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Chess & Intelligence Chess Abilities BF - Why Different BF - Interpretation Most of the Chess Puzzles Series programs are aimed at training and diagnosing a chessplayer's intellectual faculty called variations culculation. To understand what exactly we are going to test and train let us try to determine the essence of the variations calculation. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that here we regard calculation primarily as a technical operation. Therefore questions pertaining to the evaluation of positions, to the restriction of the variations tree, or to the process of move selection in general are deliberately omitted. To calculate a variation means to perform a number of consecutive moves in one's mind - and assess the result. Each such imaginary move results in a new position which has to be recorded in one's visual memory. Visual fixation is necessary to "keep" the mentally shifted piece in the proper place while pondering on further moves. So, after each mentally performed move arises the necessity to remember the latest location of the newly displaced piece and to "forget" for a while about the square where it came from. Psychological studies have shown that operative (short-term) memory plays the principal role in furthering this process. As the game evolves, the required depth of variations calculation does not stay the same. The general trend is as follows: the fewer pieces there are on the board, the longer the variations that the chessplayer has to look through. On the average, chess masters are known to count variations 5 to 6 moves in advance. Longer variations result in greater load on the operative memory; it is harder to keep in mind the constantly changing images of pieces' arrangement. As the chessplayer keeps distancing him/herself from the perceived real situation, the images get ever weaker and keeping them solid enough causes high psychic tension. It should be pointed out that the perceived real situation has been shown to be a factor hampering the functioning of the operative memory during the calculations. This is a consequence of the need for the image of the altered position in one's brain to be "more vivid" than the directly observed chessboard situation itself, or else the latter can distort or supplant the imaginary situation and hence lead to calculation errors. By the way, this mechanism accounts for a majority of gross blunders committed on the chessboard. As we already mentioned, the complexity of calculation also hinges on the number of pieces the chessplayer has to deal with. The volume of a chessplayer's operative memory is by no means unlimited, therefore if e.g. 25 - 30 pieces are available on the board, experience shows that an average of only 3 - 6 of them are actually involved in one's calculations.
Article © 1998
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