Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 15:55:05 05/23/00
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Interestingly, the skills that make a great chess programmer may be different from the skills that make a great chess player. If you looks at the Wescheler Adult Intelligence Scale (now in its third revision), you find that the scales cluster broadly into two factors, one representing verbal intelligence, and the other representing more or less spatial intelligence. Chess players would tend to have high scores on the spatial intelligence factor, since visualization and pattern matching are so important to high level play. Interestingly, research has shown that scores on the spatial factor are very sensitive to age, and begin declining somewhere around twenty five or thirty. Likewise, chess players tend to be "at the height of their powers" somewhere around this time. After that, it is hoped that wisdom can outrun the loss of capacity that naturally occurs in the slowly degrading neural network that is the human brain. Programming, however, is a massively sequential task in which the parts must be integrated into a whole. The ability to play chess cannot be coded directly, but must be broken up into a hierarchy of limited objectives that compete with each other for priority, the weight of each depending on contextual factors that may or may not appear with any frequency (e.g., whether Bishops will be more important than knights given the probable configuration of pawns in the coming endgame). All of this has to be understood in a very analytic, self-conscious, and rigorous way, because that and only that can be turned into code. The best players and programmers, of course, will combine both. These are the people that can translate their intuition of positional principles (spatial intelligence) into rules that the rest of us can understand and profit from (verbal intelligence). Roger On May 23, 2000 at 15:17:13, Fernando Villegas wrote: >Not only Bruce, as it have bbeen said, but it seems to me that almost all >programmers that gather here has very good writting skills. And not only >programmers, but also non-programmer guys like -just to name those I remember on >the fly- Enrique, Jeroen, Timothy F, Dan Corbit, Dgeordge Vidanovic and surely >a lot more I do not recall right now, but that I have read once and again with a >lot of pleasure. In fact I can confess that half the reason I come here is less >to learn about programs than to learn how to write good english when non >literary issues are at stake. Almost from all of them I get a lot of fun. Post >of this people tends to be logical, sometimes witty, even elegant from time to >time. English is not my native language, as it is clear from my very fisr >sentence of even my very last post, but I have read enough english-written stuff >on history, literature and the rest -even some maths in my university times- as >to be capable of some inner hint of what is quality and what is not when I see >it. How is that and why? Maybe just because they are high IQ people with full >command of this tool of thinking that is language or, maybe, because my poor >english is rewarded by even the most elemental show of proficiency? Let me know >if I am writting this from my ignorance or from my knowledge. >Fernando
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