Chess and Maths

[Mr Rayon]

Is it true that if you are excellent at chess, you must also have a natural talent for maths? Somebody has told me that these abilities go hand-in-hand and was just curious.

[BobSanchez]

Is it true that if you are excellent at chess, you must also have a natural talent for maths? Somebody has told me that these abilities go hand-in-hand and was just curious.

 

Not necessarily. Maybe natural talent at logic and critical thinking (which lends greatly to mathematics) but not necessarily math.

[Anura]

I think what your friend might have meant was that if your really good at chess then you are mabey more capable of understanding mathematical concepts when they are taught to you.

[TonyMcC]

You certainly need a logical mind. A person with a logical mind could reasonably be expected to become proficient at other branches of mathematics (IMO). However, as an ex club chess player, other branches of mathematics don't seem to have much bearing on the game. A good memory is almost as important as a sense of logic. There are various ways of starting a game (known as openings) and you break away from a known opening at your peril. You will almost certainly have weakened yourself in a way that the player who has studied that opening already knows how to exploit. Similarly there are various known ways to wrap up a game (the end game) using, for instance, pieces in combination. The person who remembers these can play faster and set traps more easily. The middle game is where a sense of logic comes into its own but if you start the middle game weakened by a poor opening it will be an uphill struggle.

[Anura]

You certainly need a logical mind. A person with a logical mind could reasonably be expected to become proficient at other branches of mathematics (IMO). However, as an ex club chess player, other branches of mathematics don't seem to have much bearing on the game. A good memory is almost as important as a sense of logic. There are various ways of starting a game (known as openings) and you break away from a known opening at your peril. You will almost certainly have weakened yourself in a way that the player who has studied that opening already knows how to exploit. Similarly there are various known ways to wrap up a game (the end game) using, for instance, pieces in combination. The person who remembers these can play faster and set traps more easily. The middle game is where a sense of logic comes into its own but if you start the middle game weakened by a poor opening it will be an uphill struggle.

 

 

exactly

[Genecks]

Is it true that if you are excellent at chess, you must also have a natural talent for maths? Somebody has told me that these abilities go hand-in-hand and was just curious.

 

I think if there is something to be said about being a good chess player in relation to mathematics, it would be that a person can consider the possible outcomes of a directed action. So, if I take a math problem and move it a particular way in an attempt to solve, before having done such, I could have considered a variety of other possibilities to solve that problem.

 

Learning chess as a child can help a person abstract from the game of chess in an attempt to apply it toward real life. Introduce children to the notion that "everything is like chess," and you've got some children who are primed to abstract from the game of chess.

 

There is a large amount of consequential thinking that comes out of being a chess player. Whenever I start playing against serious chess players, I find myself having to think 5+ steps ahead of them. It surely makes things more serious.

 

I like to "plan ahead" all of my steps and think of future alternatives. It keeps me quite organized these days.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Genecks

[Marat]

But in the history of chess, have any great players also been great mathematicians? Paul Morphy, Harry Pillsbury, Bobby Fisher, Karpov, Kasparov, etc., never showed any mathematical talent, so far as I know. Perhaps Lasker was a mathematician?

[thinker_jeff]

I believe that an excellent chess player has great chance to be good in math because both of them very depend on logical thinking. However, some talent for math is not necessary for chess. For example, the comprehensibility about the concepts in math seems unnecessary to play chess.

 

On the other way, the talents for memorizing visual images and strategically planning are very important in chess game but may not be so important in math.

 

 

[Doc. Josh]

I say untrue, i play chess daily atleast 5 games a day on my laptop and math has always been a struggle for me. I rate myself being a good player based on the level of hardness i can achieve, but i am also very good at logical problem solving, planning stratagy, and deep thinking etc...

[thinker_jeff]

I say untrue, i play chess daily atleast 5 games a day on my laptop and math has always been a struggle for me. I rate myself being a good player based on the level of hardness i can achieve, but i am also very good at logical problem solving, planning stratagy, and deep thinking etc...

 

 

Your case supports what I said.

 

Excellent chess player is likely good in math.

 

Good chess player is likely fair in math.

 

 

Where you are good at is very useful for playing chess.

 

 

[PhDwannabe]

Science is, in some senses, the union of the two philosophical traditions of more a priori logic and empiricism. Part of being a decent scientist is knowing when to add a little more of either. Is math skill in some way related to chess skill? This is an empirical question. It's flailing its arms and screaming out for an empirical answer.

 

Psychologists don't study these sorts of questions much--maybe they're a bit too whimsical for grant money. So I don't know of much literature on it. Evidently, though, there have been studies done on the effects of chess education--as an educational intervention, importantly--on several different outcome variables. Have never read any of those studies, and can't speak to their methodological merit. Somebody with a bit more interest in the question is encouraged to dig them up and peruse.

[thinker_jeff]

I had learned from a textbook that there was some empirical research about the ability related with chess. It might not answer this question as you wished, but might be helpful for your interest.

 

In the experiment, after the chess masters and novices reviewed the actual board situation for 5 seconds, the board was disorganized, and then they were asked to bring back the original board situation. It was no surprise, that the masters brought back about 20 ~25 pieces correctly but the novices brought back about 6 pieces correctly in average. However, if the original board situation wasn’t from an actual game but was from random arrangement, the masters did same as the novice, about 6 pieces correctly in average. The researchers concluded that, when the original board situation was random arranged the masters and the novices treated each piece as one block, so there was no difference between what the masters did and what the novices did; when the original board situation was from an actual game the masters treated multiple pieces as one block, so they could bring back more pieces correctly than the novices. To compare with novices, chess masters remember more actual board situations and more information about chess game, which results the skill difference between them.

 

 

[Ringer]

The studies in chess, and other sorts of games like chess that are played in other countries, are more related to pattern recognition than mathematical proficiency. there are quite a few papers in Science studying this link if I remember correctly.

[NLPA]

Achievements in Chess above category II (Europe), class B (USA) basis first of all on good memory, some researchings show it. Read this text and you will get more knowledge about it:

 

article The Expert Mind, Scientific American 2006, 08 [pdf]

[SMF]

Also

http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~hsstffg/preprints/Bilalic%20et%20al%20--%20intelligence.pdf

SM

[Marat]

If the hypothesis of this thread is true, does that also say that women are likely not to be good at math, since they are well known to be not as good at chess as men are? (E.g., Fisher once offered to play any woman at knight's odds and win.)