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“Chess is everything: art, science, and sport.”
“Chess is everything: art, science, and sport.”
–Anatoly Karpov, Russian chess Grandmaster and former World Champion
Chances are, you’ve heard quite a bit of about the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and gender issues in gaming. But have you ever heard of the gender barriers, gaps and apparent ceiling, in the game of chess?
Chess is one of the oldest known and widely played games in human history, with an origin story stretching back at least 1500 years. Those who know and appreciate the game might be tempted to conclude that a one so perfect at this must have been intelligently designed. However, the modern variant of chess actually evolved from earlier precursors (i.e., chaturanga, shatranj) through a series of successive rule changes. Though comprehensive data is hard to come by, some estimates suggest that upwards of 605 million people worldwide play chess regularly either at home, in parks, online, by mail or email (correspondence), or in clubs and tournaments; and at least 70% of adults have tried to play at least once.
Chess has also become a significant part of human culture in a way very few other games have. Its imagery has long been common in great art and literature (e.g., Da Vinci’s chess pieces; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; Orwell, 1984; etc.) and today it can be seen in film (particularly in popular sci-fi series such as Star Wars, Star Trek / Star Trek, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.) and television (e.g., The Big Bang Theory). It’s often used as a metaphor or analogy to help understand more complex things like science (as Richard Feynman does so beautifully here) or even life itself. It’s much more than just a game.
Clearly an intellectual pursuit as opposed to a physical one, chess has long been regarded as a gauge or indicator of intelligence. For example, in 1894, French psychologist Alfred Binet (inventor of the first widely used IQ test) was studying the intersection of chess and mathematics and he concluded that mastery in chess was highly correlated with both visual memory quality and mental calculation ability. Unfortunately for a novice player like me (in chess-speak: a patzer), Binet’s studies and others like it suggest that any correlation between chess playing and intelligence, per se, is tenuous and likely limited to master-level players.
More recent studies show that learning to play chess (much like learning to play a musical instrument or learning a new language) does have a multitude of cognitive, educational and social benefits, even for us non-masters. This, again, is not a new idea. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in “The Morals of Chess” (1750),
The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions… By playing at Chess then, we may learn foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life – that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.
Playing chess involves strategic and tactical, abstract and concrete thinking; it can lead to improvement in mental focus and acuity, ability to plan ahead, ability to quickly and carefully weigh options, etc. Some studies show a correlation with higher grades in both math and English and better scores on psychological tests measuring critical thinking and creativity. For the older crowd, chess may also help to stave off Alzheimer’s and dementia much like other mind-exercising activities such as doing crosswords, playing Sudoku, solving jig-saw puzzles, etc. |
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