The Journal
of Chess Research
is a new scholarly or academic journal that will feature scientific articles
and studies centered around chess. In some ways, this project is a more
formalized and serious version of this blog itself (with a much more impressive
board of editors and potential authors). The journal itself was featured in
another chess publication, Chess Life (official magazine of the USCF)
in a recent issue. You can also read more about this project at their website
or at Susan Polgar’s excellent blog.
Speaking of excellent blogs, one of
my favorite chess authors and friend, Michael Goeller, is hanging up his hat
with regards to the Kenilworthian. You can read about his decision
to do so, and a reflection on his amazing blogging journey, at his final post, The End of Chess Blogging. His articles were always
interesting, well written, well researched, and very enjoyable to read. For at
least one reader (myself), his writing will be sorely missed.
I may be reaching my own end of
chess blogging; work commitments to both teaching and research continue to
prevent me from making consistent posts. I will be sacrificing time that could
be used for Science on the Squares in order to revive my other blog, Just
Me and Eubacteria, which is more in-line with my professional interests. Towards this end, I
have removed some of the content from this blog, scrubbing out broken links and
images where I can. I may occasionally post a game or analysis here or there,
but regretfully these posts will be few and far in-between.
Since this blog is about Chess and Science, it is only natural to discuss the nexus between the two: scientific studies that examine some aspect of Chess. The game of chess is used by some social science, psychology and neuroscience researchers as a model or tool to examine memory, expertise, decision making skills, or some other process that two combatants engage in over the chessboard.
A few chess players may be already familiar with an example of this type of work, perhaps the highly cited studies by Adriaan de Groot. In some of the studies conducted by de Groot, chess players of different skill levels were tasked with position recall and were told to analyze a position while thinking out loud. This has led to conclusions about the way expert players organize their memory, and how they search and evaluate a position. (I'll probably revisit de Groot in a future post)
A contemporary researcher in this field is Fernand Gobet, a professor at Brunel University, West London. (See his professional homepage). Gobet has dual qualification to study chessplayers, since he is both a cognitive psychologist and an international master (a qualification not unique to the researchers in this field). He has published a number of interesting articles on a variety of aspects of the game, ranging from memory, visualization skills of chess players, and even gender differences between players. Of particular note, Dr. Gobet has attempted to simulate certain aspects of expert memory and skill using commuter models.
Below, I'll give you my reaction to a paper by Dr. Gobet that deals with the interesting Einstellung effect. While I am scientist, cognitive psychology is not my field, so the experts will have to forgive me if I do not assess the work correctly. Also, I provide below only a brief sketch of the work; I might someday blog about the individual topics in more detail, as I learn more about them.
I'd love to hear from you, dear reader, if you have some insight onto to the work of Dr. Gobet or others. In particular, please feel free to let me know if I have gotten something wrong. You can do so by leaving a comment.
