Flutterby™! : Too Clever by Half 2010-03-17 19:11:49.117527+00

Too Clever by Half

2010-03-17 19:11:49.117527+00 by petronius 4 comments

Can you be too smart to be a chess champion? The world's top-ranked player thinks so.

Yep, I've found that with various games. Charlene and I are at that point with Scrabble. I can become a better Scrabble player, but primarily by memorizing lists of words that are only useful to Scrabble.

"Learning to play chess, he said, will help you learn to think better. But only up to a point. Past that point, it will only help you learn to think better about chess."

The fact is that there is no such thing as a single definition of intelligence. Some people excel in pattern recognition, others in mathematic reasoning, etc. I'm pretty good at crosswords but hopeless at sodoku. There seems to be a pattern issue in chess that rewards one kind of recognition. There are also odd talents that just pop up. My sister-in-law never forgets a telephone number, ever. Otherwise she is a pretty average person.

#Comment Re: made: 2010-03-17 22:39:46.285966+00 by: mvandewettering

I would make the claim that I possess a reasonably high level of intelligence in a number of different regimes, but I am usually fairly bad at board games. My son can beat me at chess. I find go baffling. I am becoming a middling checkers player as part of my work on a checkers program. I used to regularly get beaten at the various war and board games I used to play. Quite frankly, I lack the patience to study the back-and-forth of move and countermove.

There is a conceit that tells us that skill in chess is a sign of intelligence (a conceit more commonly shared among those who play chess). Levitt gave without any real justification or examination of data that a person's ELO rating was about (10*IQ) + 1000. This means that a person of average intelligence might rank a maximum of around 2000, and a person with an ELO score of around 2800 would have an IQ of about 180. But he actually makes no argument that these numbers are even broadly representative of reality.