Is chess good for teaching critical thinking?

[Zelenius]

Godel suspected that someone was trying to kill him. Godel, who observed that self-referential statements create logical problems, was right.

I think you have to be "insane" to discover such paradoxical ideas. So yes, he was right, and he was insane, at least in his later years.

 

[Meed]

This was posted as evidence of other GMs who were/are insane conspiracy theorists, and I don't think it necessarily qualifies. I have never seen any evidence for Karpov or Korchnoi holding conspiracy theory views. That, of course, does not mean it is not out there, but I have read Korchnoi's autobiography, and saw little to indicate that Korchnoi would know about let alone care about conspiracy theories - he cares about chess - and that is about it. Karpov appears to be roughly the same. The 1978 World Championship match (as well as the 1981 match between the two of them again) was a gong show. But the nuttiness was likely less a reflection of the two players themselves, and more a reflection of their team members, as well as the cold war political turmoil of a match between Karpov representing the USSR and Korchnoi who was THE defector, and an enemy of the state. Korchnoi had to leave his wife and son behind. For the second match his son was sent to a Gulag. Two high stakes matches, between two players (and their teams) who had as much distrust of the other as is humanly possible. Things get weird (part of it psychological to try to throw your opponent off) for sure. But that doesn't mean that either hold insane conspiracy theorist views.

Having said that, I don't feel that someone who holds no conspiracy theorist views is necessarily a better critical thinker than someone who holds some or even many. It depends on life experience and certainly many of the chess playing greats (Benko, Gulko and Bronstein come to mind, and of course Korchnoi. Ludek Pachman was imprisoned from 1968 until 1972 and tortured just short of death during that time) from places like the former USSR had life experiences that left them with good reasons to be susceptible to conspiracy theories.

Fair enough, but to me it shows that they was some irrational thinking going on at that championship.

I don't think playing chess makes people any more or less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. I think it may be possible that on average good chess players might even be less likely to be susceptible to nutty conspiracy theories than the average Joe, but were this to be the case I doubt it would be because they play chess, but rather because they are naturally intelligent.

This is just speculation, of course.

 

[Dymanic]

I think it may be possible that on average good chess players might even be less likely to be susceptible to nutty conspiracy theories than the average Joe, but were this to be the case I doubt it would be because they play chess, but rather because they are naturally intelligent.

I think it may be possible that highly intelligent people are more likely to become targets of actual conspiracies. Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

 

[GlennB]

For training in useful analytical thinking I'd rank bridge far higher than chess. There's little or no use for inference and deduction in chess, whereas they are everything in good bridge.

I'd say a good bridge player would make a far better Sherlock Holmes than a good chess player

 

[Meed]

I think it may be possible that highly intelligent people are more likely to become targets of actual conspiracies. Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

I specified "nutty conspiracy theories", because of course conspiracies do happen sometimes.

 

[Checkmite]

Fair enough, but to me it shows that they was some irrational thinking going on at that championship.

I don't think playing chess makes people any more or less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. I think it may be possible that on average good chess players might even be less likely to be susceptible to nutty conspiracy theories than the average Joe, but were this to be the case I doubt it would be because they play chess, but rather because they are naturally intelligent.

This is just speculation, of course.

I didn't mean to suggest that chess makes people irrational. However, it seems to me that critical thinking isn't a necessary skill for mastering chess (as opposed to things like logic and pattern recognition). That leads me to question why chess even would incidentally "teach critical thinking". I do not believe it does.

 

[Mark6]

I do not see how chess could possibly teach critical thinking. Critical thinking involves examining incomplete, and possibly downright fraudulent, evidence, and deciding whether it is valid or not. In chess all information is out in the open, the only question is how to act on it. I can see how Minesweeper could teach critical thinking skills, or poker, or any game where one must act on incomplete information. But not chess.

 

[Meed]

I didn't mean to suggest that chess makes people irrational. However, it seems to me that critical thinking isn't a necessary skill for mastering chess (as opposed to things like logic and pattern recognition). That leads me to question why chess even would incidentally "teach critical thinking". I do not believe it does.

Agreed.

 

[RelativeSpace]

I think learning chess is excellent for thinking in general (though maybe not critical thought specifically)... but as with any game, there are diminishing returns after the basic game play has been learned and the player has obtained a certain degree of proficiency.

A game like chess, but with dynamic and changing rules, might do better (adding more dimensions, more pieces, changing pieces)- but the more effective it is in this sense, the harder it is to design the game itself.

 

[Zelenius]

I think learning chess is excellent for thinking in general (though maybe not critical thought specifically)... but as with any game, there are diminishing returns after the basic game play has been learned and the player has obtained a certain degree of proficiency.

A game like chess, but with dynamic and changing rules, might do better (adding more dimensions, more pieces, changing pieces)- but the more effective it is in this sense, the harder it is to design the game itself.

I mostly agree. This is why some chess players prefer Shuffle Chess or Chess 960, since the position of the back pieces is randomized before play. All too often, the first several opening moves of many players, especially Grandmasters are all standard openings that rely on rote memorization. Randomizing the back pieces forces players to put more original thought into their opening moves.

 

[Meed]

Good point. I love Fischer Random.

 

[Bikewer]

I found chess to be good for examining a problem in detail and to think of all the possible ramifications of your actions. For constantly balancing all the elements of chess; power, positon, and time.
However.... I understand that at the upper levels of play, most of this goes out the window on a conscious level.
Much like the music student who achieves fluency in sight-reading. At some point it just starts to "work" and the student doesn't have to say "Hmmm... that's an e-flat." (and much like learning to read...)
The advanced chess player sees the board as patterns, and processes this information quite differently than do lesser players.
That's why grandmasters can easily do the trick of playing a dozen opponents at once; a single glance at the board gives them all the information required.

 

[RelativeSpace]

This is why some chess players prefer Shuffle Chess or Chess 960, since the position of the back pieces is randomized before play.

Now that sounds pretty fun. That could even get me back into chess (I haven't played in a very long time).

When I play most games, I can only play a few times before losing interest. I really enjoy learning new games and playing those first few times until I 'get it'. After that, I like to move on.

 

[GlennB]

I'm not sure I'd like having 2 bishops of the same colour

 

[Dymanic]

A game like chess, but with dynamic and changing rules, might do better (adding more dimensions, more pieces, changing pieces)- but the more effective it is in this sense, the harder it is to design the game itself.

I played a fair amount of tournament chess during junior high school, a phase which ended abruptly when I discovered weed, and girls (both of which happened around the same time, and neither of which was very useful as a tool for learning critical thinking). Though it was not encouraged by my chess mentor, the fellow who conducted the youth chess club where I learned to play "chess for blood", we used to play a lot of varieties of "freak chess". Double chess (each player gets two moves in succession), Scotch chess (white moves once, black twice, white three times, etc), Super chess (any piece, king excepted, may move to any unoccupied square on the board, with some limitations; pawns cannot super-promote, bishops may not change color). My favorite was one we called "Ultima". Especially fun to play in front of an audience of chess players unfamiliar with the variant, with rich opportunities to deadpan lines like, "You can't coordinate my immobilizer, because it puts you in check from my leaper".

But the idea of a chess variant where the rules change on the fly ala Calvinball -- that just makes my head esplode. Surely the quest for critical thinking need not be a one-way trip to a rubber room.

 

[Mark6]

I had seen MANY variants of chess, and played some. Half-chess: 5x5 board with each side having only 1 of each back piece, and pawns move no more than one space. Two on two chess: cross-shaped board with 128 spaces, four sets of pieces (white, black, green and red), with white and green against black and red. Boards with more than 8 squares on a side. Wraparound boards where pieces can move off on left and come out on right, or top and bottom, or both. On a wraparound board with odd number of squares a bishop becomes a chameleon -- changes square color when it "comes around". Etc.

 

[Almo]

Half Chess is Los Alamos Chess, designed to be tractable by early computers in reasonable time.

 

[franklinveaux]

I don't think chess can teach critical thinking skills.

At the lower levels, it's merely learning the rules. This may be analogous to learning the rules of debate, but it's certainly not identical to it--the rules of chess, like all games, are arbitrary, in a way that the rules of debate and argument are not. Further, chess has a limited scope, while critical thinking really doesn't.

At the higher levels it's worse. "Extra Credits" did an episode about ballance in videogames that highlighted the issue with chess: the fact that the game is so perfectly ballanced means that the overwhelming majority of tactics have been tried, perfected, named, and classified. One learns to recognize tactics and utilize counter-tactics.

In my misspent college youth, I used to be a bit of a chess nut. I took a class in chess theory from a professor who held a master's ranking at chess and a grandmaster's ranking at go.

One of the things he said about chess is that, contrary to popular myth, high-level chess players very rarely look more than a couple of moves ahead, and then only in unusual circumstances.

Instead, he said, becoming a high-level chess player is all pattern recognition and pattern matching. When you start playing chess, he said, you see a board with a bunch of pieces on it. When you become a master, you don't see a bunch of pieces; you see a bunch of patterns, and you use those patterns toward configurations you recognize that you can win from. At a grandmaster's level, you don't see patterns; you see patterns of patterns. But that's all it is. Not strategy, just pattern recognition.

That, he said, is how masters do the common chess trick where they will play a dozen opponents simultaneously. They are not memorizing the boards or planning ahead in any of the games. They're simply coming up to each board as though they'd never seen it before, and doing pattern matching.

 

[Beerina]

Some commedian said: "I was playing chess with a friend and he said 'Let's make this interesting', so we quit playing chess."

Sounds like something Stephen Wright would say.

 

[Dymanic]

I had seen MANY variants of chess, and played some. Half-chess: 5x5 board with each side having only 1 of each back piece, and pawns move no more than one space. Two on two chess: cross-shaped board with 128 spaces, four sets of pieces (white, black, green and red), with white and green against black and red. Boards with more than 8 squares on a side. Wraparound boards where pieces can move off on left and come out on right, or top and bottom, or both. On a wraparound board with odd number of squares a bishop becomes a chameleon -- changes square color when it "comes around". Etc.

One variant my chess mentor did encourage was "King and five". Each player gets only a king and five pawns, which he may arrange anywhere he likes on his half of the board as long as the king isn't in the front row -- but someone holds up a partition during the setup so that neither player can see the other's arrangement until play begins. It's a good way to learn about "opposition" and "stepping into the square" and other aspects of king and pawn endgame strategy.