Sign in with Facebook
Thomas Ray's Reviews > The Flynn Effect: Chess as a real life example
The Flynn Effect: Chess as a real life example
by
by
The Flynn Effect: Chess as a real-life example
Kari S. Carstairs and Manny Rayner
Nice.
Online https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/researc...
Shows today's top chessplayers play better than past masters.
Defines "Flynn Effect" as a population's gain in IQ scores with time.
[Standardized tests, including IQ tests, measure membership in the privileged group. Wealth, whiteness, and maleness. If the numbers are changing, it can be the test changing, and/or the test-takers. To explore reasons for a change, it would be necessary to know /which/ people are scoring which numbers. See Deborah Meier, In Schools We Trust: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
]
"the game has remained constant"
"improvements in performance at the top level in the world of chess, this is likely to reflect increases in intelligence rather than motivation and practice."
[Explosion in science & technology: moon shot, decoding the alphabet of DNA, artificial intelligence, … not because today's scientists & technologists are smarter than Newton, but there are vast armies of them, well funded, equipped, and trained.
Likewise chess: past masters didn't have new chess knowledge blasting them through a fire hose, as is now the case. Now, chess prize money is higher than ever: motivates & enables full-time study. And, except for this year, it seems the number of tournaments and players is higher than ever.
The tallest iceberg is a big one. If you have a million players, the natural spread will include some who start with more aptitude. And, when there are only few players, they haven't opportunity to meet strong opponents, and improve. (There are also vastly more very low-rated players now. A big pool.)
The world under-age-eight championship is now won by tykes who devote many hours a day to chess, coached by very dedicated top masters. ]
"chess players are acquiring GM titles at increasingly early ages"
[Here's a taste of the immense effort on the part of little kids and their parents and coaches to win a title:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
That's new. Lasker, say, wouldn't've had a grandmaster coaching him to win a world under-age-eight championship.
Awonder Liang, born 2003, wasn't born knowing how to play chess. He went from USCF 577 in 2008 to USCF 2691 in 2019:
http://www.uschess.org/datapage/ratin...
http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmt...
https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2056...
The computer analysis of top-player games in the past is convincing: today's top players are better.
That's not to say that people generally are more clever. The average person has more knowledge. High-school kids understand conservation of energy. Newton didn't. No one did before Helmholtz.
Another way of looking at it is, motivation and practice /is/ intelligence: it's the thing that creates the ability.
A non-chess example of, "effort and perseverance /is/ intelligence:"
When we took our Lorge-Thorndike IQ tests in second grade, there was a multiplication question. None of us knew how to multiply. We knew what multiplication /was/, but not how to do it. One kid turned it into an addition problem, added up six sevens, and got the answer. Oh. Yeah. We could all have done that. That kid took the trouble to /do/ it. He now owns a telecom company in Silicon Valley. (I /still/ say it's not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. --Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams)
That test determined which of us would be in the "accelerated," "average," and "slow" class. It worked: /none/ of the bussed-in Black kids were in the accelerated class.
Back at chess: David, the captain of our high school team, could play us simultaneous blindfold games, and wipe the board with us. He'd see more not looking than we would, each staring at our own board. David said Tom (not me) had more chess potential than David himself: but Tom wasn't interested. He never developed his talent.
Also, one could conjecture that Fischer after 1972, Morphy after 1859, and Steinitz after 1876, might have continued to dominate, had the champ continued to compete. But since they did /not/ compete, it's just conjecture. We can seek the best player only among those who play. (view spoiler)
László Polgár, father and teacher of chess prodigies Susan, Sofia, and Judit Polgar, set out to prove, "geniuses are made, not born." His result, 2 GMs and an IM in three daughters, is impressive.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Professor Arpad Elo numerically estimated relative strengths of top players from Morphy to Karpov in his 1978 book, The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present. The upshot is, whoever the current world champion is, is always at or near the strongest player ever. They are products of increasingly-strong competition, and have absorbed ever more of the increasing body of chess knowledge.
(Where the current champ becomes current champ by beating the then-current champ, who has himself recently proved his dominance, it's slightly by definition that the current champ is the best ever. The other possibility is, the old champ is past his prime. 21-year-old Garry Kasparov in 1984 used his greater stamina to wear down 33-year-old Anatoly Karpov in a 48-game world championship match, after Karpov pulled to an early lead.
Wikipedia has a table of the ages of chess world champions or presumed best players in the world at the time, from Ruy Lopez, 1559-1575 through Magnus Carlsen, as of 2020. If we tabulate these ages, we can see in how many years the top player was each age.
We see that the typical age for a reigning world chess champion is 30 to 40:
The average total reign of the 32 champions was 9.3 years (as listed by Wikipedia, with adjustments noted below). Sixteen have reigned a total of 8 years or more each; 16 reigned 1 to 6 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World... about 2/3 of the way down the page.
Actually, many of the Wikipedia ages overlap: for example, Boris Spassky, 1969-1972, age 32-35; Bobby Fischer, 1972-1975, age 29-32: counts both outgoing and incoming champion for 1972. Instead, for the year of a change of champions, I record only the new champion, and record his age as the year of his win minus the year of his birth (regardless of what time of year either event happened). I don't count the former champion's age the year he loses the title or dies. This gives only one champion per year, and only one age per year. For disputed years: I count 1996 as the year FIDE champion Karpov takes back over from PCA champion Kasparov. I count 1878 as Zukertort's eclipse of Steinitz; Steinitz recaptured 1886. For 1575 I count di Bona.
Yes, it's always, "he." Judit Polgar was one of the eight contenders in the 2005 title tournament--but she scored only 4.5/14; the title went to Topalov with 10/14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_Wo... )]
Kari S. Carstairs and Manny Rayner
Nice.
Online https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/researc...
Shows today's top chessplayers play better than past masters.
Defines "Flynn Effect" as a population's gain in IQ scores with time.
[Standardized tests, including IQ tests, measure membership in the privileged group. Wealth, whiteness, and maleness. If the numbers are changing, it can be the test changing, and/or the test-takers. To explore reasons for a change, it would be necessary to know /which/ people are scoring which numbers. See Deborah Meier, In Schools We Trust: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
]
"the game has remained constant"
"improvements in performance at the top level in the world of chess, this is likely to reflect increases in intelligence rather than motivation and practice."
[Explosion in science & technology: moon shot, decoding the alphabet of DNA, artificial intelligence, … not because today's scientists & technologists are smarter than Newton, but there are vast armies of them, well funded, equipped, and trained.
Likewise chess: past masters didn't have new chess knowledge blasting them through a fire hose, as is now the case. Now, chess prize money is higher than ever: motivates & enables full-time study. And, except for this year, it seems the number of tournaments and players is higher than ever.
The tallest iceberg is a big one. If you have a million players, the natural spread will include some who start with more aptitude. And, when there are only few players, they haven't opportunity to meet strong opponents, and improve. (There are also vastly more very low-rated players now. A big pool.)
The world under-age-eight championship is now won by tykes who devote many hours a day to chess, coached by very dedicated top masters. ]
"chess players are acquiring GM titles at increasingly early ages"
[Here's a taste of the immense effort on the part of little kids and their parents and coaches to win a title:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
That's new. Lasker, say, wouldn't've had a grandmaster coaching him to win a world under-age-eight championship.
Awonder Liang, born 2003, wasn't born knowing how to play chess. He went from USCF 577 in 2008 to USCF 2691 in 2019:
http://www.uschess.org/datapage/ratin...
http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmt...
https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2056...
The computer analysis of top-player games in the past is convincing: today's top players are better.
That's not to say that people generally are more clever. The average person has more knowledge. High-school kids understand conservation of energy. Newton didn't. No one did before Helmholtz.
Another way of looking at it is, motivation and practice /is/ intelligence: it's the thing that creates the ability.
A non-chess example of, "effort and perseverance /is/ intelligence:"
When we took our Lorge-Thorndike IQ tests in second grade, there was a multiplication question. None of us knew how to multiply. We knew what multiplication /was/, but not how to do it. One kid turned it into an addition problem, added up six sevens, and got the answer. Oh. Yeah. We could all have done that. That kid took the trouble to /do/ it. He now owns a telecom company in Silicon Valley. (I /still/ say it's not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. --Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams)
That test determined which of us would be in the "accelerated," "average," and "slow" class. It worked: /none/ of the bussed-in Black kids were in the accelerated class.
Back at chess: David, the captain of our high school team, could play us simultaneous blindfold games, and wipe the board with us. He'd see more not looking than we would, each staring at our own board. David said Tom (not me) had more chess potential than David himself: but Tom wasn't interested. He never developed his talent.
Also, one could conjecture that Fischer after 1972, Morphy after 1859, and Steinitz after 1876, might have continued to dominate, had the champ continued to compete. But since they did /not/ compete, it's just conjecture. We can seek the best player only among those who play. (view spoiler)
László Polgár, father and teacher of chess prodigies Susan, Sofia, and Judit Polgar, set out to prove, "geniuses are made, not born." His result, 2 GMs and an IM in three daughters, is impressive.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Professor Arpad Elo numerically estimated relative strengths of top players from Morphy to Karpov in his 1978 book, The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present. The upshot is, whoever the current world champion is, is always at or near the strongest player ever. They are products of increasingly-strong competition, and have absorbed ever more of the increasing body of chess knowledge.
(Where the current champ becomes current champ by beating the then-current champ, who has himself recently proved his dominance, it's slightly by definition that the current champ is the best ever. The other possibility is, the old champ is past his prime. 21-year-old Garry Kasparov in 1984 used his greater stamina to wear down 33-year-old Anatoly Karpov in a 48-game world championship match, after Karpov pulled to an early lead.
Wikipedia has a table of the ages of chess world champions or presumed best players in the world at the time, from Ruy Lopez, 1559-1575 through Magnus Carlsen, as of 2020. If we tabulate these ages, we can see in how many years the top player was each age.
We see that the typical age for a reigning world chess champion is 30 to 40:
The average total reign of the 32 champions was 9.3 years (as listed by Wikipedia, with adjustments noted below). Sixteen have reigned a total of 8 years or more each; 16 reigned 1 to 6 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World... about 2/3 of the way down the page.
age number of years when world chess champ was this age (through 2020)
19 1 Ruslan Ponomariov, 2002
20 2
21 2
22 3
23 4
24 6
25 5
26 6
27 6
28 7
29 10
30 13
31 12
32 11
33 14
34 12
35 13
36 14
37 14
38 15
39 14
40 12
41 10
42 9
43 8
44 7
45 7
46 6
47 7
48 5
49 4
50 6
51 6
52 5
53 3
54 2
55 2
56 2
57 2
58 1 Philidor, 1784-1794, according to Wikipedia
59 1
60 1
61 1
62 1
63 1
64 1
65 1
66 1
67 1
68 1
tot yr Name
9.3 average total reign
40 François-André Danican Philidor
27 Emanuel Lasker
25 Legall de Kermeur
20 Wilhelm Steinitz
19 Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais
17 Alexander Alekhine
16 Ruy López de Segura
14 Gioachino Greco
13 Mikhail Botvinnik
13 Anatoly Karpov
11 Adolf Anderssen
11 Garry Kasparov
08 Howard Staunton
08 Johannes Zukertort
08 Viswanathan Anand
08 Magnus Carlsen
06 Alexandre Deschapelles
06 José Raúl Capablanca
06 Tigran Petrosian
04 Paul Morphy
03 Boris Spassky
03 Bobby Fischer
02 Max Euwe
02 Ruslan Ponomariov
01 Leonardo di Bona
01 Alessandro Salvio
01 Vasily Smyslov
01 Mikhail Tal
01 Alexander Khalifman
01 Rustam Kasimdzhanov
01 Veselin Topalov
01 Vladimir Kramnik
00 Paolo Boi (I'm listing di Bona instead for 1575)
These are on the list more than once, total years of reigns above:
00 Vladimir Kramnik (I'm listing FIDE champs instead for 2000-2006)
Adolf Anderssen
Wilhelm Steinitz
Alexander Alekhine
Mikhail Botvinnik
Mikhail Botvinnik
Garry Kasparov
Anatoly Karpov
Viswanathan Anand
Actually, many of the Wikipedia ages overlap: for example, Boris Spassky, 1969-1972, age 32-35; Bobby Fischer, 1972-1975, age 29-32: counts both outgoing and incoming champion for 1972. Instead, for the year of a change of champions, I record only the new champion, and record his age as the year of his win minus the year of his birth (regardless of what time of year either event happened). I don't count the former champion's age the year he loses the title or dies. This gives only one champion per year, and only one age per year. For disputed years: I count 1996 as the year FIDE champion Karpov takes back over from PCA champion Kasparov. I count 1878 as Zukertort's eclipse of Steinitz; Steinitz recaptured 1886. For 1575 I count di Bona.
Yes, it's always, "he." Judit Polgar was one of the eight contenders in the 2005 title tournament--but she scored only 4.5/14; the title went to Topalov with 10/14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_Wo... )]
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
The Flynn Effect.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
January 9, 2021
– Shelved
January 13, 2021
– Shelved as:
chess
January 13, 2021
– Shelved as:
detailed-reviews
---
I interpret that as people are now more aware that tactics is 97% of chess
and they are way way more cautious tactically
the better the chess literature, the better everyone's tactics