> It is noteworthy that China, one of the two most important countries in the world, has decided to invest heavily in chess. This year Chinese teams won both the men’s and women’s divisions at the Chess Olympiad, a first.
I'm somewhat surprised that chess still has a "men's" and "women's" division. Isn't that anachronistic for a "sport" that has virtually no physical component at all? I don't really understand the ELO system by which players are compared, but I believe that one's score is in relation to the competition they have previously faced. Are top females' lower scores not simply self-perpetuated due to not playing the top males?
Most tournaments, including the "men's" Olympiad, correctly called the "Open", are open to both genders.
The top women are far worse than the top men (the top two are currently ranked #99 and #350). Discussing why is a sensitive matter: depending on which studies you believe it's either because women are naturally different from men or because the patriarchy keeps them down.
I would assume that to be due to a smaller selection pool. That is, fewer females play chess, and so fewer climb into the elite ranks. The same reason why American football players disproportionately come from the south, where the sport is more culturally prevalent, and hockey players disproportionately come from the north.
So that leaves us with the more controversial answers. I havent done any research, so I couldnt tell you which it is, bias or genetics. If I had to guess, I would say genetics. I mean, its a game about spatial patterns.
But I dont know why people still consider chess to be a good measure of general intelligence. Its not. The newest bot learned how to be better than our centuries of chess knowledge in about 30 mins, but the robot isnt at all intelligent in any general sense.
Women remain significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. Some have argued that spatial ability differences, which represent the most persistent gender differences in the cognitive literature, are partly responsible for this gap. The underlying forces at work shaping the observed spatial ability differences revolve naturally around the relative roles of nature and nurture. Although these forces remain among the most hotly debated in all of the sciences, the evidence for nurture is tenuous, because it is difficult to compare gender differences among biologically similar groups with distinct nurture. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. We also show that about one-third of the effect can be explained by differences in education. Given that none of our participants have experience with puzzle solving and that villagers from both societies have the same means of subsistence and shared genetic background, we argue that these results show the role of nurture in the gender gap in cognitive abilities.
Conclusion
Our paper shows that the gender gap in spatial abilities in the task that we study interacts with culture. In the matrilineal society, we observe no gender difference in this task. These results show that nurture plays an important role in the gender gap in spatial abilities. Our results also indicate that providing equal education and improving treatment of women at the family level may make a difference; however, this implication should be taken with a grain of salt, because causality cannot be ascertained. Nevertheless, the implications for both policymakers and ordinary people interested in reducing the gender gap cannot be overstated: reducing the gender gap in spatial abilities may reduce the gender gap in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. It is worth mentioning that our results do not provide evidence against the role of nature.
> But I dont know why people still consider chess to be a good measure of general intelligence. Its not. The newest bot learned how to be better than our centuries of chess knowledge in about 30 mins, but the robot isnt at all intelligent in any general sense.
That's not necessarily a valid counterargument. Humans and bots may play similarly to some extent (both technically do ranking&searching through space of possible moves, aided by many heuristics), but for humans it's about using the same "mental pathways" that are required by other tasks in life. Bots are just playing chess.
It's like benchmarking a CPU vs. an ASIC. ASIC will be better for the task it's designed for, but absolutely useless for everything else.
>> If I had to guess, I would say genetics. I mean, its a game about spatial patterns.
What do "spatial patterns" have to do with genetics, in this context?
Anyway, judging from your comment you probably haven't heard of Judit Polgár:
Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is generally considered the strongest female chess player of all time.[1] In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer.
Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest, to a Hungarian Jewish family.[10] Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age.[11] "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject.[12] László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They received resistance from Hungarian authorities as home-schooling was not a "socialist" approach. They also received criticism at the time from some western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood.
Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[13] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[14] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. Susan Polgár, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, said in 1985 that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[15]
So, of three women that were purposefully trained from an early age to play chess, two became grandmasters and the other an International Master. Either genetics has nothing to do with it, or the Polgárs are a very special family, genetically speaking. Which is the most likely?
My comment was solely based off of the metastudies you see around spatial reasoning. Since I’m not very aware of the details (e.g. cultural effects), I stressed that it was a guess.
You should consider revising your opinions and not making unwarranted assumptions. Or at the very least being open to the idea that it is because they are in fact not (statistically) equal in innate ability at the sport. It is certainly, prima facie, the obvious conclusion to reach.
Yes there are other factors such as the massively overburdened 'lack of role model' explanation, but these are better explained as positive feedback from an already unequal situation (and in any case does it matter so much if you can have separate men and women sides to the sport?).
The world is a very confusing and complicated place if you don't accept clear evidence however inconvenient!
A female friend of mine ranked #2 junior champion in Germany, and she received special coaching to encourage her to take more risks. So apparently the German Chess Federation believes that women's disadvantage in chess comes (at least in part) from excessive caution.
>> Discussing why is a sensitive matter: depending on which studies you believe it's either because women are naturally different from men or because the patriarchy keeps them down.
So one type of study invokes "nature", the other speaks from the point of view of feminism.
Neither sounds like a very unbiased kind of study. Shall we just say we have no idea and leave it at that, until the scientists decide to take a look into the issue?
Not really. There are some titles, like Women's Grandmaster (WGM), that are available only to women, and some like Grandmaster (GM) that are open to both. WGM sounds a bit like GM, and confers some of the same meagre benefits, but it's not the same title.
I think its similar to esports. Its more about being historically very male-dominated, so having leagues focused on women helps encourage more women to take it up instead of feeling alien due to being surrounded by males. At least that seems to be the hope.
The best chess channel I have found is agadmator. Amazing manner of explaining chess and very entertaining. Here's a video about Alpha Zero vs. StockFish:
I spend far too much time watching chess, so I’ll chime in here with a couple of channels/people that really show how chess can be entertainment.
Daniel King (PowerPlayChess) is a Grand Master who does commentary on most major chess events. His explanations are deep, interesting, and colored with historical background:
watching this vid has reminded how much the chess world is lucky to have MC as its flagship ambassador. He is almost the ideal WC. Caruana would be such a huge stepdown. Michal Krasenkow has compared Caruana to Euwe - "[Caruana] is an extremely pleasant young man and an outstanding player but lacking a unique personal style and a champion's charisma." I couldn't agree more.
Chess is a game where everybody can play it almost anywhere, and there is no physical advantage one has over
another. There also is a huge amount of stuff that is possible to learn about the game to become better at it, so
there is no real limit to how much you can learn about the game. The only thing that I dislike about chess is the
people who play it. The culture around many chess circle's seems very pretentious and snotty to me.
My kids think I'm weird for watching chess but it is a perfect background show to have on - baseball is the other sport that works fairly well. There are also some really fantastic commentators (Peter Svidler and Jan Gustaffson are my favorites). Finally most of the top players are also almost absurdly humble and friendly
Snooker, let's plays and esports in general fill this niche for me very well. I previously got very into Go which also worked well so I can absolutely see chess serving you well.
I don't have kids yet, but I'm looking forward to the prospect of having Starcraft and chess tournaments on along with my usual Sunday football once I do. One (obvious) very cool thing about the internet is that these hobbies that previously weren't profitably marketable can be televised and commentated on at very low cost.
Back in the 1980s and '90s when the internet wasn't generally available and Teletext ruled Europe, the pages on which you could follow live chess championship games were quite popular.
I really like chess 'permanency' and to know that the time 'wasted' mastering it will not be lost. Chess is relevant now and it will be during my lifetime.
You might like Arimaa. It's playable on a chessboard and has no draws. I find it more fun than chess, mostly because at my low level of chess play, the game is mostly decided by blunders. In Arimaa, it's harder to evaluate who's winning, and it's harder to make big gains or losses in a single turn. It feels like you need more long term planning to win, which makes winning more satisfying IMO.
My words were harsh and I probably deserve the downvotes. It just appears like it is getting ever more evident, that chess results in a draw assuming perfect play. That doesn't diminish the accomplishments of world class chess players in any way, but it feels like there is a reachable skill cap allowing black to force a draw. I'm not even sure if it's possible to design a "fair" game, which always has a winner, assuming no randomization. Go is most likely closer to that goal than chess, as it always has a winner and allows to compensate for the first-mover advantage using a score bias. Then of course finding an optimal value for the bias is a hard problem.
To be able to compute all the moves in chess and to play perfectly is literally impossible. There are more possible games in chess than atoms, protons, etc. Even the amount of possible games from ELO 2900 and up are still going to a number humans can not even comprehend, and that a computer would not be able to solve. Theoretically there is perfect play in chess, but theoretically there is also perfect play in basketball or baseball.
Advanced or centaur chess (where the team consists of a man plus a computer chess engine) tournaments routinely consist of 90% draws, and the best players are estimated at 3600 ELO, very close to the theoretical perfect play [1].
No it's not, defining it as: If it's possible for a player to force a win or draw, do it. Just because it's computationally unfeasible to determine, doesn't mean it isn't theoretically possible to decide.
Perfect play as is currently used in the chess world means you don't make moves that result in you losing your advantage or giving the other player an advantage, given current computational resources to evaluate a position. If both sides play perfectly then the game results in a draw.
I think most of the games that are possible (ie games in game space) in chess are draws but this is just my sense of it.
I'm somewhat surprised that chess still has a "men's" and "women's" division. Isn't that anachronistic for a "sport" that has virtually no physical component at all? I don't really understand the ELO system by which players are compared, but I believe that one's score is in relation to the competition they have previously faced. Are top females' lower scores not simply self-perpetuated due to not playing the top males?