(via boingboing)
No, this isn’t like the satirical look Stephen Colbert gave us earlier in the week. Over at Scientific American there is an article dealing with the study of the mind of experts.
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.
How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is said to have answered, “but it is always the correct one.”
Part of the problem of studying experts is studying in a field where expertise can be measured. As the Scientific American article points out, there are experts in fields like teaching or business management, but how can you get quantitative results which can be used to compare the expert and average person in those fields? With chess, there is the rating structure which is well defined and easily understood.
Continue reading “A scientific look at how experts come to be”
