Author: Sune Fischer
Date: 03:56:38 12/24/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 24, 2001 at 05:14:07, Andre Godat wrote:
>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,
..and so they are meaningless :)
>there can be no doubt that
>what IQ tests DO test, i.e, verbal, numerical, and spatial skills,
Yes, and they dump all that into one number with no mentioning of how they
weight things, the least they could do would be to give you an IQ for chess, an
IQ for math etc.
Imagine if you where to buy a car from looking at one number only;
this car is a 98! I prefer to know the volume of the engine, weight, fuel
consumption, acceleration, color etc. before I purchase it.
Humans are even more complex than cars, so we need many more numbers.
>are pretty
>reliable at predicting how far one can be expected to go in chess.
I doubt it.
How do they factor in the amount of dedication and the will to win?
Perhaps you are smart, but if you are lazy or scared of losing your potential is
not that great after all.
>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.
Well chess is not easy, so at some level "IQ" must enter the picture.
If two players A and B are at 1900 and A spent 10 years getting there and B only
3 years, then I would call B the more intelligent, eventhough the chess-IQ test
would show them equal. Speed of learning is also a factor IMO, but they don't
test for that?
> 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.
Ah, so you agree then that chess skills are a bad measure of IQ, even unrelated
to a large extent?
Crafty is very good at chess, but what is Crafty's IQ ;)
Merry Xmas
-S.
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