Author: Andre Godat
Date: 02:14:07 12/24/01
Go up one level in this thread
IQ tests can be misleading, but they are far from meaningless. Although they
don't test what I believe to be the most important components of true genius:
unusually high levels of creativity and intuition, there can be no doubt that
what IQ tests DO test, i.e, verbal, numerical, and spatial skills, are pretty
reliable at predicting how far one can be expected to go in chess. I don't
think they are very good at predicting whether or not someone with an IQ in the
99th percentile who devotes his life to chess will become a Grandmaster, but
they are very good at predicting that he will wind up somewhere among the top 3
per cent (ELO roughly 2000 or above) of serious players. It is at least as easy
to predict that someone with an IQ under 70 will not rise above the bottom 3 per
cent (ELO {I'm guessing}<1200). Someone who spends years trying to improve his
chess and can't quite crack USCF Class D is, at least in the chess sense, a
moron. What a genius is, I find harder to define, perhaps because I'm not a
genius at chess, although I feel like a chess moron sometimes.
Anyone who believes there may be an imbecile somewhere with the potential to
play chess at the Kasparov level fails to see the difference between an idiot
savant and a creative genius. "Rain Man" can mentally perform all the functions
of a scientific calculator, but that doesn't make him a mathematician; likewise
his ability to memorize every chess book ever written makes him nothing more
than a human database with no analysis engine.
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