Chess in Science Magazines
by Bill Wall

Here are a few articles and research papers about chess in science magazines. There was an article called "The Chess Palladium and Mathematical Sphinx." It was a review of a monthly magazine with that same name, edited by Napoleon Marache (1815-1875). (source: Scientific American, Nov 14, 1846, Vol. 2, # 8, p. 63) In 1847, a quantity of splendid furniture was made in Birmingham, England, for Isabella II (1830-1904), queen of Spain. Some of the items made were chess tables for the Queen. (source: Scientific American, Jun 5, 1847, Vol 2, #37, p. 296) There is an article on William Caxton (1422-1491), thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England. He came to England in 1447 and set up a press in Westminster under the patronage of the Westminster abbot. The first book he produced was a book related to the game of chess. It was a translation from a Latin compilation entitled Dicetes and Sayings. Altogether, he produced 64 works. (source: Scientific American, Jul 3, 1847, Vol 2, #41, p. 326) An article appeared on automatons. For a while, Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804) overshadowed the fame of Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), but Kempelen relied on trickery more than mechanical invention, which were the characteristics of the automaton chess player. The real chess player was a living one. Vaucanson create a number of impressive and innovative automata. He was also the first man to design an automatic loom, but never developed the idea. (source: Scientific American, Jun 3, 1848, Vol 3, # 37, p. 296) An article appeared on the invention of chess. Mr. de Basterot, of France, edited a work upon the game of chess. Among other particulars, he informed his readers, on good authority, that chess was invented during the 6th century, by an Indian Brahmin, called Sissa, who presented his invention to the reigning monarch, Sirham. Sissa requested, as a reward, on grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second, and four for the third, and so on, in geometric progression, up to the 64th square. To reach the amount of this humble request, the author informed his readers, would require the entire wheat crop of France for 140 years. Instead of 140 years, it would take over 360,000 years for the purpose, allowing the annual wheat crop of France to be 100 million bushels. (source: Scientific American, Apr 16, 1853, Vol 8, # 31) There was an article called "Some of the Wonders of Chess-Playing." A correspondent gives an interesting account of the astonishing performances of Paul Morphy, including his blindfold play. (source: Scientific American, Oct 30, 1858, Vol 14, # 8, p. 62) There was an article called "The Great Chess Contest." It was an article on the match between Paul Morphy and Adolf Anderssen in which Morphy won 7 games, lost 2, and drew 2. (source: Scientific American, Jan 29, 1859, Vol 14, # 21, p. 167) There was an article called "Chess-Playing Excitement." The article begins about how Paul Morphy defeated all of his European competitors and how Morphy was being praised in America. The author continued, "...some of our scientific friends rather overdid the thing by their adulations; yet all this might be overlooked if such influences extended no further than the time and place when and where these effusions were uttered. But we regret to state that this is not the case, for a pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country...Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while at the same time, it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, because it requires a strong memory and peculiar powers of combination. It is also generally believed that skill in playing it affords evidence of a superior intellect. These opinions, we believe, are exceedingly erroneous... A game of chess does not add a single new fact to the mind; it does not excite a single beautiful thought; nor does it serve a single purpose for polishing and improving the nobler faculties. Persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises for recreation — not this sort of mental gladiatorship. Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chess-board as they would as adder's nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies... It is a game which no man who depends on his trade, business or professional, can afford to waste time practicing; it is an amusement — and a very unprofitable one — which the independently wealthy alone can afford time to lose its pursuit... No young man who designs to be useful in the world can prosecute it without danger to his best interests. A young gentleman of our acquaintance, who had become a somewhat skillful player, recently pushed the chess-board from him at the end of a game, declaring, 'I have wasted too much time upon it already; I cannot afford to do this any longer; this is my last game.' We recommend his resolution to all those who have been foolishly led away by the present chess-excitement, as skill in his game is neither a useful nor graceful accomplishment." (source: Scientific American, Jul 2, 1859, Vol 1, #1, p. 9) A portable writing apparatus designed for soldiers was patented. It was an apparatus combining amusement and utility for the soldier. It was a light tin cylinder, 9 inches in length, and less than 3 inches in diameter. It contained a writing table, paper, ink, pen, pencil, postage stamps and envelopes, a chess board, and chessmen. The apparatus was patented (Patent No. 34,168) through the Scientific American Patent Agency on January 14, 1862. The inventor was H. C. Small of East Limington, Maine. (source: Scientific American, Mar 1, 1862, Vol 6, # 9, p. 129) A reader to the editor of Scientific American repeated the story of the Indian who invented chess and wanted one grain of wheat for the first square on the chess bard, two grains for the second square, four grains for the third square, etc. The reader calculated the number of grains for all 64 squares, and it came to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains. This, reduced to bushels, at the rate of 560,000 grains to the bushel, made 32,940,614,417,338 bushels. These bushels would form square pyramid pile 4 miles high and 14 miles square at the base. This would allow more than five and a half bushels per annum to every man, woman, and child that existed since the creation. If paid for in American gold coin, at the price of $1 per bushel, it would require 54,200,755 tons of gold. (source: Scientific American, Apr 11, 1863, Vol. 8, # 15, p. 230) An article appeared about Paul Morphy. It mentioned that he just returned from Paris to New Orleans. He went to Paris about 4 years ago as a loyal man, beat all the Europeans at chess, and was flattered and honored immensely. He made has late visit as a rebel, got beaten at chess, and attracted no attention whatever. (source: Scientific American, Apr 9, 1864, Vol. 10, # 15, p. 227) There was an article on the electric telegraph. The first newspaper report by electric telegraph appeared in the Morning Chronicle on May 8, 1845, detailing a railway meeting held at Portsmouth on the preceding evening. A chess match was played in April, 1845, between amateurs in London and Howard Staunton and Captain Kennedy in Gosport. The contest began at 11:30 a.m. and ended at 7 p.m., the time take by the consideration of the players over the moves. The square of the board and the men were numbered, and the electric fluid traveled 10,000 miles during the contest. (source: Scientific American, Sep 24, 1870, Vol. 23, # 13, p. 197) There was an article on automata. It mentioned that Johann Maelzel (1772-1838) came to this country in 1830, bring with him an automaton trumpeter and this chess player. He went to Philadelphia, then to Havana, where he took the chess player automaton. Maelzel's health failed and he tried to return to America from Havana, but died on shipboard. All of his effects, including the chess-playing automaton, were sold to pay his passage. A number of gentlemen, among whom were Dr. Mitchell, Constant Guillou (1812-1872), and Robert Cornelius (1809-1893), purchased the chess player, which was placed on exhibition in the Chicago Museum, at Ninth and Sansom streets. The chess-playing automaton was lost in the fire which destroyed that building. (source: Scientific American, May 27, 1876, Vol. 34, # 22, p. 342) There was an article called "Chess" that mentioned that Samuel Loyd (1841-1911) of Elizabeth, NJ, would be writing a weekly chess column for Scientific American Supplement. The article went on to say, "It is a curious fact, that the most distinguished inventors, mechanics, scientists, lawyers, clergymen, musicians, and statesmen, find recreation in the practice of this superior amusement. There appears to be something about it that both delights the mind and sharpens the understanding. The ablest men are found among its devotees, and confess to its beneficial influences." (source: Scientific American, Aug 11, 1877, Vol. 37, # 6, p. 51) The first chess column in Scientific American Supplement by Sam Loyd introduced a few chess problems and some chess history. Loyd said that chess had been termed the essence of ingenuity and science, whose origin dated with the earliest arts. Chess had been the recreation, if not the school, of the greatest intellects. He wrote that Robert Fulton (1765-1815) was passionately fond of the game, Benjamin Franklin wrote essays upon the subject, and Elias Howe (1819-1867) and Samuel Morse (1791-1872) were skillful chess players. Loyd wrote that he would give portraits and sketches of leading chess problemists and players. Loyd wrote that chess, as a diversion, was the most scientific, if not the oldest, having originated in India about 5,000 years ago. (source: Scientific American Supplement # 84, Aug 11, 1877, p. 1342) Sam Loyd had several entries in a recent Centennial Problem Tournament. There were 300 chess problems entered, the largest number an any Problem Tournament. There were 17 prizes, of which Loyd won eight of them, winning $334 ($7,000 in today's currency). (source: Scientific American Supplement # 85, Aug 18, 1877, p. 1358) In Scientific American Supplement # 87, there was a sketch and an article on Mrs. John W. Gilbert (1837-1900) of Hartford, Connecticut, considered the Queen of Chess. She was considered the most accomplished lady chess player living. Several of her correspondence games were included. (source: Scientific American Supplement # 87, Sep 1, 1877, p. 1390) In Scientific American Supplement # 88, there was a sketch of chess problemist W. Ballantine and two of his chess problems. A Paulsen-Morphy game was annotated. Loyd called the 1857 chess congress the Third American Chess Congress, when it was the first American Chess Congess. (source: Scientific American Supplement # 88, Sep 8, 1877) In Scientific American Supplement # 89, there was an article on the Leipzig Chess Congress, won by Louis Paulsen. There was also a sketch of Adolph Anderson (it should have been Adolf Anderssen) and one of his games (source: Scientific American Supplement # 89, Sep 15, 1877) In Scientific American Supplement #90, there was a column called "Scientific American Chess Record." It was column on Wilhelm Steinitz with a portrait of Steinitz playing chess. The drawing had the chess board reversed (black square to the right instead of the white square to the right). (source: Scientific American Supplement #90, Sep 29, 1877) In Scientific American Supplement #117, Sam Loyd described Louis Charles de la Bourdonnais and his plaster cast of his head, along with a sketch. (source: Scientific American Supplement #117, Apr 6, 1878) In Scientific American Supplement, No. 126, there is an article called "The New Automaton Chess Player." It described a new chess automaton built by Mr. C.G. Gumpel of London, called "Mephisto." (source: Scientific American Supplement, No. 126, Jun 1, 1878) In Scientific American Supplement, No. 131, there is an article called "Rousseau As a Chess Player." It described Jean Jacques Rousseau's daily chess play at the Café de la Regence and elsewhere. (source: Scientific American Supplement, No. 131, Jul 6, 1878) An article called "Memory in Chess Playing," appeared in Scientific American. It stated that wonderful as are the feats of chess-players who can work out a game or a series of games without seeing the board, there is nothing really remarkable in them. When once mastered, the trick is not only fairly easy of performance, but the fact that the process is purely mental rather facilitates than impedes the action of the mind. To the "blindfold" chessplayer, there is present a mental picture of the board with the pieces in position. He can change the position of the men as easily as he can think, and after he has mastered the difficulty of fixing the mental picture, it is distinctly before him. As a rule, chess-players are mental-picture-readers, and can at pleasure call up any one of several pictures of boards as they last conceived them. The most difficult feat is to play two or three games simultaneously blindfold, the moves made by their opponents being told them in close sequence and their own moves being directed after all the reports of the proceedings of their opponents have been received. (source: Scientific American, Dec 10, 1881, Vol. 45, # 24, p. 378) There was an article called "The Automaton Chess Player" in Scientific American. It mentioned that the police in Bordeaux, France had forbidden the exhibition of the automaton Az Rah at the Exhibition Theater because an 18-year-old youth was discovered inside it, and that his health was gravely compromised by this daily torture. It then went on to describe the history of The Turk chess automaton. It was thought the hidden chess player in Kempelen's automaton was a Polish officer who, having been compromised in the revolt against Catharine the Great, and having lost his two legs in fighting, was received by Kempelen, who thus hid him so well from the searches of the Russian police that he could go to conquer his sovereign in the game in the midst of her court. (source: Scientific American, Feb 17, 1883, Vol. 48, # 7, p. 103) Dr Wurstenberger of Zurich, Switzerland, constructed an electrical machine that records the movement of chess men on the usual board as the game of chess is being played. The record (reference figures and numbers) is printed on an article strip. A print is made when a chessman is taken up or removed from the board; also, when set down on the board. The pieces are provided with plugs which fit correspondingly in holes of the board. The plugs of the white pieces are made of wood, and those of the black pieces are made of metal. The record is transmitted to the printing apparatus by means of electricity, there being 64-sparate wires joined into a cable (source: Scientific American, Feb 18, 1888, Vol. 58, # 7, p. 97 and Western Electrician, Feb 4, 1888, pp. 57-58) An article called "The Antiquity of Chess" was published in Scientific American. The latest excavations on the pyramid field of Saqqara show relief painting of a high official (vizier) playing chess. North of the pyramid of King Teti, two grave chambers were discovered which were erected for two high officials of that rule. One of the names, Mereruka (Meri or Mera) is shown playing chess with his wife on one of the well-preserved walls. The bass reliefs and pictures are dated to 3300 B.C., making chess known 5,200 years ago (source: Scientific American, Feb 20, 1897, Vol. 76, # 8, p. 116). We now know the board game is called senet. There is an article in Scientific American called "Chess in Three Dimensions." It was called a new chess variant, designed by Dr. Ferdinand Maack, a Hamburg medical doctor, with an illustration in the magazine. The game was introduced at the International Chess Tournament at Carlsbad and used 8 chess boards (512 squares). The game was called tridimensional or cubic chess. (source: Scientific American, Feb 1, 1908, Vol. 98, # 5, p. 76) An article appeared in a Scientific American supplement called "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices: He Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind." It described the electrical connections of an automatic chess player designed by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936). He called it El Ajedrecista, which first appeared in public in 1914. It used a mechanical arm to makes its moves and electrical sensors to detect its opponent's replies in a King vs. King + Rook endgame. The writer of the article was worried that machinery might someday substitute for the human mind. (source: Scientific American, Supplement 80, Nov 6, 1915, p. 296) Dr. Ernest Jones (1879-1958) published an article called "The problem of Paul Morphy — A Contribution to the psycho-analysis of chess." Jones wrote, "Perhaps a general conclusion emerges from contemplating this tragic story. It would seem to afford some clue to the well-recognized association between genius and mental instability. It may well be that Morphy's case is a general one. Genius is evidently the capacity to apply unusual gifts with intense, even if only temporary, concentration. I would suggest that this, in its turn, depends on a special capacity for discovering conditions under which the unconscious guilt can be held in complete abeyance. This is doubtless to be connected with the well-known rigour, the sincerity and the purity of the artistic conscience. It is purchased, however, at the cost of the psychical integrity being at the mercy of any disturbance of these indispensable conditions. And that would appear to be the secret of 'artistic sensitiveness'. The story also lends itself to a discussion of some important psychoanalytical considerations which I have scarcely time here to adumbrate. It will have been noticed that, for the sake of simplicity, I have throughout referred to Morphy's gifts as a mark of his capacity for sublimation, and the question may well be asked whether this is a just description of a disguised way of gratifying hostile, e.g. parricidal, impulses. In answer I would admit that the impulses behind the play are ultimately of a mixed nature, but the essential process seems to me to be a libidinal one. I conceive that the parricidal impulses were bound by an erotic cathexis, actually a homosexual one, and that this in its turn was sublimated. The enormous value of the process to Morphy's mental health is evident from the considerations adduced above, and this I take to be an example of an important general law, namely that the process of sublimation has ultimately a defensive function.10   By discharging id energy along a deflected path, and particularly by transforming a sexualized aggressivity it protects against the dangers to the ego which we know to proceed from excessive accumulation of that energy. Finally, it is worth pointing out that when one speaks clinically of the 'breakdown of a sublimation one really means the cessation of its defensive function. Morphy could play chess as well after as before his mental failure, as may be seen from his occasional games with Maurian: in most such cases, perhaps in all, the actual capacity acquired in the sublimating process remains intact in itself. What is lost is the ability to use this talent as a means of guarding against overwhelming Id impulses, and this is really what patients are fearing when they express the anxiety lest 'psycho-analysis will take their sublimations away from them. (source: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 12, 1931) Harold Holck published an article called "Effect of caffeine upon chess problem solving." There was a slight but insignificant increase in efficiency after injections of 0.4 ml. containing 200 milligrams of caffeine sodium benzoate. Injections of saline solution were used for control purposes. The author, who served as the subject, did not know when he was injected with saline solution and when he was injected with caffeine. The improvement following caffeine was 7 to 9% (source: Journal of Comparative Psychology, Jan 1933) Ernest Jones published an article called "Psychoanalysis and Chess and Paul Morphy." Jones attributed Morphy's mental breakdown and the accompanying paranoia to an inability to stand up under too great success and a repressed hostility toward his father. (source: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Nov 1933, Vol. 78, # 5, pp. 534-539) Dr. Ben Karpman published an article called "The Psychology of Chess." (source: Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 24, Jan 1937, pp. 54-69) Marston Morse (1892-1977) published an article called "A Solution of the problem of infinite play in chess." The rules of chess include a description of admissible moves, together with rules which define a victory or a draw. Among the latter rules is one which proclaims a draw if any given sequence of moves is repeated twice in succession and is immediately followed by the first move of a third repetition. The author looks into the possibility of an unending game of chess, that is a game which never leads to a victory or a draw. One of the conditions on the game is that it never lead to an undisputed superiority of one side, for in such a case the game is ordinarily required to end in a prescribed number of moves, or else become a draw. An unending sequence of symbols, first used by the author to establish the existence of recurrent motions in dynamics, was used here to establish the possibility of infinite play in chess. (source: Bulletin of American Mathematical Society, Vol. 44, 1938, p. 632) Isador H. Coriat (1875-1943) published an article called "The Unconscious Motives of Interest in Chess." He wrote, "The unconscious motive which actuates chess players is not the pugnacity which characterizes competitive games, but the grimmer one of father-murder. The King is not actually captured, as was customary in the original purpose of earlier games, but the goal of modern chess is "sterilizing him into immobility." The game is pre-eminently of an anal-sadistic nature and so gratifies the aggressive aspects of the antagonism between father and son; its unconscious motivation is the symbolic expression of a "wish to overcome the father in an acceptable way." It seems from the material cited that the chief symbolic feature of chess can be compared with the aggressive aspect of the Oedipus complex. The capture of the King by checkmate eliminates him from the combat, it ends the game, the King is dead or castrated into immobility, an end result which corresponds with what Oliver Wendell Homes terms "the brutality of an actual checkmate." The English word "checkmate" is derived from the Persian or Arabic and means literally that the "King is dead," paralyzed, helpless and defeated, which is synonymous with murder or castration." (source: Psychoanalytic Review, 1941) Joan Fleming and Samuel Strong published an article called "Observations on the Use of Chess in the Therapy of an Adolescent Boy." Improvement in an isolated, schizoid youth of sixteen took place after he became interested in chess. It provided an outlet for his hostile impulses in a nonretaliatory situation. The authors stressed the dynamics in the use of the game, showing that it is a social experience which necessitates abiding by rules, taking into consideration the wishes and acts of another person, and wherein intense interpersonal relations are possible in a brief period. Good use was made of the patient's digressions from the game and his newly acquired ability to speak about his feelings, fantasies and dreams which the particular emotional situation of the game touched off. The report also demonstrated how the fact that chess is a game, and not real, enabled the patient to exert some conscious control over his feelings and thus learn to master them to a limited extent. (source: Psychoanalytic Review, 1943, pp. 399-416) N. Gibbins published an article called "Chess in Three and Four Dimensions." (source: The Mathematical Gazette, May 1944, pp.46-50) R. Pakenham-Walsh published an article called "Chess as a Form of Recreational Therapy." Although chess sets are usually to be found in the games cupboards of the male wards of a mental hospital, it is a rare sight to see two patients indulging in this game. Nevertheless, it may be a humiliating experience for any medical officer to challenge a patient to a match unless he is a fairly good player. (source: Journal of Mental Science, Jan 1949, Vol. 95, # 398, pp. 203-204) A Scientific American article called "A Chess-Playing Machine" by Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001) was published. The article was concerned with the problem of constructing a computing routine or "program" for a computer to enable it to play chess. This was the first appearance of Shannon's technical paper on computer chess. It was the earliest appearance of an attempt to understand the necessities of a computer for playing chess. A more technical and longer article, "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess," by Shannon appeared in the Philosophical Magazine, March 1950. (source: Scientific American, Feb 1, 1950, Vol. 182, # 2, pp. 48-51) W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) published an article called "Can a mechanical chess-player outplay its designer?" At the time, the question was not only of philosophic interest, but was fast approaching practical importance. Ashby felt compelled to demonstrate the full significance and implications of this possibility to an audience beyond the handful of psychiatrists and cyberneticians with whom he had contact. To do this, he developed a clear and compelling problem through which audiences could grasp this significance. Ashby was concerned with the ability of a machine, in this case a chess-playing machine, to acquire knowledge and skill beyond the knowledge and skill built into it. (source: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 44-57, May, 1952) Eliot Slater (1904-1983) published an article called "Statistics for the Chess Computer and the Factor of Mobility." Shannon argued that the problem of providing a program for a chess-playing computer is of theoretical interest, and its use might lead to a wide range of practical developments. The problem was also interesting psychologically. If the human and the mechanical players are to play the same game, they will each have to be directed by concepts which have a certain equivalence. But the concepts used by the skilled human chess-player are both subtle and complex, and for the purpose of programming a computer they will have to be reduced to their simplest form. Chess-masters are, as a class, men of considerable general intellectual ability, and come from the ranks of professional men, mathematicians, scientists, lawyers, etc. They have in addition a special ability. Very few chess-masters, who began the game early, did not show unusual excellence at it at a very early age. The specific chess ability begins to show itself, given the opportunity, at about the age of eleven. Furthermore, there are few, if any, chess-masters who cannot play blindfold, and play many games at once, achievements which are entirely beyond the powers of the ordinary player. The order of intellectual activity which we are required to reduce to simple terms is therefore of a superior kind. (source: Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory, Vol 1, # 1, Feb 1953) Allen Newell (1927-1992), of the RAND Corporation, published an article called "The chess machine: an example of dealing with a complex task of adaptation." The modern general-purpose computer was characterized as the embodiment of a three-point philosophy: (1) There shall exist a way of computing anything computable; (2) The computer shall be so fast that it does not matter how complicated the way is; and (3) Man shall be so intelligent that he will be able to discern the way and instruct the computer. (source: Proceedings of AFIPS Western Joint Computer Conference, pp. 101-108, March 1955) Grandmaster Reuben Fine (1914-1993) published an article called "Psychoanalytic observations on chess and chess masters." The literature showed agreement that a combination of homosexual and hostile impulses was sublimated in chess. Chess became a means of working out the son-father rivalry. Chess lent itself to conflicts surrounding aggression. Chess offered libidinal and ego gratifications. There was no clear-cut type of chess player. The ego of the chess player was in many respects the opposite of that of the overt homosexual. The ego weakness of the chess player was mainly in an accentuation of the narcissistic factor. The all-important and weak King stood for the boy's penis in the phallic stage, the self-image of the man, and the father cut down to the boy's size. Chess players were men drawn chiefly from intellectual and scientific fields. The personalities of nine world chess champions of the past century were described. (source: Psychoanalysis, Vol 4, # 3, pp. 7-77, 1956) In the 1950s, IBM was looking for computer programmers. IBM put an ad in the December 1956 issue of Scientific American and the New York Herald Tribune newspaper seeking anyone interested in computer programming. The ad featured a black knight chess piece, and said that "those who enjoy playing chess or solving puzzles will like this work." One of the applicants that responded to the ad was US chess champion Arthur Bisguier (1929-2017). Bisguier was then hired as an IBM programmer. Another applicant was Sidney Noble, who claimed he was the chess champion of the French Riviera. Another applicant was Alex Bernstein, a U.S. Intercollegiate champion who developed the first complete chess program. Another applicant was Don Schultz, who became president of the United States Chess Federation. He was with IBM from 1957 to 1987. J. Kister, P. Stein, S. Ulam, W. Walden, and M. Wells (all from Los Alamos Scientific Lab) published an article called "Experiments in Chess." The aim of the article was to report on some experiments performed on a fast computing machine, the MANIAC I, on the coding of computers to play the game of chess. It was not their belief that a machine would be made in the near future which could be coded to beat a strong player. (source: Journal of the ACM, Vol. 4 # 2, April 1957, pp. 174-177) There was an article called "Computer v. Chess-Player" by Michael de V. Roberts and Alex Bernstein in Scientific American. It showed a picture of Alex Bernstein playing chess using an IBM 704 computer. Bernstein also present an article on the chess playing program at a computer conference in 1958. (source: Scientific American, Jun 1, 1958, Vol. 198, # 6, pp. 96-105 and "A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 704," Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, 1959) In 1959, Martin Gardner (1914-2010) wrote a column in Scientific American called "Sam Loyd: America's Greatest Puzzlist." Gardner wrote, "For ten years Loyd apparently did little except push chess pieces about on a chessboard. At that time chess was enormously popular... During the next five years his output of chess puzzles was so prodigious that he became known throughout the chess world... In 1877 and 1878 Loyd wrote a weekly chess page for Scientific American Supplement, beginning each article with an initial letter formed by the pieces of a chess problem. Martin Gardner wrote Scientific American's Mathematical Games columns for 25 years (1956 to 1981), often including chess in his column. He was a lifelong chess fan. In a Scientific American article, Martin Gardner, in his Mathematical Games column, mentioned hexapawn. Gardner invented the game using a 3x3 chessboard. (source: Scientific American, Mar 1, 1962) Allen Newell (1927-1992), John C. Shaw (1922-1991), and Herbert Simon (1916-2001) published an article called "Chess-playing programs and the problem of complexity." This paper traced the development of digital computer programs that play chess. The work of Shannon, Turing, the Los Alamos group, Bernstein, and the authors was treated in turn. The efforts to program chess provided an indication of current progress in understanding and constructing complex and intelligent mechanisms. (source: IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol 2 Issue 4, pp. 320-335, October 1962) Herbert Simon and Peter Simon published an article called, "Trial and error search in solving difficult problems: Evidence from the game of chess." To lesser souls who have difficulty remembering their own telephone numbers, the grandmasters of chess seem intellectual prodigies, who perform feats of memory and discovery unachievable by ordinary mortals. The great chess players are also a puzzle to psychologists, who find it difficult to reconcile these exploits with current theories about the problem?solving process. This paper attempted to clear away some of the mythology which surrounded the game of chess by showing that successful problem solving was based on a highly selective, heuristic "program" rather than on prodigies of memory and insight. (source: Behavioral Science, Volume 7 Issue 4, pp. 425-429, October 1962) Richard Bellman (1920-1984), of the RAND Corporation, published an article called "On the application of dynamic programming to the determination of optimal play in chess and checkers." A great deal of effort was expended in connection with the use of digital computers to play chess or checkers. The paper tried to show how the theory of dynamic programming could be used to determine optimal play in the great majority of pawn-king end games in chess, with computers currently available, and to determine the optimal play for the entire game of checkers. (source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 1965, Vol. 53, # 2, pp. 244-247) George Baylor and Herbert Simon published an article called "A Chess Mating Combinations Program." The program reported in this paper was not a complete chess player; it did not play chess games. Rather, it was a chess analyst limited to searching for checkmating combinations in positions containing tactical possibilities. A combination in chess is a series of forcing moves with sacrifice that ends with an objective advantage for the active side. A checkmating combination, then, is a combination in which that objective advantage is check-mate. Thus, the program described in this paper — dubbed mater — given a position, proceeded by generating that class of forcing moves that put the enemy King in check or threaten mate in one move, and then by analyzing first those moves that appear most promising. (source: Proceedings of AFIPS Joint Computer Conference, pp. 431-447, April 1966) There was a Scientific American article called "System Analysis and Programming" by Christopher Strachey. It was reprinted in the August 23, 2011 issue. It discussed how positions on a chess board could be represented by a computer. This article was about how to get a computer to do what you want, and why it almost always takes longer than you expect. It was not a detailed report on the state of the art of programming but an attempt to show how to set about writing a program. The process of writing a program was primarily intuitive rather than formal. The author was more concerned with the guiding principles that underlie programming than with the particular language in which the program wass to be presented to the machine. (source: Scientific American, Vol. 24, #3, Sep 1, 1966, pp. 112-124) In Scientific American, there was a column, written by Martin Gardner, called "Mathematical Games" which covered problems that were built on the knight's move in chess. (source: Scientific American, Oct 1, 1967, Vol. 217, # 4) Richard Greenblatt, Donald Eastlake, and Stephen Crocker (all from MIT) published a paper called "The Greenblatt chess program." Since mid-November 1966 a chess program was under development at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Project MAC at M.I.T. This paper described the state of the program as of August 1967 and gave some of the details of the heuristics and algorithms employed. (source: Proceedings of the AFIPS Computer Conference, pp. 801-810, November 1967) F. L. Moullen wrote an article called "Chess and the Computer." (source: Datamation, Vol. 14, # 4, April 1968, pp. 52-68). In 1969, Martin Gardner wrote a column in Scientific American called "The Eight Queens and Other Chessboard Diversions." Alex G. Bell published an article called, "How to Program a Computer to Play Legal Chess." (source: Computing Journal, Vol. 13, # 2, 1970, pp. 209-219) Hans Berliner (1929-2017) published a paper called, "Experiences Gained in Constructing and Testing a Chess Program." This paper was an attempt to document the structure of one chess program, and to shed some light on the pitfalls of developing a competent chess program. Berliner advocated a program that selected a move as likely to be best under lengthy examination, and only rejects this notion based upon finding in the depth search. This process would then be continued until there no longer appears to be a move that could better than the best found thus far. (source: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Systems Science and Cybernetics, 1970, pp. 216-223) Martin Scurrah and Daniel Wagner wrote an article called," Cognitive Model of Problem-Solving in Chess." By performing a series of five experiments with two subjects, several aspects of one of the subject's behavior in solving chess problems were found to be predictable, and a model was developed to explain this predictability. The heuristics used in this model may be applicable in developing future computer programs for chess play. The cover of Science magazine for this issue featured a chess board and pieces. (source: Science, Vol. 169, # 3941, Jul 10, 1970, pp. 209-211) Herbert Simon wrote a letter to the editors of Science magazine called, "Computers as Chess Partners." He mentions that computer chess programs began in 1957-58 when Alex Bernstein constructed the first complete chess-playing program for a computer. He also pointed out that the Greenblatt program won a Class C USCF rating. (source: Science, Vol. 169, # 3946, Aug 14, 1970, pp. 630-631) In Scientific American, there was a column, written by Martin Gardner, called "Mathematical Games" which discussed lessons from Dr. Matrix in chess and numerology. (source: Scientific American, Jan 1, 1971, Vol. 224, # 1) Daniel Wagner and Martin Scurrah wrote an article called, "Some Characteristics of Human Problem-Solving in Chess." Following the design of de Groot (1965) and Newell and Simon (1965), the authors were asked to produce a total of six verbal chess protocols over a variety of conditions involving: middle and end game positions; real and artificial board positions; and differing time constraints. The analysis of these protocols yielded problem-solving episodes similar to those described by Newell and Simon. To account for these data, a modification of the Newell and Simon model was developed. The modified model gave a good account both of the data obtained in this study and also those described by Newell and Simon. (source: Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 2, # 4, 1971, pp. 454-478) In Scientific American, Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column included challenging chess tasks. (source: Scientific American, May 1, 1972) Donald Michie (1923-2007) wrote an article called, "Programmer's Gambit." He noted that chess computers fall far short of international grandmaster performance. But, if fed with the right kind of "knowledge," they should far exceed it. At the time, the best chess programs were rated around 1500. The author wagered several thousand dollars against International Master David Levy, that a chess computer would be able to beat Levy by 1978. Mitchie lost that bet. (source: New Scientist, Aug 17, 1972, pp. 329-332) Jasia Reichardt wrote an article about art and chess and the evolution of the shape of chess pieces. She also discussed examples of recent improvements of the chess pieces by artists. (source: New Scientist, Oct 5, 1972, p. 51) An article called "Perception in Chess," by William Chase and Herbert Simon appeared in Cognitive Psychology. The authors developed a technique for isolating and studying the perceptual structures that chess players perceive. Three chess players of varying strength - from master to novice - were confronted with two tasks: ( 1) A perception task, where the player reproduces a chess position in plain view, and (2) short-term recall task, where the player reproduces a chess position after viewing it for 5 sec. The successive glances at the position in the perceptual task and long pauses in the memory task were used to segment the structures in the reconstruction protocol. The size and nature of these structures were then analyzed as a function of chess skill. By analyzing an expert player's eye movements, it had been shown that, among other things, he is looking at how pieces attack and defend each other. But we know from other considerations that he is seeing much more. The authors' work was concerned with just what the expert chess pIayer perceives. (source: Cognitive Psychology, Jan 1973, Vol. 4, # 1, pp. 55-81) In Scientific American, there was an article called "An Advice-Taking Chess Computer" by Albert Zobrist and Frederic Carlson. The cover of Scientific American had a chess problem on the cover. (source: Scientific American, Jun 1, 1973, Vol. 228, # 6, pp. 92-105) William Chase and Herbert Simon wrote an article called "Skill in Chess." Experiments with chess-playing tasks and computer simulation of skilled performance throw light on some human perceptual and memory processes. Chess has proved to be an excellent model environment around which knowledge and understanding could cumulate. Practice interacts with talent, and certain combinations of basic cognitive capacities may have special relevance for chess. There is no evidence, however, that chess masters demonstrated more than above-average competence on basic intellectual factors: their talents are chess specific. The acquisition of chess skill depends on building up recognition memory for many familiar chess patterns. (source: American Scientist, Jul-Aug 1973, Vol. 61, # 4, pp. 394-403) Hans Berliner wrote an article called "Some Necessary Conditions for a Master Chess Program." (source: IJCAI '73 Proceedings for the 3rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 1973, pp. 77-85) D. Cooper and E. Kozdrowski wrote an article called, "COKO III: The Cooper-Kozdrowicki Chess Program." This paper discussed the "tree-searching catastrophe" as a natural phenomenon that plagued selective tree searching for both man and machine. In addition, so-called "interminimal-game communication" was considered as a natural, powerful procedure frequently used by humans to guide their selective search and as a point of emphasis for future development. It was concluded that COKO's development was just beginning, with no immediate barriers to progress, and no lack of ideas for improvement. (source: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, # 6, 1974, pp. 627-699) In Scientific American, Martin Gardner reported a computer program had been running for months at MIT and had determined the best first move in chess was "Pawn to Queen Rook Four." It was an April Fool's joke. (source: Scientific American, Apr 1, 1975, Vol 228, # 4) In Scientific American, Martin Gardner, in his Mathematical Games column, posed the following problem: "What is the smallest number of queens you can put on an n x n chessboard such that no queen can be added without creating three in a row, a column, or a diagonal?" (source: Scientific American, Oct 1, 1976) David Levy wrote an article called, "Computers Are Now Chess Masters." He gave a history of chess computers and how computers have different strengths and weaknesses. He also discussed how he played against computers. (source: New Scientist, Jul 27, 1978, pp. 256-258) Hans Berliner wrote an article on computer chess and its history. Because of its obvious intellectual content, chess has long presented computer scientists with a challenge to their ingenuity. The development of the attempt to program computers to play chess at human Grand master level had raised some interesting points about the strategies that men and machines used to solve problems 'intelligently'. (source: Nature, Vol. 274, Aug 24, 1978, pp. 745-748) In Scientific American, there was a column, written by Martin Gardner, called "Mathematical Games" that discussed chess problems on a higher plane, including mirror images, rotations, and the superqueen. (Scientific American, Jun 1, 1979, Vol. 270) Arthur L. Robinson wrote an article called, "Tournament Competition Fuels Computer Chess." A chess diagram was produced wrong, with a missing pawn. (source: Science, Vol. 204, # 4400, Jun 29, 1979, pp. 1396-1398) In 1979, David Lane and Lauren Roberton, both from Rice University, tested the hypothesis that memory for chess positions is a function of the depth of processing and, particularly, of the richness of stimulus elaboration afforded by the combination of task and skill-level conditions.  They tested non-rated beginners and rated chess players and could not find a relationship between chess skill and recall under formal orienting instructions or no relationship between chess skill and memory for random positions.  Only when the subjects were able to perceive the 64 squares and various pieces as a meaningful configuration does the player with the better understanding of chess show any superiority.  In addition to being familiar with more patterns of chess pieces, stronger players are better that weaker players at integrating familiar configurations into a coherent whole.  (source: "The generality of the levels of processing hypothesis: An application to memory for chess positions," Memory & Cognition, Vol. 7, # 4, pp. 253-256, 1979) Monroe Newborn wrote an article called, "Recent Progress in Computer Chess." There was much progress in software technology, making programming, debugging, and testing chess programs much easier. The author details CHESS 4.7's first victory over a chess master. The paper looks at computer endgame play, speed chess by computers, and chess on microcomputers. (source: Advances in Computers, Vol 18, 1979, pp. 59-117) Thomas Saaty and Luis Vargas wrote an article called, "Hierarchical Analysis of Behavior in Competition: Prediction in Chess." In this paper the authors used the analytic hierarchy process to combine technical and behavioral characteristics of chess players and predict the outcome of a championship match. The method also applied to decision making in living systems at the level of the group. Their approach to prediction dealt with the inputs (know?how of the players) of a system (the chess board and its psychological surrounding environment), the transformation of the input within the system through actual play, and with its outputs (outcome of the match). Their task was to assess the quality of the input by deriving a relative index of power of the players by identifying (with the assistance of grandmasters through a questionnaire) the relevant factors whose totality may determine the outcome. They then used this index to assess the kind of output (win, draw, or loss) that it would produce over a set of several encounters in a match. The outcome of their analysis was an estimate of the total number of games that two given players would play, together with the numbers of games won by each player. They also analyzed the sensitivity of the results to changes in the expectations of the competitors. (source: Behavioral Science, Vol. 25, # 3, 1980, pp. 180-191) Arthur Robinson wrote an article called "Computer Chess: Belle Sweeps the Board." Belle won the 3rd world championship in computer chess in Linz, Austria in September 1980. The next challenge was to win a $100,000 prize that was offered to beat the human world chess champion. (source: Science, Vol. 210, # 4467, Oct 17, 1980, pp. 293-294) N. Charness wrote an article called, "Search in Chess: Age and Skill Differences." 34 chess players 16—64 years old, varying in skill, generated think-aloud protocols for each of 4 chess positions. The findings indicated that (a) more skilled players search more extensively and deeply; (b) older players search less extensively, though equally deeply; (c) rate of search did not generally vary with age or skill; and (d) the quality of the selected move varied only with skill. Results suggested that the ability to remember changes in piece positions and the ability to evaluate positions reached in search differs with skill level. (source: Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 7, # 2, 1981, pp. 467-476) Gina Kolata wrote an article called, "Chess-Playing Computer Seized by Customs." Customs at New York's Kennedy Airport seized a small crated containing Belle, a chess computer. It was on its way to Moscow with Ken Thompson for a chess match. The computer was confiscated by the Customs Service as part of its Operation Exodus, a program to prevent the illegal export of high technology items to the Soviets. (source: Science, Vol. 216, # 4553, Jun 25, 1982, p. 1392) Donald Michie wrote an article about computer chess and the humanization of technology. He included a short history of computer chess. Chess provided the opportunity for studying the representation of human knowledge in machines, but it took more than a century since its conception for chess playing by machines to become a reality. The World Computer Chess Championship and other computer chess tournaments where program is matched against program occur regularly. The author asks, "How far can the less clever but more intelligent human master rely on the computer's brute force technology?" (source: Nature, Vol. 299, Sep 30, 1982, pp. 391-394) James Storer wrote a paper called "On the Complexity of Chess." Most past work analyzing games from the point of view of computational complexity has dealt with combinatorial games on graphs. This paper showed that for a wide class of generalizations of chess to an NxN board, it is PSPACE-complete to determine if a specified player has a winning strategy. In order to study a game like checkers, GO, or chess in terms of asymptotic complexity, it is clearly necessary to generalize the game to an NxiV board. With chess it is not clear how to generalize. One can imagine all sorts of new pieces and a host of starting positions. In addition, the knight of standard chess poses a problem. It seems reasonable that generalized chess would have at least one of the standard queen, rook, and black and white bishops. However, as the board size gets large, standard knights seem to become worthless since they can only travel a distance of three squares on a given move, whereas a bishop can travel diagonally across the board. (source: Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Vol. 27, # 1, Aug 1983, pp. 77-100) Thomas Saaty and Luis Vargas wrote an article called, "Modelling Behavior in Competition: The Analytic Hierarchy Process." This paper offered an approach for dealing with prediction of the outcome of World Chess Championship matches based on players experience and attitude towards the game. The paper dealt with both the overall outcome and the sequence of game by game outcomes. A method for predicting the overall outcome was advanced and illustrated. Methods for predicting game by game outcomes were examined and compared according to strengths and weaknesses. The analysis was supported by the data on World Championship matches since their beginning 125 years ago. (source: Applied Mathematics and Computation, Vol 16, # 1, Jan 1985, pp. 49-92) Robert Hyatt, Harry Nelosn, and Albert Gower wrote an article on Cray Blitz, the 1984 World Computer Chess Program. The program has also played in human chess tournaments and was a chess master. At speed chess, where its ability to perform very accurate analysis was particularly important, it has maintained a performance rating of over 2600 for the past two years. This indicated that at speed chess, the program was one of the top players, electronic or human, in the world. It ran on a Cray XMP-48 computer system and has was designed around the parallelism that the XMP architecture provides. (source: Telematics and Informatics, Vol. 2, # 4, 1985, pp. 299-306) In Scientific American, there was a column called "Computer Recreations: The King (A Chess Program) is Dead, Long Live the King (A Chess Machine)" by Alexander Dewdney. It was an article about the 1985 North American Computer Chess Championship, held in Denver. The computers were: Awit, Bebe, Chaos, Cray Blitz, Hitech, Intelligent Software, Lachex, Ostrich, Phoenix, and SPOC. Hitech won that year. (source: Scientific American, Feb 1, 1986) Robert Cannon and Stan Dolan wrote an article on the knight's tour. The classical problem of the knight's tour consists of moving a knight over a chess board in such a manner that it moves successively on to every possible square once and only once. If the initial and final squares of this tour are a knight's move away from each other, then for obvious reasons the tour is termed re-entrant. The problem has a long and interesting history. Solutions due to De Moivre, Euler, Vandermonde, Warnsdorff and Roget, together with further references can be found in this article. (source: Mathematical Gazette, June 1986) A. Avni, D. Kipper, and S. Fox wrote an article called, "Personality and Leisure Activities: An Illustration with Chess Players." This article investigated the relationship between personality and involvement in a leisure activity: chess playing. The participants comprised three groups of highly competitive chess players, moderately competitive chess players, and a comparison group of non-players (n = 20 each). The results showed that of the six personality characteristics under investigation all chess players differed from the comparison group in terms of unconventional thinking and orderliness. In addition, highly competitive players differed from non-players in being also significantly more suspicious. The three groups did not differ significantly on neuroticism, aggressive tendency, and hostility. Implications concerning future studies of the relationship between personality and involvement in competitive leisure activities are discussed. (source: Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 8, # 6, 1987, pp. 715-719) Jane Seymour wrote an article called, "What are Chess Masters Made Of?" She wrote about her experiences as the only woman in chess tournaments that she participated in. She hoped that as old traditions break down, more women will start playing chess. (source: New Scientist, Mar 3, 1988, pp. 72-73) In Scientific American, there was an article called "Deep Thought." (source: Scientific American, Apr 1, 1989, Vol. 260, # 4) Greg Wilson wrote an article called "Chess Computers Make Their Move." He predicted in a few years, a machine could be the world chess champion. He noted that chess computers were finally capable of beating all but the world's best chess players. The best chess programs were written for microcomputers, supercomputers, or those machines built using special circuitry. (source: New Scientist, Aug 5, 1989, pp. 50-53) A. Robison, B. Hafner, and S. Skiena published an article called, "Eight Pieces Cannot Cover a Chess Board." The problem of maximizing the number of squares on a chess board which can be attacked by a configuration of the 8 main pieces was first posed in 1849. The paper reported on a computer search which proves that at most, 63 squares can by simultaneously attacked, and the authors give results for other variations of the problem. (source: The Computer Journal, Vol. 32, # 6, 1989) Monroe Newborn wrote an article called, "Computer Chess: Ten Years of Significant Progress." Since 1979, there have been a number of new developments including special-purpose hardware, parallel search on multiprocessing systems, windowing techniques, and increased use of transposition tables. The article described these advances. It reviewed various search techniques that improved chess programs: the minimax algorithm; depth-first search and the basic data structures for chess trees; the alpha-beta algorithm; move generation, the principal continuation, and the killer heuristic; pruning techniques and variable depth quiescence search; transposition tables; iterative deepening; windows, parallel search techniques; special-purpose hardware; and time control and thinking on the opponent's time. The article also presented a brief history of computer chess play and relation between computer speed and program strength—faster computers play better chess. (source: Advances in Computers, vol. 29, 1989, pp. 197-250) H. Berliner, G. Goetsch, M. Campbell, and C. Ebeling wrote an article called, "Measuring the Performance Potential of Chess Programs." Chess programs can differ in depth of search or in the evaluation function applied to leaf nodes or both. Over the past 10 years, the notion that the principal way to strengthen a chess program is to improve its depth of search has held sway. Improving depth of search undoubtedly does improve a program's strength. However, projections of potential gain have time and again been found to overestimate the actual gain. The authors examined the notion that it is possible to project the playing strength of chess programs by having different versions of the same program (differing only in depth of search) play each other. Their data indicated that once a depth of "tactical sufficiency" was reached, a knowledgeable program could beat a significantly less knowledgeable one almost all of the time when both are searching to the same depth. This suggested that once a certain knowledge gap has been opened up, it could not be overcome by small increments in searching depth. The conclusion from this work was that extending the depth of search without increasing the present level of knowledge would not in any foreseeable time lead to World Championship level chess. (source: Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 32, # 1 (special issue on computer chess), April 1990, pp. 7-20). Helmut Horacek wrote a paper called, "Reasoning with Uncertainty in Computer Chess." This paper aimed at an improvement of decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An overall analysis was given of how manifestations of uncertainty are dealt with in the field of computer chess. A new method of expressing uncertainty was presented which is done on the basis of a pair of point values associated with a weighting factor that indicated a preference between them. The reasoning process aiming at decisions among problem states associated with such a weighted pair is embedded in a traditional environment which required point values. Essential components of this process are the overall (general) state of the critical position in terms of the degree of advantage and the competence of the system to judge the category of the domain-specific feature which causes the uncertainty. Finally, the author presented further improvements of the reasoning process which can be achieved when the requirement to back up point values is removed. (source: Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 32, # 1 (special issue on computer chess), April 1990, pp. 37-56). There was a Scientific American article called "A Grandmaster Chess Machine" by Hsu, Anantharaman, Campbell, and Nowatzyk. It is about Deep Though, a chess-playing machine using a combination of software and customized hardware. The conclusion of the authors was that the system would be strong enough, by virtue of its speed alone, to mount a serious challenge to the world champion. They further believed that the addition of a long list of other planned improvements would enable the machine to prevail, perhaps as soon as 1992. (source: Scientific American, Oct 1, 1990, Vol. 263, # 4) Pertii Saariluoma wrote an article called "Visuo-Spatial Interference and Apperception in Chess." Chess players' calculation cannot be based on perception alone, because chess players generate moves in chess protocols that are never made on the board. This is not possible without some mediating representation. Direct object perception is not sufficient but the visible positions must be transformed into some format that allows players to distance themselves from current visual input. This article focused on what this format could be and what is the processing system that supports these cognitive operations. The experiments on visual search for chess pieces show only that information intake is impaired by concurrent visuo-spatial suppression, but such evidence does not provide direct proof that visuo-spatial processing is involved in thought processes. Only protocol analysis can provide direct evidence for the involvement of visuo-spatial working memory in thinking in chess. (source: Advances in Psychology, Vol. 80, 1991, pp. 83-94) Robert Levinson and Richard Snyder wrote an article, "Adaptive Pattern-Oriented Chess." Psychological evidence indicates that human chess players base their assessments of chess positions on structural/perceptual patterns learned through experience. Morph is a computer chess program that has been developed to be more consistent with the cognitive models. The learning mechanism used by Morph combines weight-updating, genetic, explanation-based and temporal-difference learning to create, delete, generalize and evaluate chess positions. An associative pattern retrieval system organized the database for efficient processing. The main objectives of the project were to demonstrate capacity of the system to learn, to deepen the understanding of the interaction of knowledge and search, and to build bridges in this area between AI and cognitive science. To strengthen connections with the cognitive literature limitations had been place on the system, such as restrictions to 1-ply search, to little domain knowledge, and to no supervised training. (source: Machine Learning Proceedings, June 1991, pp. 85-89) Perti Saariluoma wrote an article called, "Aspects of Skilled Imagery in Blindfold Chess." Blindfold chess is a very good task environment to study skill-based mental images or skilled imagery. Seven experiments providing information on different aspects of skilled imagery in blindfold chess were made. In all experiments, very clear skill-related differences in the operation of chess-specific materials could be found. It was also argued that chess-specific patterns or chunks are important in skilled subjects' construction of images and the operation of these images relies on the cooperation of visual working memory and long-term memory. (source: Acta Psychologica, Vol. 77, # 1, Aug 1991, pp. 65-89) In Scientific American, an article by Lewis Stiller showed that a computer found a solution of a king, rook, and bishop checkmating a king and two knights in 223 moves. The computer worked 5 hours, considering 100 billion moves by retrograde analysis — working backward from a winning position. (source: Scientific American, Nov 1, 1991) Ingo Althoefer wrote an article called, "Data Compression Using an Intelligent Generator: The Storage of Chess Games as an Example." Computer chess has been called the drosophila of Artificial Intelligence, and currently chess computers are in some sense the most impressive results of AI. In this article, the author presented a robust method of compressing chess master games with help of a fast-deterministic chess program. This is the first example where a concrete product of AI has been used for data compression purposes. (source: Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 52, # 1, Nov 1991, pp. 109-113) S. Fried published an article called "Chess: a psychoanalytic tool in the treatment of children." The author proposed a theoretical rationale for the clinical application of chess instruction to the psychoanalytic process in working with inner city children and adolescents who may present particular resistance to the focus on verbal communication in traditional therapy. The chess pieces were seen as embodying parental symbols and the competition of the game was seen as symbolizing Oedipal issues. Transference phenomena in the relationships of students to the instructor were discussed and learning effective strategies of play was related to developing impulse control. A case study was described of an aggressive male pre-adolescent special education student who benefited from this intervention. (source: International Journal of Play Therapy, Vol. 1, # 1, pp. 43-51, 1992) An article called "The Impact of Chess Research on Cognitive Science" appeared in Psychological Research. The chess research of de Groot (1965) and Chase and Simon (1973) have accumulated over 250 citations each. Chess playing has provided a model task environment for the study of basic cognitive processes, such as perception, memory, and problem solving. It also offers a unique opportunity for the study of individual differences (chess expertise) because of Arpad Elo's development of a chess-skill rating scale. Chess has also enjoyed a privileged position in Artificial-Intelligence research as a model domain for exploring search and evaluation processes. (source: Psychological Research, Mar 1992, Vol. 54, # 1, pp. 4-9) W. Schneider, H. Gruber, A. Gold, and K. Opwis wrote an article called, "Chess Expertise and Memory for Chess Positions in Children and Adults." The major goal of this study was to explore the effects of the following task characteristics on memory performance: (1) Familiarity with the constellation of chess pieces (i.e., meaningful versus random positions) and (2) familiarity with both the geometrical structure of the board and the form and color of chess pieces. The tasks presented to the four groups of subjects (i.e., child experts and novices, adult experts and novices) included memory for meaningful and random chess positions as well as memory for the location of wooden pieces of different forms on a board geometrically structured by circles, triangles, rhombuses, etc. (control task 1). Further, a digit span memory task was given (control task 2). The major assumption was that the superiority of experts should be greatest for the meaningful chess positions, somewhat reduced but still significant for the random positions, and nonsignificant for the board control task. Only age effects were expected for the digit span task. The results conformed to this pattern, showing that each type of knowledge contributed to the experts? superior memory span for chess positions. (source: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 56, # 3, Dec 1993, pp. 328-349) Linda Hope wrote an article called, "Mission Possible: Computers in Chess and A-Level Mathematics." The author discussed whether a computer defeating the world chess champion made chess obsolete for humans. (source: Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 78, # 481, March 1994, pp. 11-17) Claire O'Brien wrote an article called "Checkmate for Chess Historians." A set of chess pieces turned up in a third century Roman grave at Venafro, in southern Italy. The controversial Venafro chess pieces were later shown to come from the 10th century after radiocarbon dating. How the pieces came to be in a Roman grave remains a mystery. (source: Science, Vol. 265, # 5156, Aug 26, 1994, pp.1168-1169) I. Rivin, I. Vardi, and P. Zimmerman published an article called, "The n-Queens Problem." The n-queens problem asks how many ways can one put n queens on an n x n chessboard so that no two queens attach each other. Gauss conjectured that there were 72 solutions. Soon after this, 92 solutions were published, which convinced Gauss that he had been incorrect. (source: The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol 101, # 7, Aug-Sep 1994, pp. 629-639) In Scientific American, there was an article by Ian Stewart in its mathematical recreation department called "Playing Chess on a Go Board." The Puzzles and Games Ring of the Archimedean Society at the University of Cambridge invented a way to play chess on a go board. (source: Scientific American, Nov 1, 1994, Vol. 271, # 5, pp. 108-111) In Scientific American, there was an article in the Mathematics Recreations Department called "The Never-Ending Chess Game" by Ian Stewart. It talks about recent computer analysis that can force a win in the endgame, but involves making more than 50 moves without capturing any pieces or moving pawns. (source: Scientific American, Oct 1, 1995) Barry Cipra wrote an article called, "Artificial Intelligence: Will a Computer Checkmate a Chess Champion at Last?" In a series of games in Philadelphia beginning on February 10, 1996, chess master Gary Kasparov will go face-to-interface with Deep Blue, a computer chess program developed at IBM. Some experts think that for the first time, a computer has a chance of beating a human champion. Building on the latest techniques, Deep Blue's strategy is not to outsmart its opponent but to outsearch him, by looking many moves ahead and ferreting out what looks like the best line of play (source: Science, Vol. 271, # 5249, Feb 2, 1996, p. 599). Deep Blue did win the first game in 37 moves, but Kasparov did win three games and drew two games to min the match. Deep Blue—Kasparov, game 1, Feb 10, 1996, 1.e4 c5 2.c3 d5 3.exd5 Qxd5 4.d4 Nf6 5.Nf3 Bg4 6.Be2 e6 7.h3 Bh5 8.0-0 Nc6 9.Be3 cxd4 10.cxd4 Bb4 11.a3 Ba5 12.Nc3 Qd6 13.Nb5 Qe7 14.Ne5 Bxe2 15.Qxe2 0-0 16.Rac1 Rac8 17.Bg5 Bb6 18.Bxf6 gxf6 19.Nc4 Rfd8 20.Nxb6 axb6 21.Rfd1 f5 22.Qe3 Qf6 23.d5 Rxd5 24.Rxd5 exd5 25.b3 Kh8 26.Qxb6 Rg8 27.Qc5 d4 28.Nd6 f4 29.Nxb7 Ne5 30.Qd5 f3 31.g3 Nd3 32.Rc7 Re8 33.Nd6 Re1+ 34.Kh2 Nxf2 35.Nxf7+ Kg7 36.Ng5+ Kh6 37.Rxh7+ 1—0 In Scientific American, there was an article called "The Deep Blue Team Plots Its Next Move" by John Horgan. Horgan interviewed the Deep Blue team at IBM for Scientific American. (source: Scientific American, Mar 8, 1996) Santos Lazzeri and Rachelle Heller wrote a paper called, "An Intelligent Consultant System for Chess." This paper dealt with the problem of teaching chess. The authors describe the ideal characteristics for a learning environment for chess and discussed a partial implementation of such an environment called An Interactive Consultant for Chess Middlegames (ICONCHESS). Most research on computer chess has focused on creating highly competitive chess playing programs, regardless of the means used to achieve this goal. Because of the success obtained by programs based on search algorithms, little effort has been put on chess playing programs that play using high level strategies, which are necessary in human chess players. This lack of strategic foundations makes most chess playing programs inadequate as chess tutors too. This paper presented a new approach for computer chess in general and specifically for a learning environment for chess. This approach combined the techniques of fuzzy logic and case-based reasoning in order to produce high level advice for chess positions. The authors also presented the results of the empirical experiments used to test ICONCHESS and suggested some ways in which the approach can be applied to other domains. (source: Computers & Education, Vol. 27, # 3-4, Dec 1996, pp. 181-196) In 1996, Fernand Gobet and Herbert Simon looked at the hypothesis of chess masters' superiority in recalling meaningful material from their domain of expertise vanished when random material is used.  However, they found that strong players generally do maintain some superiority over weak players even with random positions, although the relative difference between skill levels is much smaller than with game positions.  With thousands of hours of intense practice and study, one would expect a master to have stored numerous chunks in their long term memory, including some unusual features, which would allow them to recognize, more often than weak players, familiar chunks that occur in random positions, thereby obtaining an advantage in recall.  It is also possible that masters have developed strategies to cope with uncommon situations, which occur sometimes in practice.  In addition, their familiarity with the materials (better knowledge of the topology of the chess board and its attributes) could give them some advantage in comparison with non-experts.  Gobet's and Simon's findings showed that the recall of a random position varies somewhat as a function of chess skill.  This could be due to three possibilities: (1) a large database of chunks in long-term memory, occasionally allowing the recognition of stored patterns that occur by chance in random positions; (2) the possession of strategies for coping with uncommon positions; (3) better knowledge of the topology of the chessboard. (source: "Recall of rapidly presented random chess positions is a function of skill," Memory & Cognition, Vol. 24, pp. 493-503, 1996) In Scientific American, there was an article by Corey Powell called "Kasparov vs. Deep Blue." The latest Deep Blue computer was an IBM RS/6000 SP* that incorporated 32 processors effectively functioning as 512; the company claimed an evaluation speed of 200 million moves per second. In a further attempt to humanize the computer's chess moves, the Dee Blue team brought in GM Joel Benjamin, a former U.S. champion, as a consultant and mentor. His strategic advice was being folded into the computer's updated software in an attempt to blunt the intuitive skills that enabled Kasparov to defeat the computer last time around. Before the match, Kasparov said, "The computer will calculate better than any human being in the world. But there is something beyond calculation--it's your understanding of the nature of chess." (source: Scientific American, Apr 21, 1997) In 2000, Reingold, Charness, Pomplun, and Stampe employed eye movement-monitoring techniques in order to provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that a perceptual advantage is a fundamental component of chess skill.  They predicted that the perceptual advantage accruing to master chess players would be reflected in a larger view span for chess-related visual patterns, but not for patterns unrelated to chess.  The encoding of chunks rather than individual pieces by chess masters would result in fewer fixations, and fixations between rather than on individual pieces.  Prior research on eye fixations in chess has shown differences in variables such as fixation duration and coverage of the chessboard.  Previous studies showed that the chess master has an advantage in immediate memory for chess-related information following a very brief exposure to an unfamiliar position.  This study extended the findings by showing that masters have an advantage in extracting perceptual information in an individual fixation.  For check-to-the-king detection, the master extracts the necessary interpiece relations from both the foveal (part of the retina that permits 100% visual acuity) and parafoveal (region of the retina that covers 10 degrees radius around the fovea) regions.  Advanced chess skill attenuates change blindness by improving target detection in meaningful, but not scrambled, chess configurations, and this effect is due to greater span size relative to less-skilled chess players.  (source: "Visual Span in expert chess players: Evidence From Eye Movements," Psychological Science, Vol. 12, # 1, January 2001) In Scientific American, there was an article called "Brain Study Shows Grandmaster Chess Players Think Differently Than Amateurs Do" by Harald Franzen. The conclusion was that grandmaster chess players tap into different parts of their brains than amateurs do when plotting their next move. (source: Scientific American Online, Aug 9, 2001) Pertti Saariluoma of the University of Helsinki published an article called "Chess and content-oriented psychology of thinking." In this paper a number of principles for content-oriented cognitive psychology was presented in the context of research into chess players' information processing. It will be argued that modern theoretical concepts of attention, imagery and memory are based on underlying concepts of capacity and format and that these concepts are not sufficiently powerful to express all phenomena associated with mental contents. Instead, one must develop a genuinely content-oriented theoretical language to discuss, for example, contents and their integration into thinking. The main problem is how to explain the contents of representations. Why do representations have precisely the contents that they have? Here the main attention was focused on the question how can one explain the selection of content elements in representations? To formulate the basic concepts of content-oriented thought research several issues were discussed. Firstly, it was shown that traditional attention and memory research is capacity-oriented and therefore unable to express mental contents. Secondly, it was argued that there are content phenomena which must be explained by properties of other content phenomena. Thirdly, it was shown that in chess, people integrate information into representations by using functional rules or reasons, i.e. concepts and rules, which tell why some information contents must be included in a representation. It was then shown that people integrate information around learned 'thought models' whose contents, together with functional rules or reasons, explain and clarify the content-structure of a mental representation. (source: Psicologica, Vol. 22, pp. 143-164, 2001) A news article in Science, entitled "CERN Wins Atomic Lab Chess Crown," mentioned that CERN's scientists were several times better in chess than Fermilab physicists. The CERN chess team beat the Fermilab chess team over the Internet in November 2001, scoring 11.5 to 5.5. (source: SCIENCE, Vol 294, # 5549, Dec 7, 2001, p. 2087) J. Joireman, C. Fick, and J. Anderson wrote an article called, "Sensation Seeking and Involvement in Chess." The study examined the relationship between scores on the Sensation Seeking Scale, and involvement in chess within a sample of 112 college students. Students who reported having played chess, and those with more chess experience, evidenced higher scores on both the Total SSS and the Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS) subscale, effects which were independent of gender. Higher scores on Disinhibition were also associated with greater chess experience. The results provided further support for the validity of the TAS scale with regard to involvement in sports, and suggested that more attention be directed to the link between sensation seeking and involvement in low-risk, but theoretically relevant, sporting activities. (source: Personality and Individual Differences, Vol 32, # 3, Feb 2002, pp. 509-515) Christian Ewerhart wrote a paper called, "Backward Induction and the Game — Theoretic Analysis of Chess." This paper scrutinized various stylized facts related to the minmax theorem for chess. The author first pointed out that, in contrast to the prevalent understanding, chess is actually an infinite game, so that backward induction does not apply in the strict sense. Second, the author recalled the original argument for the minmax theorem of chess—which is forward rather than backward looking. Then it was shown that, alternatively, the minmax theorem for the infinite version of chess could be reduced to the minmax theorem of the usually employed finite version. (source: Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 39, # 2, May 2002, pp. 206-214) Christopher Chabris and Eliot Hearst wrote an article called, "Visualization, Pattern Recognition, and Forward Search: Effects of Playing Speed and Sight on the Position on Grandmaster Errors." A new approach examined two aspects of chess skill, long a popular topic in cognitive science. A powerful computer-chess program calculated the number and magnitude of blunders made by the same 23 grandmasters in hundreds of serious games of slow ("classical") chess, regular "rapid" chess, and rapid "blindfold" chess, in which opponents transmit moves without ever seeing the actual position. Rapid chess led to substantially more and larger blunders than classical chess. Perhaps more surprisingly, the frequency and magnitude of blunders did not differ in rapid versus blindfold play, despite the additional memory and visualization load imposed by the latter. The authors discuss the involvement of various cognitive processes in human problem-solving and expertise, especially with respect to chess. Prior opposing views about the basis of general chess skill have emphasized the dominance of either (a) swift pattern recognition or (b) analyzing ahead, but both seem important and the controversy appears currently unresolvable and perhaps fruitless. (source: Cognitive Science, Vol. 27, # 4, Jul-Aug 2003, pp. 637-648). Celete Biever wrote a news article called, "Man Versus Machine Chess Match Drawn." The article was about the match between former world champion Garry Kasparov and the chess program X3D Fritz. The match score between the two was 2 — 2. (source: New Scientist, Nov 19, 2003) In 2004, an article called "Chess Masters' Hypothesis Training," written by Michelle Cowley and Ruth Byrne, was published. The article deals with the way in which chess experts gain the edge over opponents by falsifying their own ideas, while chess novices'' optimism usually leads to a crushing defeat. The two cognitive scientists decided to study how different chess players decide whether their move strategies will be winners or losers. They found that novices were more likely to convince themselves that bad moves would work out in their favor, because they focused more on the countermoves that would benefit their strategy while ignoring those that led to the downfall of their cherished hypothesis. Chess masters were readily able to falsify their plans. They generated move sequences that falsified their plans more readily than novice chess players, who tended to confirm their plans. (source: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Vol. 26, 2004) Mark Peplow wrote an online news article called "Science Secret of Grand Masters Revealed." He wrote that a team of cognitive scientists had worked out how to think like a chess grandmaster. He quoted from the work of cognitive scientists Cowley and Byrne. (source: Nature, Aug 6, 2004) L. Bourzutschky, J. Tamplin, and G. Haworth wrote an article called "Chess Endgames: 6-Man Data and Strategy." While Nalimov's endgame tables for chess are the most used today, their Depth-to-Mate metric is not the most efficient or effective in use. The authors have developed and used new programs to create tables to alternative metrics and recommend better strategies for endgame play. (source: Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 349, # 3, Dec 14, 2005, pp. 140-157) An article called "The Expert Mind: Overview/Lessons from Chess" by Philip Ross was published in Scientific American. Because skill at chess can be easily measured and subjected to laboratory experiments, chess has become important in cognitive science. Researchers have found evidence that grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of game positions, and that GMs organize the information in chunks. GMs are motivated by competition and the joy of victory. (source: Scientific American Online, Jul 24, 2006) In the August 1, 2006 issue of Scientific American (multiple chess sets are on the cover), there was an article called "The Expert Mind" by Philip Ross in which studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in some other fields as well. The article summarizes the research that has been done in an attempt to explain such feats of the human mind as grandmaster play. He mentions Capablanca's quick simultaneous play and concludes that the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. Researchers have found evidence that chess grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of game positions. Some scientists have theorized that GMs organize the information in chunks, which can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory and manipulated in working memory.(source: Scientific American, Vol. 295, Aug 1, 2006, pp. 64-71, and ChessBase, Aug 14, 2006) In Scientific American, there was an article called "Flipping Colors" by Dennis Shasha. It discussed the knight's tour and a new puzzle with the knight moving two squares vertically and one horizontally without jumping. The walk flips the colors of all the squares. (source: Scientific American Online, Oct 20, 2006) R. Grabner, E. Stern, and A. Neubauer wrote a research articled called, "Individual Differences in Chess Expertise: A Psychometric Investigation." Starting from controversies over the role of general individual characteristics (especially intelligence) for the attainment of expert performance levels, a comprehensive psychometric investigation of individual differences in chess expertise was presented. A sample of 90 adult tournament chess players of varying playing strengths (1311—2387 ELO) was screened with tests on intelligence and personality variables; in addition, experience in chess play, tournament participation, and practice activities were assessed. Correlation and regression analyses revealed a clear-cut moderate relationship between general intelligence and the participants' playing strengths, suggesting that expert chess play does not stand in isolation from superior mental abilities. The strongest predictor of the attained expertise level, however, was the participants' chess experience which highlights the relevance of long-term engagement for the development of expertise. Among all analyzed personality dimensions, only domain-specific performance motivation and emotion expression control incrementally contributed to the prediction of playing strength. In total, measures of chess experience, current tournament activity, intelligence, and personality accounted for about 55% of variance in chess expertise. The present results suggested that individual differences in chess expertise are multifaceted and cannot be reduced to differences in domain experience. (source: Acta Psychologica, Vol. 124, # 3, March 2007, pp. 398-420) M. Bilalic, P. McLeod, and F. Gobet wrote an article called, "Personality Profiles of Young Chess Players." Although the game of chess has often featured in psychological research, we know very little about people who play chess, especially about children who take up chess as a hobby. This study presented the personality profiles of 219 young children who play chess and 50 of their peers who do not. Children who score higher on Intellect/openness and Energy/extraversion were more likely to play chess while children who score higher on Agreeableness were less likely to be attracted to chess. Boys with higher scores on Agreeableness were less likely to take up chess than boys with lower scores. Considering that girls score higher on Agreeableness, this factor may provide one of the possible reasons why more boys are interested in chess. A sub-sample of 25 elite players had significantly higher scores on Intellect/openness than their weaker chess playing peers. (source: Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 42, # 6, April 2007, pp. 901-910) A. de Bruin, R. Rikers, and H. Schmidt wrote an article called, "The Effect of Self-Explanation and Prediction on the Development of Principled Understanding of Chess in Novices." The study was designed to test the effect of self-explanation and prediction on the development of principled understanding of novices learning to play chess. First-year psychology students, who had no chess experience, first learned the basic rules of chess and were afterwards divided in three conditions. They either observed, predicted, or predicted and self-explained the moves of the computer playing a chess endgame of King and Rook against King. Finally, in the test phase, participants had to play the endgame against the computer and were required to checkmate the opponent King. Apart from their test performance, the conditions were compared on quality of move predictions in the learning phase. The self-explanation condition showed better understanding of the endgame principles than the two other conditions, as indicated by the move predictions in the learning phase that more often exemplified correct application of chess principles. Moreover, participants in the self-explanation condition more often checkmated the black King in the test phase than participants in the two other conditions. However, no differences emerged between the prediction and observation condition. This study showed that, even for novices, providing self-explanations stimulates the discovery of domain principles of chess. (source: Contemporary Educational Psychology, Vol. 32, # 2, Apr 2007, pp. 188-205) In Scientific American, there was an article called "Silicon Smackdown." It was about a new Go algorithm that would be able to beat humans. It started out, "A decade ago IBM's chess program, Deep Blue, beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. The event marked a milestone, forcing to yield dominance of yet another strategic diversion — Go." (source: Scientific American Online, Jun 1, 2007) M. Bilialic, P. McLeod, and F. Gobet wrote an article called, "Does Chess Need Intelligence? — A Study with Young Chess players." Although it is widely acknowledged that chess is the best example of an intellectual activity among games, evidence showing the association between any kind of intellectual ability and chess skill has been remarkably sparse. One of the reasons is that most of the studies investigated only one factor (e.g., intelligence), neglecting other factors relevant for the acquisition of chess skill (e.g., amount of practice, years of experience). The present study investigated the chess skill of 57 young chess players using measures of intelligence (WISC III), practice, and experience. Although practice had the most influence on chess skill, intelligence explained some variance even after the inclusion of practice. When an elite subsample of 23 children was tested, it turned out that intelligence was not a significant factor in chess skill, and that, if anything, it tended to correlate negatively with chess skill. This unexpected result is explained by a negative correlation between intelligence and practice in the elite subsample. The study demonstrated the dangers of focusing on a single factor in complex real-world situations where a number of closely interconnected factors operate. (source: Intelligence, Vol 35, # 5, Sep-Oct 2007, pp. 457-470) Joao Duro and Jose Oliveira wrote an article called, "Particle Swarm Optimization Applied to the Chess Game." The paper investigated the applicability of particle swarm optimization (PSO) to a chess player agent endowing it with learning abilities, i.e., allowing the agent to improve its performance based on experience. PSO is a computational method that optimizes a problem by iteratively trying to improve a candidate solution with regard to a given measure of quality. (source: 2008 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation) M. Bilalic, P. McLeod, and F. Gobet wrote an article called, "Inflexibility of Experts — Reality or Myth? Quantifying the Einstellung Effect in Chess Masters." How does the knowledge of experts affect their behavior in situations that require unusual methods of dealing? One possibility is that an increase in expertise can lead to inflexibility of thought due to automation of procedures. Yet another possibility, based on expertise research, is that experts' knowledge leads to flexibility of thought. The authors tested these two possibilities in a series of experiments using the Einstellung (set) effect paradigm. Chess players tried to solve problems that had both a familiar but non-optimal solution and a better but less familiar one. The more familiar solution induced the Einstellung (set) effect even in experts, preventing them from finding the optimal solution. The presence of the non-optimal solution reduced experts' problem-solving ability was reduced to about that of players three standard deviations lower in skill level by the presence of the non-optimal solution. Inflexibility of thought induced by prior knowledge (i.e., the blocking effect of the familiar solution) was shown by experts but the more expert they were, the less prone they were to the effect. Inflexibility of experts is both reality and myth. But the greater the level of expertise, the more of a myth it becomes. (source: Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 56, # 2, Mar 2008, pp. 73-102) Awani Kumar wrote an article on the magic knight's tour for chess in three dimensions. (source: Mathematical Gazette, March 2008) A. Fernandez and A. Salmeron wrote an article called, "BayesChess: A Computer Chess Program Based on Bayesian Networks. In this paper, the authors introduce a chess program able to adapt its game strategy to its opponent, as well as to adapt the evaluation function that guides the search process according to its playing experience. The adaptive and learning abilities have been implemented through Bayesian networks (a type of probabilistic graphical model). The authors show how the program learns through an experiment consisting on a series of games that point out that the results improve after the learning stage. (source: Pattern Recognition Letters, Vol. 29, # 8, June 1, 2008, pp. 1154-1159) G. Campitelli and F. Gobet wrote an article called, "The Role of Practice in Chess: A Longitudinal Study." The authors investigated the role of practice in the acquisition of chess expertise by submitting a questionnaire to 104 players of different skill levels. Players had to report their chess rating, the number of hours of individual and group practice, their use of different learning resources and activities, and whether they had been trained by a coach. The use of archival data enabled the authors to track the rating of some of the players throughout their career. The authors found that there was a strong correlation between chess skill and number of hours of practice. Moreover, group practice was a better predictor of high-level performance than individual practice. The authors also found that masters had a higher chess rating than expert players after only three years of serious dedication to chess, although there were no differences in the number of hours of practice. The difference that may explain the variation in rating is that masters start practicing at an earlier age than experts. Finally, the authors found that activities such as reading books and using computer software (game databases, but not playing programs) were important for the development of high-level performance. Together with previous data and theories of expert performance, the authors' results indicated limits in the deliberate practice framework and made suggestions on how best to carry out learning in chess and in other fields. (source: Learning and Individual Differences, Vol. 18, # 4, 4th Quarter 2008, pp. 446-458) In Scientific American, there was an article called "Men's Chess Superiority Explained" by Karen Hopkin. A study by the Royal Society found that men's superiority over women at chess at the top levels could be explained by population size. (source: Scientific American Online, Dec 29, 2008) N. Troubat, M. Fargeas-Gluck, M. Tulppo, and B. Dugue wrote an article called, "The Stress of Chess Players as a Model to Study the Effects of Psychological Stimuli on Physiological Responses." The authors studied the physiological consequences of the tension caused by playing chess in 20 male chess players, by following heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory variables. They observed significant increase in the heart rate (75—86 beats/min), in the ratio low frequency (LF)/high frequency (HF) of heart rate variability (1.3—3.0) and also a decrease in mean heart rate variability with no changes in HF throughout the game. These results suggested a stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system with no changes in the parasympathetic system. The respiratory exchange ratio was rather elevated (over 0.89) at the start and significantly decreased during the game (0.75 at the end), indicating that energy expenditure progressively switched from carbohydrate to lipid oxidation. The changes in substrate oxidation and the sympathetic system seem to be due to high cognitive demands and bring new insight into adaptations to mental strain. (source: European Journal of Applied Physiology, Feb 2009, Vol. 105, # 3, pp. 343-349) In Scientific American, there was an article by Laura Vanderkam called "Tamir Druz: From Risking Check in Chess to Checking Risk in Energy Futures." A 1989 Westinghouse finalist, Tamir Druz, studied how elite chess players choose moves and if creativity could predict chess expertise. Now he advised companies on how to think about the price of power. (source: Scientific American Online, Apr 20, 2009) Charles Moul and John Nye wrote an article called, "Did the Soviets Collude? A Statisitcal Analysis of Championship Chess, 1940-1978." The authors expand the set of outcomes considered by the tournament literature to include draws and used games from post-war chess tournaments to see whether strategic behavior could be important in such scenarios. In particular, the authors examined whether players from the former Soviet Union acted as a cartel in international all-play-all tournaments — intentionally drawing against one another in order to focus effort on non-Soviet opponents — to maximize the chance of some Soviet winning. Using data from international qualifying tournaments as well as USSR national tournaments, the authors considered several tests for collusion. Their results were inconsistent with Soviet competition but consistent with Soviet draw-collusion that yielded substantial benefits to the cartel. Simulations of the period's five premier international competitions (the FIDE Candidates tournaments) suggested that the observed Soviet sweep was a 60%-probability event under collusion but only a 25%-probability event had the Soviet players not colluded. (source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 70, #1-2, May 2009, pp. 10-21) In Cognitive Science, there was an article by M. Bilalic and F. Gobet entitled, "The Influence of Instruction on Chess Expert Perception." When expert chess players were instructed to match problems based on similarities at the abstract level (analogy), they produced more abstract pairs than pairs based on concrete similarity. However, the same experts produced more concrete pairs than abstract one when instructed to match the problems base on concrete similarity. (source: Cognitive Science, Vol 33, # 5, pp. 753-747, 2009) R. Solak and V, Vuckovic published an article called, "Time Management During a Chess Game." During a chess game, there are two important resources that each player possesses. One is material i.e., the pieces that are at his disposal. The other is the time shown on the clock. Until now, efforts that have been invested in the development of chess programs were mostly directed towards evaluation functions and algorithms for searching the state space, while time management did not receive much attention. In this article, the authors considered six models for time management. They experimented with them and succeeded in improving the performance of such sophisticated programs as RYBKA and SHREDDER. (source: ICGA Journal, Vol. 32, # 4, pp. 206-220, 2009) Francis Mechner published an article called "Chess as a Behavioral Model for Cognitive Skill Research." This work on chess played without sight of the pieces was a psychologist's examination of this topic and of chess skill in general, including a detailed and comprehensive historical account. This review built on Hearst and Knott's assertion that chess can provide a uniquely useful model for research on several issues in the area of cognitive skill and imagery. A key issue was the relationship between viewing a stimulus and mental imagery in the light of blindfold chess masters' consistent reports that they do not use or have images. This review also proposed a methodology for measuring and quantifying an individual's skill shortfall from a theoretical maximum. This methodology, based on a 1951 proposal by Claude Shannon, was applicable to any choice situation in which all the available choices are known. The proposed "Proficiency" measure reflected the equivalent number of "yes—no" questions that would have been required to arrive at a best choice, considering also the time consumed. (source: Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Vol. 94, #3, 2010, pp. 373-386) S. Vollstaedt-Klein, O. Grimm, P. Kirsch, and M. Bilalic wrote an article called, "Personality of Elite Male and Female Chess Players and its Relation to Chess Skill." Whereas a lot of studies examine cognitive processes in chess players, personality profiles of elite chess players are still not described well. The aim of this study was to examine personality of strong chess experts and its influence on chess skill. The authors tested elite male and female chess players with Freiburg Personality Inventory Revised (FPI-R), which also provides population norms for males and females. Elite male players' personality profile did not significantly differ from the population norms. Female players were more satisfied with life, had less physical complaints and higher achievement motivation in comparison with female population norms. Personality was also related with chess skill but showed different patterns in males and females. Stronger male players were more introverted, while the authors found the opposite pattern in female players. These results indicated that personality plays an important role in the highest level of complex intellectual activities. (source: Learning and Individual Differences, Vol. 20, # 5, Oct 2010, pp. 517-521) Christer Gerdes and Patrick Graensmark wrote a paper called, "Strategic Behavior Across Gender: A Comparison of Female and Male Expert Chess Players." This paper aimed to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employed a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allowed the authors to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control for aspects such as innate ability as well as other characteristics of the players. Most notably, the data contained an objective measure of individual playing strength (Elo rating). In line with previous research, the authors found that women are more risk-averse than men. A novel finding is that men choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability. (source: Labour Economics, Vol 17, # 5, Oct 2010, pp. 766-775) In the January 10, 2011 blog of Scientific American, there was an article called "Could chess-boxing defuse aggression in Arizona and beyond?" Chess-boxing made its first appearance in a science fiction comic book (graphic novel) called Cold Equator (Froid Equator) by Enki Bilal. The blog covers the history of chess-boxing. An article appeared in New Scientist called, "Chess Players Use Both Side of Brain." Expert chess players get ahead by using both sides of their brain to process chess tasks, in contrast to amateurs who use just one. (source: New Scientist, Vol 209, # 2795, Jan 15, 2011, p. 17) David Barrett and Wade Fish published an article called "Our Move: Using Chess to Improve Math Achievement for Students Who Receive Special Education Services." This causal-comparative study evaluated a 30-week chess instructional program implemented within special education math classes for students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades in a suburban middle school located in the southwestern United States. An analysis of covariance was utilized to compare the adjusted means for the comparison and treatment groups on the students' math achievement as measured by end-of-year course grades and state assessment scores, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Pretest scores and grade levels served as covariates. Results indicated a significant difference on four of the measures in favor of the treatment group: end-of-year course grades, overall TAKS math scale scores, and percentage scores on two specific TAKS math objectives: Numbers, Operations, and Quantitative Reasoning and Probability and Statistics. No significant differences were found between the groups on the other four TAKS math objectives: Patterns, Relationships, and Algebraic Reasoning, Geometry and Spatial Reasoning, Concepts and Uses of Measurement, and Underlying Processes and Mathematical Tools. Causation and generalizability were difficult due to the narrow scope of this study. However, these results were encouraging and suggest chess is a potentially effective instructional tool for students who receive special education services in math. (source: International Journal of Special Education, Vol. 26, # 3, pp 181-192, 2011) L. Sajo, Z. Ruttkay, and A. Fazekas wrote a papercalled, "Turk-2, a Multi-Modal Chess Player." In this paper the authors presented Turk-2, a hybrid multi-modal chess player with a robot arm and a screen-based talking head. Turk-2 can not only play chess, but can see and hear the opponent, can talk to him and display emotions. The authors were interested in finding out if a simple embodiment with human-like communication capabilities enhanced the experience of playing chess against a computer. First, the authors gave an overview of the development road to multi-modal communication with computers. Then the authors motivated their research with a hybrid system, introduced the architecture of Turk-2, and then described the human experiments and its evaluation. The results justified that multi-modal interaction made game playing more engaging, enjoyable — and even more effective. These findings for a specific game situation provided yet another evidence of the power of human-like interaction in turning computer systems more attractive and easier to use. (source: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 69, # 7-8, July 2011, pp. 483-495.) D. Krawczyk, A. Boggan, M. McClelland, and J. Bartlett wrote an article called "The Neural Organization of Perception in Chess Experts." The human visual system responds to expertise, and it has been suggested that regions that process faces also process other objects of expertise including chess boards by experts. The authors tested whether chess and face processing overlap in brain activity using fMRI. Chess experts and novices exhibited face selective areas, but these regions showed no selectivity to chess configurations relative to other stimuli. The authors next compared neural responses to chess and to scrambled chess displays to isolate areas relevant to expertise. Areas within the posterior cingulate, orbitofrontal cortex, and right temporal cortex were active in this comparison in experts over novices. The authors also compared chess and face responses within the posterior cingulate and found this area responsive to chess only in experts. These findings indicated that the configurations in chess were not strongly processed by face-selective regions that are selective for faces in individuals who have expertise in both domains. Further, the area most consistently involved in chess did not show overlap with faces. Overall, these results suggested that expert visual processing may be similar at the level of recognition, but need not show the same neural correlates. (source: Neuroscience Letters, Vol 499, # 2, July 20, 2011, pp. 64-69) Nathan Ensmenger wrote an article called, "Is Chess the Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence? A Social History of an Algorithm." This paper explored the emergence of chess as an experimental technology, its significance in the developing research practices of the AI community, and the unique ways in which the decision to focus on chess shaped the program of AI research in the 1970s. (source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 42# 1, Feb 2012, pp. 5-30) A. Linhares, A. Freitas, A. Mendes, and J. Silva wrote an article called, "Entanglement of Perception and Reasoning in the Combinatorial Game of Chess: Differential Errors of Strategic Reconstruction." The autors questioned Chase and Simon's (1973) study concerning the content of the chess chunks, and they conduct a new variation of the classic chess reconstruction experiments, analyzing 25 types of possible reconstruction errors of grandmasters, masters, and beginners. The differences between the errors conducted in poor, intermediate, and strategically perfect reconstructions provided insights concerning the encoding of experts. The results obtained shed clear light into the debate concerning the importance of abstract thought (i.e., forward search) vs. perceptual processes (i.e., pattern recognition). The authors claimed that a clear solution to this debate is ultimately unfeasible, as their experiments demonstrate high entanglement of perception and reasoning. Their results provided additional evidence that analogy is central to strategic thought in chess. (source: Cognitive Systems Research, Vol. 13, # 1, Mar 2012, pp. 72-86) In the March 24, 2012 Scientific American blog, there was a letter called "Deep Thought is Dead, Long Live Deep Thought." Patrik Graensmark wrote an article called "Masters of our Time: Impatience and Self-Control in High-Level Chess Games." This paper presented empirical findings on gender differences in time preference and inconsistency based on international, high-level chess panel data with a large number of observations, including a control for ability. Due to the time constraint in chess, it is possible to study performance and choices related to time preferences. The results suggested that men play shorter games on average and pay a higher price to end the game sooner. They also performed worse in shorter game compared to women but better in longer games. Furthermore, women performed worse in time pressure. The results were consistent with the interpretation that men are more impatient (with a lower discount factor) but also more inconsistent in the sense that they tend to be too impatient. Women, on the other hand, were more inconsistent as they tend to over-consume reflection time in the beginning, leading to time pressure later. (source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 82, # 1, April 2012, pp. 179-191) C. Bueren, B. Frank, S. Krabel, and A. Werner wrote an article called, "Decision-making in Competitive Framings — Strategic Behavior in Chess Players in Mini-Ultimatum Game Chess Puzzles." The authors introduce a competitive framing in the mini-ultimatum game utilizing chess puzzles. Therein, their chess-playing participants accepted low offers significantly more often compared to a neutral framing. The authors concluded that in familiar competitive surroundings egoistic behavior is more acceptable. (source: Economics Letters, Vol. 115, # 3, June 2012, pp. 356-358) Neil Charness wrote an article called, "Patterns of Theorizing About Chess Skill." The conceptual approach of Linhares and Freitas (2010) on "experience-recognition"-driven problem-solving points to the need to incorporate analogical reasoning mechanisms into explanations of how chess players choose the best move in chess. The Lane and Gobet (2011) commentary and the cognitive simulation models that they espouse consisted of plausible mechanisms to support choosing a good move, but need additional development to incorporate abstract/semantic information. One possible avenue for future exploration will be to produce hybrid models that use both "piece-on-square" chunk and template representations and abstract high-level representations to guide search in chess. (source: New Ideas in Psychology, vol. 30, # 3, Dec 2012, pp. 322-324) F. Kazemi, M. Yeklayer, and A. Abad wrote an article called "Investigation the Impact of Chess Play on Developing Meta-Cognitive Ability and Math Problem-Solving Power of Student at Different Levels of Education." The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of learning of chess play on developing meta-cognitive ability and mathematical problem-solving capability of students at various levels of schooling. To this end, 86 school-boy students were randomly selected and they were taught chess for six months, and another group of 94 students randomly selected for the control group. The subjects were assessed via meta-cognitive questionnaire of Panaoura, Philippou, and Christou (2003) and mathematics exams. The results indicated that chess player students showed more achievement in both meta-cognitive abilities and mathematical problem-solving capabilities than other non-chess player students. In addition, a positive and significant relationship was found between students' meta-cognitive ability and their mathematical problem-solving power. These results suggested that chess can be used as an effective tool for developing higher order thinking skills. (source: Procedia — Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 32, 2012, pp. 372-379) Mark Cannice wrote an article called, "The Right Moves: Creating Experimental Management Learning with Chess." This paper described the objectives and process for using a "chess simulation," an experiential learning method, that some faculty may consider using to help introduce or illustrate important management concepts to their students. This simulation required numerous levels of involvement from students (e.g., planning and analysis, discussion and negotiation, teaching and learning, seeing and touching, feedback and application), and, thus, may provide an enduring lesson to participants. The simulation objectives and debrief points correlated the activities that the students experience during the chess match to specific management principles. As the simulation unfolded, students applied most of these principles, and, during the debrief, students discovered that they had been utilizing management principles in the game, and, thus, had gained experience in the application of these principals. Chess simulation proved to be an effective and enjoyable method for illustrating and reinforcing management concepts in the classroom. (source: The International Journal of Management Education, Vol. 11, # 1, March 2013, pp. 25-33) In Scientific American, there was an article by Barry Kaufman called "From Chess to Dreams: Interview on the Creative Writing Process with Fred Waitzkin." (source: Scientific American Online, Apr 1, 2013) A. Dreber, C. Gerdes, and P. Graensmark wrote an article called, "Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess." The authors explored the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. They used a large international panel dataset on high-level chess competitions which includes a control for the players' skill in chess. This data was combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. The authors' results suggested that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women's strategies were not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent. (source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 90, June 2013, pp. 1-18) E. Vazquez-Fernandez, C. Coello, and F. Troncoso wrote an article called, "An Evolutionary Algorithm with a History Mechanism for Tuning a Chess Evaluation Function." The authors proposed an evolutionary algorithm for tuning the weights of a chess engine. Most of the previous work in this area has normally adopted co-evolution (i.e., tournaments among virtual players) to decide which players will pass to the following generation, depending on the outcome of each game. The authors' method adjusted the weights of the evaluation function of a chess engine through a database of chess grandmaster games. The authors found that the best evolved virtual player without the historical mechanism played at 2249 rating points. They found that the best evolved virtual player with the historical mechanism played at 2397 rating points. With the historical mechanism, their virtual players could solve 53.08% of the positions of chess grandmaster games. (source: Applied Soft Computing, Vol. 13, # 7, July 2013, pp. 3234-3247) Bjorn Frank and Stefan Krabel wrote a paper called "Gens Una Sumus?! — Or Does Political Ideology Affect Experts' Esthetic Judgment of Chess Games?" This paper presented evidence on biased voting by jurors from the Warsaw Pact countries who ranked high-level chess games. This bias was observed only for jurors from Eastern countries, not for those from the West (NATO), and most interestingly, it disappeared after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989. (source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 92, Aug 2013, pp. 66-78) Mehdi Mhalla and Frederic Prost wrote an article called, "Gardner's Minichess Variant is Solved." A 5x5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. The authors considered Gardner's minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has roughly 9x10^{18} legal positions and was comparable in this respect with checkers. The authors weakly solve this game, that is they prove its game-theoretic value and give a strategy to draw against best play for White and Black sides. Their approach required surprisingly small computing power. They give a human readable proof. The way the result is obtained is generic and could be generalized to bigger chess settings or to other games. (source: International Computer Games Association (ICGA) Journal, Vol 36, # 4, 2013) An article on recognizing mental stress in chess players was published in one of the IEEE Proceedings. The authors presented a platform for psychological stress detection using physiological sensors during a chess match. The sensors were inside an unobtrusive chest strap that was worn by a player during a match. By playing games on an Android phone, the system could apply machine learning techniques to the player's vital sign data to give important feedback such as which moves caused the player to become stressed during a match. (source: 2013 Proceedings of IEEE Southeastcon) K. Spoerer, T. Sirivichayakul, and H. Iida wrote an article called "Homogeneous Group Performance in Chess." The authors performed experiments on groups of chess programs to test the effect of group size on performance. They studied homogeneous groups (copies of the same chess program), as opposed to heterogeneous groups (different chess programs). Groups were made up of Stockfish. Simple Majority Voting was used to mechanically combine the individual chess program's decisions into a group decision. Games of chess were played between groups of increasing size, and individual Stockfish was used as an opponent. Results showed that winning rate increases with group size. (source: Procedia Technology, Vol. 11, 2013, pp. 1272-1276) A. Schaigorodsky, J. Perotti, and O. Billoni wrote a research paper called, "Memory and Long-Range Correlations in Chess Games." In this paper the authors reported the existence of long-range memory in the opening moves of a chronologically ordered set of chess games using an extensive chess database. They used two mapping rules to build discrete time series and analyzed them using two methods for detecting long-range correlations; rescaled range analysis and detrended fluctuation analysis. They found that long-range memory is related to the level of the players. When the database was filtered according to player levels, they found differences in the persistence of the different subsets. For high level players, correlations were stronger at long time scales; whereas in intermediate and low-level players they reached the maximum value at shorter time scales. This can be interpreted as a signature of the different strategies used by players with different levels of expertise. These results were robust against the assignation rules and the method employed in the analysis of the time series. (source: Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Vol. 394, Jan 15, 2014, pp. 304-311) In a Scientific American blog, there was an article by Barry Kaufman called "The Mind of the Prodigy." It discusses chess, art, and music prodigies before the age of 10. (source: Scientific American, Feb 10, 2014) P. Flesner and F. Gliga wrote an article called, "Cognitive Benefits of Chess Training in Novice Children." The study aimed to demonstrate the role chess training has on school performance, memory, sustained attention and creativity. A group of 20 novice primary school students took part in 10 blended learning chess lessons and in a final chess competition. Eighteen control students participated in 10 fun math lessons. Most cognitive skills increased from pretest to posttest in both groups but the School Performance Test increased significantly more in the chess group. Resistance to monotony and not IQ at pretest predicted success in the chess contest. (source: Procedia — Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol 116, Feb 21, 2014, pp. 962-967) There was a Scientific American article called "Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones." This article discussed cognitive bias preventing strong chess players from finding the fastest way to checkmate. The Einstellung effect is the brain's tendency to stick with solutions it already knows rather than look for potentially superior ones. (source: Scientific American, Mar 1, 2014) There was a Scientific American article called "Are Girls Bad at Chess?" by Dr. Daisy Grewal of Stanford University. It discusses the "stereotype threat" as an explanation for real-world performance gaps. Psychology professors looked at whether stereotype threat affects young girls who play in chess tournaments. Psychologists have hypothesized that repeated exposure to stereotype threat might cause people to avoid the activities that are causing the threat. (source: Scientific American, Apr 15, 2014) A. de Bruin, E. Kok, J. Leppink, and G. Camp wrote an article called, "Practice, Intelligence, and Enjoyment in Novice Chess Players: A Prospective Study at the Earliest Stage of a Chess Career." Previous studies have generally found no relation between IQ and chess skill in chess experts. This lack of a relation could be due to the influence of practice being more important than IQ in chess expertise. An alternative explanation is that IQ is relatively high and might therefore be restricted in range in chess experts. The current study investigated the contribution of practice, IQ and motivation to chess performance prospectively in a group of young, novice chess players in which IQ restriction of range did not play a role. Children who entered their first chess course were asked to complete weekly diaries indicating the amount of practice and their enjoyment of the course. IQ and motivation were measured using standardized tests. Using path analysis, the authors found that IQ and practice independently predicted chess performance on a chess test at the end of the course. Motivation influenced performance indirectly, by moderating the amount of practice that was undertaken. The results indicated that, at the early stages of expertise development, IQ and motivation influence chess performance. (source: Intelligence, Vol 45, July-August 2014, pp. 18-25) Roland Grabner wrote an article called, "Going Beyond the Expert-Performance Framework in the Domain of Chess." The Expert-performance framework cannot account for current evidence in chess experts. Selection processes are questionable in the expertise domain of chess. The extended expert—novice paradigm is a powerful research approach. (source: Intelligence, Vol 45, July-August 2014, pp. 109-111) An article appeared in a drug and alcohol dependence journal called, "Motivational Interviewing Combined with Chess Accelerates Improvement in Executive Functions in Cocante-Dependent Patients: A One-Month Prospective Study." In cocaine-dependent individuals, executive function deficits are associated with poor treatment outcomes. Psychological interventions and pharmacological approaches have produced only modest effect sizes. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of a new model of intervention, which integrated chess and motivational Interviewing, called Motivational Chess. The improvement in working memory was more significant in the Motivational Chess Group than other groups. The Motivational chess intervention was associated with greater improvements in executive functions, especially working memory, suggesting that tailored interventions focusing on complex executive functions accelerated the process of cognitive recovery during the initial period of abstinence. (source: Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Vol. 141, Aug 2014, pp. 79-84) Soren Riis wrote an article called, "What Makes a Chess Program Original? Revisiting the Rybka Case." In this article, the author considered the controversial Rybka chess engine case, which created a considerable stir in the computer chess community in 2011. Rybka was, from its initial public release in 2005 until it was surpassed in 2010, by far the strongest chess engine ever seen. The question of whether Rybka was substantially or slightly copied from other sources, or a completely original work, was still being debated on forums and blogs. Since the actual source code was not available, the determination of whether or not the program was original was complex and involved technical topics such as reverse engineering, program analysis, the abstraction—filtration—comparison test and black box testing such as ponder-hit analysis. The question related to practices for software development, legal issues like copyright law and touches on innovation and market leadership. Drawing on this array of topics, the author reviewed the question if and to what extent Rybka was a clone/derivative. The main conclusion was that the view computer experts take on this question was colored by two different views of software development, one that fits programming in an academic environment, one that fits programming in an industry environment. (source: Entertainment Computing, Vol 5, # 3, Aug 2014, pp. 189-204) J. Hanggi, K. Bruetsch, A. Siegel, and L. Jaencke wrote an article called, "The Architecture of the Chess Player's Brain." The game of chess can be seen as a typical example for an expertise task requiring domain-specific training and experience. Despite intensive behavioral studies, the neural underpinnings of chess performance and expertise are not entirely understood. A few functional neuroimaging studies have shown that expert chess players recruit different psychological functions and activate different brain areas while they are engaged in chess-related activities. Based on this functional literature, the authors predicted to find morphological differences in a network comprised by parietal and frontal areas and especially the occipito-temporal junction, fusiform gyrus, and caudate nucleus. Twenty expert chess players and 20 control subjects were investigated using voxel-based and surface-based morphometry as well as diffusion tensor imaging. There was negative correlation between caudate nucleus volume and years of chess experience. There was increased mean diffusivity in the superior longitudinal fasciculus in chess players. There was negative correlation between mean diffusivity of the superior longitudinal fasciculi (SLF) and the Elo score. To the best of their knowledge, the authors showed for the first time that there are specific differences in grey and white matter morphology between chess players and control subjects in brain regions associated with cognitive functions important for playing chess. (source: Neuropsychologia, Vol. 62, Sep 2014, pp. 152-162) Robert Howard wrote an article called, "Learning Curves in Highly Skilled Chess Players: A Test of the Generality of the Power Law of Practice." The power law of practice holds that a power function best interrelates skill performance and amount of practice. Some researchers argue that it is an artifact of averaging individual exponential curves while others question whether the law generalizes to complex skills and to performance measures other than response time. The present study tested the power law's generality to development over many years of a very complex cognitive skill, chess playing, with 387 skilled participants, most of whom were grandmasters. A power or logarithmic function best fit grouped data but individuals showed much variability. An exponential function usually was the worst fit to individual data. Groups differing in chess talent were compared and a power function best fit the group curve for the more talented players while a quadratic function best fit that for the less talented. After extreme amounts of practice, a logarithmic function best fit grouped data but a quadratic function best fit most individual curves. Individual variability is great and the power law or an exponential law are not the best descriptions of individual chess skill development. (source: Acta Psychologica, Vol. 151, Sep 2014, pp. 16-23) Aek Thanatipanonda wrote an article called, "Rook Endgame Problems in m by n Chess." The author considered chess played on an board (with m and n arbitrary positive integers), with only the two Kings and the White Rook remaining, but placed at arbitrary positions. Using the symbolic finite state method, developed by Thanatipanonda and Zeilberger, the author proved that on a 3 x n board, for almost all initial positions, White can checkmate Black in less than or equal to n + 2 moves, and that this upper bound is sharp. He also conjectured that for an arbitrary m x n board, with m, n equal or greater than 4, (except for (m, n) — (4, 4) when it equals 7), the number of needed moves is less than or equal to m + n, and that this bound is also sharp. (source: Advances in Applied Mathematics, Vol. 61, Oct 2014, pp. 19-24. U. Chakraborty and D. Sharma published an article called "An Improved Chess Machine based on Artificial Neural Networks." Numerous published studies revealed that various researchers have attempted to build a program that learns to play cognitive games, given little or no earlier knowledge about the rule of the game. A usual chess playing machine thoroughly explores the moving possibilities from a chessboard configuration to choose what the next best move to make. The brute-force searching technique used by the Deep Blue chess engine made vast impact in the ground of artificial intelligence, but still found to be resource hungry. This paper, with the concept of Artificial Neural Networks presented a very simple and efficient approach to develop an intelligent chess engine which can assist and hint the possible move within the game using the evolutionary and adaptive computing technique on learning from the human grandmasters. (source: International Journal of Computer Applications, 2014) YoungCul Kim, GueeSang Lee, Tam Nguyen, and Quang Vo published an article called "Tensor voting, hough transform and SVM integrated in chess playing robot." (source: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication, Article No. 67, 2015) Pawel Stepien published an article called "Nonlinear analysis of EEG in chess players." The chess game is a good example of cognitive task which needs a lot of training and experience. The aim of this work was to compare applicability of two nonlinear methods - Higuchi Fractal Dimension and Empirical Mode Decomposition - in analysis of EEG data recorded during chess match. The author analyzed data of three master chess players registered during their matches with a computer program. (source: EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics Journal, 2015, Vol. 3, # 1) Ivan Bratko, Matej Guid, and Simon Stoiljkovikj published an article called "A Computational Model for Estimating the Difficulty of Chess Problems." In educational setting, it is often desirable to anticipate how difficult a given problem will be fora student. Assessing difficulty is also very difficult for human experts. It is an open question how to assess the difficulty automatically. In this paper, the authors presented experiments with a computational approach to estimating the difficulty for humans of combinatorial problems such as chess. The approach was based on heuristic search by a computer to solve a given problem. Importantly, this search mimics human's problem solving taking into account the human's domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, the authors investigated this approach in assessing the difficulty for humans of chess tactical problems. In the experiments, the authors used chess tactical problems supplemented with statistic based difficulty ratings obtained from the Chess Tempo website. The authors assumed these ratings as true difficulties. A "meaningful" search tree was generated by computer game tree search which attempted to emulate human's problem solving. Automatic detectors of difficulty were then induced with machine learning techniques from properties of meaningful trees. In the experiments, a number of selected chess problems were classified into difficulty classes by human experts and by the authors' automatic detector of difficulty. The accuracy of classifications by computer models compare favorably with the accuracy of human experts. (source: Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, Article 7, 2015) D. Barnes and J. Hernandez-Castro wrote an article called, "On the Limits of Engine Analysis for Cheating Detection in Chess." The integrity of online games has important economic consequences for both the gaming industry and players of all levels, from professionals to amateurs. Where there is a high likelihood of cheating, there is a loss of trust and players will be reluctant to participate — particularly if this is likely to cost them money. Allegations of cheating even in over-the-board (OTB) games have increased significantly in recent years, and even led to recent changes in the laws of the game that potentially impinge upon players' privacy. In this work, the authors examine some of the difficulties inherent in identifying the covert use of chess-playing programs purely from an analysis of the moves of a game. Their approach was to deeply examine a large collection of games where there is confidence that cheating has not taken place, and analyze those that could be easily misclassified. They concluded that there was a serious risk of finding numerous "false positives" and that, in general, it was unsafe to use just the moves of a single game as prima facie evidence of cheating. They also demonstrated that it was impossible to compute definitive values of the figures currently employed to measure similarity to a chess-engine for a particular game, as values inevitably vary at different depths and, even under identical conditions, when multi-threading evaluation is used. (source: Computers & Security, Vol. 48, Feb 2015, pp. 58-73) M. Bertoni, G. Brunello, and L. Rocco wrote an article called "Selection and the Age — Productivity Profile. Evidence from Chess Players." The authors used data on professional chess tournaments to study how endogenous selection affects the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. The authors then corrected for selection using an imputation procedure. The authors showed that less talented players are more likely to drop out, and that the age-productivity gradient is heterogeneous by ability, making fixed effects estimators inconsistent. The authors found that the median productivity increases by close to 5 percent from initial age (15) to peak age (21), and declines substantially after the peak. (source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol 110, Feb 2015, pp. 45-58) A. Ericsson, Y. Gong, and J Moxley published an article called "Recall of Briefly Presented Chess Positions and Its Relation to Chess Skill." Individual differences in memory performance in a domain of expertise have traditionally been accounted for by previously acquired chunks of knowledge and patterns. These accounts have been examined experimentally mainly in chess. The role of chunks (clusters of chess pieces recalled in rapid succession during recall of chess positions) and their relations to chess skill are, however, under debate. By introducing an independent chunk-identification technique, namely repeated-recall technique, this study identified individual chunks for particular chess players. The study not only tested chess players with increasing chess expertise, but also tested non-chess players who should not have previously acquired any chess related chunks in memory. For recall of game positions significant differences between players and non-players were found in virtually all the characteristics of chunks recalled. Size of the largest chunks also correlates with chess skill within the group of rated chess players. (source: Public Library of Science, March 2015) V. Gupta, A. Kumar, et al, published an article called "Autonomous Chess Playing Robot." The authors looked across various algorithms and theories across the glove to make a chess engine. For the mechanical part, they were inspired by the moving mechanism used in 3D printers. (source: International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, Vol 4, Issue 3, March 2015) M. Chhangani and R. Sushir published an article called "Wireless Powered Chess: - A Review." (source: International Journal of Engineering Research and General Science, Vol 3, Issue 2, March-April 2015) Mensure Aydin published an article called "Examining the impact of chess instruction for the visual impairment on Mathematics." (source: Educational Research and Reviews, April 2015, Vol. 10, # 7, pp. 907-911) Manish Chhangani published an article called, "Arduino based Wireless Powered Chess." This paper concentrated on designing of chess boards using Arduino mega and Reed Switches. The Arduino is the open source platform. The wireless powered chess has solutions of all the problems. Already built system requires computer and laptop to enjoy the game which affects cost and complexity. In the result and simulation part this paper focused on how to enjoy the game at a distance. Chess is an activity in which we deploy almost all our available cognitive resources; therefore, it makes an ideal laboratory for investigation into the working of human mind. This study focused on an automatically operated chess board with the help of Bluetooth and Arduino Processesor. In this process two chess boards were connected with the help of Bluetooth and by using Arduino processors the interfacing between the two boards is done. The complete operation was done at RF frequency and the moves done on computer and performed on the board as well. In the proposed wireless powered chess project, since both the chess boards were connected with the Arduino Microprocessor, the move performed on the manually attended boards was also seen on other boards without being operated by the player. (source: International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and Communications Engineering, Vol. 3, # 4, April 2015) Abdullah Al-Saedi and Alu Mohammed published an article called "Design and Implementation of Chess-Playing Robotic System." This paper introduced a chess-playing robotic system that was designed to autonomously play board games against human opponents. The control of the robotic arm manipulator was addressed in terms of speed and position control. A complete control system was proposed to control the Lab-Volt 5150 robotic manipulator which is a five degree of freedom (DOF) robotic manipulator arm. A smart chessboard was built for tracking opponent's movement. Board representation and search techniques were provided by using the free and open source chess application the "SharpChess". It was modified under VC# environment to fulfill the project requirement. The implemented control was a networked control system (NCS) scheme, the network exchanges the necessary information between the system parts. The proposed systems with all of their parts were tested in a real time with a real chess tournament and the system gave satisfactory results. (source: International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology, May 2015, Vol. 5, # 5, pp. 90-98) B. ElDaou and S. El-Shamieh wrote an article called, "The Effect of Playing Chess on the Concentration of ADHD Students in the 2nd Cycle." The study examined the effect of playing chess on the concentration of students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The study hypothesized that chess improves concentration period and listening language skills. The sample was chosen from two schools with inclusion, students received chess training twice per week. Pre- and post- measurements of Conner's Teachers Rating Scale: Revised-Long version, concentration tasks, and scores of school language listening tests were the data collection tools of the study. Results showed improvement in concentration skill and period, and in listening score. (source: Procedia — Social and Behavior Sciences, Vol 192, June 24, 2015, pp. 638-643) Philippe Chassey and Fernand Gobet published an article called "Risk taking in adversarial situations: Civilization differences in chess experts." To estimate risk-taking across civilizations, the authors examined strategies used in 667,599 chess games played over eleven years by chess experts from 11 different civilizations. They showed that some civilizations were more inclined to settle for peace. Similarly, the authors show that once engaged in the battle, the level of risk taking varies significantly across civilizations, the boldest civilization using the riskiest strategy about 35% more than the most conservative civilization. The authors discuss which psychological factors might underpin these civilizational differences. (source: Cognition, Aug 2015, Vol. 141, pp. 36-40) Sunandita Sarker published an article called, "Wizard Chess: An Autonomous Chess Playing Robot." Robotic chess is an emerging problem domain in the field of human-robot interaction. In this paper, Wizard Chess, an autonomous chess playing robotic system is introduced, which is capable of recognizing all possible chess board states, generating subsequent moves as well as executing those moves. Existing chess playing robots use camera for the detection of game states and articulated robotic arm for the movement of pieces on the board which make these robots particularly complex and highly expensive. Compared to these prior works, Wizard Chess is architecturally simple, low-cost and feasible in case of personal use, educational and recreational purposes. In this system, an X-Y Cartesian table is used for moving chess pieces along the board. Additionally, sixty-four magnetic reed switches are used for determining the current game state. A prototype of the proposed robotic chess was implemented and an extensive performance evaluation was presented in this paper which shows the feasibility of the system in real-life situations. (source: 2015 IEEE International WIE Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering) A. Blanch, A. Aluga, and M. Cornado, wrote an article called, "Sex Differences in Chess Performance: Analyzing Participation Rates, Age, and Practice in Chess Tournaments." This study analyzed sex differences in chess Elo ratings with chess tournament data. The authors evaluated whether sex differences were due to differential participation rates of males and females, and whether age and practice were able to predict differences in chess ability. There were meaningful sex differences in Elo ratings unrelated to different participation rates. Age and practice predicted sex differences in Elo chess ratings for females, but not for males. The findings paralleled those concerning sex differences in cognitive ability research, and supported that biosocial factors (i.e., age and practice) rather than divergences in participation rates of males and females in the domain influenced the extreme sex differences in Elo ratings (source: Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 36, Nov 2015, pp. 117-121) An article appeared in a medical journal called, "Efficacy of Chess Training for the Treatment of ADHD: A Prospective, Open Label Study." A study was made to examine the effectiveness of playing chess as a treatment option for children with ADHD. Parents of 44 children ages 6—17 with a primary diagnosis of ADHD consented to take part in the study. Children with ADHD improved in both the Swanson, Nolan, and Pelham Scale (SNAP) and the Conner's Rating Scales (CPRS). If the authors' results are replicated in better designed studies, playing chess could be included within the multimodal treatment of ADHD. (source: Revista de Psiquiatria y Salud Mental, Vol 9, # 1, Jan-Mar 2016, pp. 13-21) Several psychiatrists contributed to an article called, "Bobby Fischer: Chess, Genius and Madness at the Height of the Cold War." The authors tried to dig a little in the biography of Bobby Fischer who many described as mentally ill. The authors tried to figure out what is reality and what is just legend about Fischer. Their goal was to promote chess, and also honor Bobby Fischer. Moreover, the authors wanted to explore the scientific literature published about the benefits of playing chess, especially in childhood. Their conclusion was that not all geniuses were crazy, neither all crazy are geniuses. A genius is a person with extraordinary capabilities, that focused on a topic, has the ability to enlighten new ways to explain this complex world, whether it is to create a symphony, paint masterpiece or the next move on the chessboard. (source: European Psychiatry, Vol.33, Mar 2016, pp. S634-S635) Fernand Gobet and Giovanni Sala published an article called, "Do the Benefits of Chess Instruction Transfer to Academic and Cognitive Skills? A Meta-Analysis." In recent years, pupils' poor achievement in mathematics has been a concern in many Western countries. Chess instruction has been proposed as one way to remedy this state of affairs, as well as improving other academic topics such as reading and general cognitive abilities such as intelligence. Chess instruction is thought to improve children's cognitive and academic skills. The aim of this paper was to quantitatively evaluate the available empirical evidence that skills acquired during chess instruction in schools positively transfer to mathematics, reading and general cognitive skills. The selection criteria were satisfied by 24 studies (40 effect sizes), with 2788 young people in the chess condition and 2433 in the control groups. Results show a modest overall effect size. The duration of chess training predicts pupils' achievement. However, no study had an "ideal design"; thus, placebo effects cannot be ruled out. More than half of educational interventions are better than chess instruction. (source: Educational Research Review, Vol 18, May 2016, pp. 46-57) JL Zirulnik wrote an article called "Chess-Sinthome: A New Approach to Bobby Fischer's Psychosis." A new conceptual model was proposed to explain the psychosis of American chess player Bobby Fischer. Based on the pioneering work of psychoanalysts, the author introduced the concept of sinthome, taken from the Lacanian topology of the Borromean knot, with its three registers: real, symbolic and imaginary [RSI], and its fourth stabilizer knot at the breaking of the symbolic. Here, the author calls it chess-sinthome to designate the antipsychotic role fulfilled the ultra-competitive chess, in life and in the minds of some great players. (source: Clinical Depression, May 16, 2016 — omicsonline.org) L. Linnemer and M. Visser wrote an article called "Self-Selection in Tournaments: The Case of Chess Players." Who self-selects into a tournament with entry cost? The authors considered a simple tournament model in which individuals auto-select into the contest on the basis of their commonly known strength levels, and privately observed strength-shocks. The model predicted that the participation rate should increase with the player's observed strength, and the total awarded prize amount. Furthermore, under certain conditions self-selection implied that participants with high observed strength levels have smaller expected strength-shocks than those with low levels. Consequently, the latter should play better than predicted and the former worse (given their observed strength). These predictions were confronted with data from a large and high-prize chess tournament held in the USA. This tournament is divided into different sections, with players being able to play in the section to which their current chess rating (observed strength) belongs. As predicted, the authors found that within each section the participation probability increases with chess rating and prize amounts, and players with a relatively low rating were indeed the ones who have a better relative performance. Low rated players stop participating when they have a negative ability shock. (source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol 126, June 2016, pp. 213-214) Angel Blanch wrote an article called, "Expert Performance of Men and Women: A Cross-Cultural Study in the Chess Domain." This study addressed the disparity between men and women in performance at the expert chess level. Actual sex differences in chess performance were contrasted with differences estimated from the divergent participation rates of men and women chess players from twenty-four countries in the Eurasian region. There was a male advantage in chess performance throughout all countries. Sex differences in chess performance emerged for all the studied countries, with remarkable and highly variable unexplained gaps that were unrelated to the men versus women ratios. The cross-country variability about sex differences in chess performance indicates differences in geographical and cultural factors that might elicit differential participation rates, starting age, and perseverance in the domain for men and women. These differences were also likely to underlie the remarkable disparity in expert chess performance of men and women than only differential participation rates. (source: Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 101, Oct 2016, pp. 90-97) A. Burgoyne, G. Sala, F. Gobet, B. Macnamara, G. Campitelli, and D. Hambrick, authored an article called, "The Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Chess Skill: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis." Why are some people more skilled in complex domains than other people? The study showed that chess skill correlated positively with numerical, visuospatial, and verbal ability. Chess skill also correlated positively and significantly with fluid reasoning, comprehension-knowledge, short-term memory, and processing speed. Moreover, the correlation between fluid reasoning and chess skill was moderated by age, and skill level. Interestingly, chess skill correlated more strongly with numerical ability than with verbal ability or visuospatial ability. The results suggested that cognitive ability contributes meaningfully to individual differences in chess skill, particularly in young chess players and/or at lower levels of skill. The study reviewed 2,287 relevant articles on chess. "Chess is probably the single most studied domain in research on expertise, yet the evidence for the relationship between chess skill and cognitive ability is mixed," said Alexander Burgoyne, one of the authors "We analyzed a half-century worth of research on intelligence and chess skill and found that cognitive ability contributes meaningfully to individual differences in chess skill." (source: Intelligence, Nov-Dec 2016, Vol. 59, pp. 72-83) A recent scientific article by Devika Bansal suggested that through chess study, you make more risky choices as the day wears on. Neuroscientists examined the quality of moves in more than one million games of chess in an online database. They charted the decisions of 99 prolific players by gauging the time they look for each move and its usefulness in leading to a victory — factors that impact games like high-speed tiebreakers in world chess championships. As expected, early risers played more games in the morning, whereas night owls were active at dusk and beyond. But both sets of chess players took longer for each move and made better games choices early in the day and soon after they woke up. Come evening, their chess game play quickened and their moves grew less effective. The study revealed a pervasive switch in decision strategy from safe play in the morning to riskier — faster and less successful — moves at sundown. The finding shows we may have greater control over our decisions earlier in the day and soon after we wake up, regardless of when we prefer to sleep. As we grow tired, our bodies' need for sleep could dictate the quality of our choices—no matter how focused we think we might be. (source: sciencemag.org, Dec 2, 2016) A. Blanch, H. Garcia, A. Llaveria, and A. Aluja wrote an article called, "The Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR) in Chess." This law contends that a general factor of cognitive ability (g) is more efficient to account for individual differences in intellectual performance in low ability than in high ability groups. This study evaluated the SLODR with data from the chess domain with the Amsterdam chess test (ACT). Chess ability relates closely with several cognitive abilities that load in g, whereas the Elo chess rating is a robust quantitative indicator of chess skill that is suitable to determine differentiated ability groups. A structural equation model with five subtests from the ACT for low and high Elo chess rating groups indicated a better overall model fit for the low ability group. Factor invariance analyses about the variance explained by g, residual variances, and g-loadings, indicated that the highest variation between low and high chess ability groups arose in the model constraining equal g-loadings between both groups. These findings supported the SLODR in chess. (source: Personality and Individual Differences, Vol 104, Jan 2017, pp. 434-441) A. Rydzewski and P. Czarnul wrote an article called, "A Distributed System for Conducting Chess Games in Parallel." This paper proposed a distributed and scalable cloud based system designed to play chess games in parallel. Games can be played between chess engines alone or between clusters created by combined chess engines. The system has a built-in mechanism that compares engines, based on Elo ranking which finally presents the strength of each tested approach. If an approach needs more computational power, the design of the system allowed it to scale. The system was designed using a loosely coupled architecture approach and the master-slave pattern. It works under Unix or MacOS operating systems. CloudAMQP is an implementation of Advanced Message Queue Protocol and was used as a message-oriented middleware. This layer was created to split games between every available processing node connected to the system. This element also contributes to greater fault tolerance. The authors presented results of games played between many available chess engines. (source: Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 119, 2017, pp. 22-29) An article called "Methylphenidate, Modafinil, and Caffeine for Cognitive Enhancement in Chess: A Double-Blind, Randomised Control Trial," appeared in a leading medical journal. Stimulants and caffeine have been proposed for cognitive enhancement by healthy subjects. This study investigated whether performance in chess — a competitive mind game requiring highly complex cognitive skills — can be enhanced by methylphenidate, modafinil or caffeine. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, 39 male chess players received 2×200 mg modafinil, 2×20 mg methylphenidate, and 2×200 mg caffeine or placebo in a 4×4 crossover design. They played twenty 15-minute games during two sessions against a chess program (Fritz 12; adapted to players' strength) and completed several neuropsychological tests. Marked substance effects were observed since all three substances significantly increased average reflection time per game compared to placebo resulting in a significantly increased number of games lost on time with all three treatments. Only when controlling for game duration as well as when excluding those games lost on time, both modafinil and methylphenidate enhanced chess performance as demonstrated by significantly higher scores in the remaining 2876 games compared to placebo. In conjunction with results from neuropsychological testing, the authors concluded that modifying effects of stimulants on complex cognitive tasks may in particular result from more reflective decision making processes. When not under time pressure, such effects may result in enhanced performance. Yet, under time constraints more reflective decision making may not improve or even have detrimental effects on complex task performance. (source: European Neuropsychopharmacology, Vol 27, # 3, March 2017, pp. 248-260) G. Sala, A. Burgoyne, B. Macnamara, D. Hambrick, G. Campitelli, and F. Gobet, authored an article called, "Checking the 'Academic Selection' Argument. Chess Players Outperform Non-chess Players in Cognitive Skills Related to Intelligence. A Meta-Analysis." The "academic selection process" hypothesis is that expert vs. non-expert differences in cognitive ability reflect ability-related differences in access to training opportunities. This difference may be due to academic selection processes (e.g., GRE scores). To test this hypothesis, the authors focused on a domain in which there are no selection processes based on test scores: chess. This meta-analysis revealed that chess players outperformed non-chess players in intelligence-related skills. Therefore, this outcome does not corroborate the academic selection process argument, and consequently, supports the idea that access to training alone cannot explain expert performance. This outcome contradicted the academic selection hypothesis. (source: Intelligence, Vol. 61, Mar-Apr 2017, pp 130-139). Demis Hassabis wrote an article called, "Artificial Intelligence: Chess Match of the Century." He details the match in which Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997. He also reviewed Kasparov's book, Deep Thinking. (source: Nature, Vol. 544, Apr 27, 2017, pp. 413-414) Larry Greenemeier published an article called, "20 Years after Deep Blue: How AI Has Advanced Since Conquering Chess. IBM AI expert Murray Campbell reflected on the machine's long, bumpy road to victory over chess champ Garry Kasparov. (source: Scientific American, Jul 2, 2017) J. Powell, D. Grossi, R. Corcoran, F. Gobet, and M. Garcia-Finana wrote an article called, "The Neural Correlates of Theory of Mind and Their Role During Empathy and the Game of Chess: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study." Chess involves the capacity to reason iteratively about potential intentional choices of an opponent and therefore involves high levels of explicit theory of mind, i.e., the ability to infer metal states of others. The neural network associated with theory of mind, empathy, and chess was investigated by the authors. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used on 12 healthy male novice chess players to identify cortical regions associated with chess. For novice chess players, chess involved operations that were involved in inferences about mental states of others. (source: Neuroscience, Vol. 365, July 4, 2017, pp. 149-160) An article called "Analysis of Chess Grand Masters" appeared in the European Journal of Physical Education and Sport Sciences. A study was made on the age of becoming a chess grandmaster. Research was made on the factors which have caused the age of becoming a GM to fall rapidly in recent years. Most of chess studies fall into four categories: studies involving the relation of chess sports and education; studies on chess computer programs and their effects; studies on sports psychology; and studies based on mathematical calculations, such as position calculations or number of moves in chess. (source: European Journal of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, Oct 2017) N. Almeira, A. Schaigorodsky, J. Perotti, and O. Billoni wrote an article called, "Structure Constrained by Metadata in Networks of Chess Players." A study was made of extensive chess databases and how a network of games played over-the-board (OTB) compared with a network of games played in the Internet. The authors studied the main topological characteristics of the two networks, such as degree distribution and correlations, transitivity and community structure. They complemented the structural analysis by incorporating players' level of play as node metadata. Although both networks were topologically different, they showed that in both cases players gather in communities according to their expertise and that an emergent rich-club structure, composed by the top-rated players, is also present. The authors used a database of 7.7 million OTB chess games, and a database of 15 million games played between humans in different websites, such as chess.com, playchess.com, ICC, etc. The average Elo rating for OTB play was 1884. The average Elo rating for portals (Internet) was 1692. (source: Scientific Reports, Nov 9, 2017, Vol. 7, article # 15186) K. Barzegar and S. Barzegar wrote an article called, "Chess Therapy: A New Approach to Curing Panic Attack." A study was made to look at the effect of playing a cell phone chess game on treating a panic attack. A chess game on an android cell phone was played by one of the researchers who was affected by panic attack as a post-traumatic disorder immediately after or before feeling of the start of symptoms. The right level of difficulty, i.e., levels 2—4, was selected for optimal results. Playing chess game on the android cell phone prevented the manifestation of panic attack and led to the cure of this traumatic condition. Chess therapy with the right level of difficulty can be recommended as a very effective non-pharmaceutical method for the successful treatment of panic attacks. (source: Asian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 30, Dec 2017, pp. 118-119) An 800-year-old 'knight' chess (shatranj) piece was recently discovered in a 13th-century house in Tonsberg, Norway. It was a decorated thimble-shaped object used as a chess knight piece. The piece was made mostly out of antler. It was analyzed by a team of archaeologists for the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research. (source: livescience, Jan 29, 2018 - https://www.livescience.com/61552-old-chess-piece-discovered.html) Alexander Matros wrote an article called, "Lloyd Shapley and Chess with Imperfect Information." Shapley was a game theorist and a lover of chess. In the paper, the author analyzes some of Shapley's chess problems and his contributions to the study of chess and chess with imperfect information. (source: Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 108, Mar 2018, pp. 600-613)     Return to Main Page Please report broken or duplicate links to the Webmaster. Official Website Copyright 2017, 2018 by William D. Wall All Rights Reserved

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