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Information content of chess positions

Published: 01 April 1977 Publication History

Abstract

Chess has served as a convenient vehicle for studying cognition and perception (see de Groot [1965], Chase and Simon [1973]) as well as machine intelligence. Perhaps the central question for both of these research uses of chess is: How much chess-specific knowledge does it take to play at a given level of competence, for example, at the master level? It is difficult to say what chess-specific knowledge is, and it certainly consists of different types of knowledge, that must be considered independently of each other (for example, "book knowledge" obtained by studying chess books is quite different from experience obtained in over-the-board play). Even if one succeeds in defining what "chess-specific knowledge" is, there remains the difficulty of measuring it. Because of these difficulties, any approach to measuring the amount of knowledge possessed by a practitioner of a craft must be based on questionable assumptions, and any result obtained is subject to uncertainty and criticism. Only the inherent interest of the question posed justifies reporting on a rough and inconclusive experiment designed to answer one aspect of the tantalizing question: How much chess-specific knowledge does it take to play at a given level of competence?

References

[1]
Chase, W. G. and Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology 4, 55--81.
[2]
Groot, A. de (1965). Thought and choice in chess, (ed. G. W. Baylor). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. (Translation, with additions, of Dutch version of 1946).
[3]
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychol. Rev. 63, 81--97.
[4]
Simon, H. A. and Gilmartin, K. (1973). Cognitive Psychology 5, 29--46.

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cover image ACM SIGART Bulletin
ACM SIGART Bulletin Just Accepted
April 1977
8 pages
ISSN:0163-5719
DOI:10.1145/1045398
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 1977
Published in SIGAI , Issue 62

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