Is prosopagnosia related to "amaurosis scacchistica"?

Prosopagnosia (which Keith Ammann taught me how to pronounce) is a fancy word for "face blindness."  This is my third day at the U.S. Open, and it's embarrassing to me to speak to a new friend for ten minutes while desperately trying to remember who that person is.  So when you come to Middleton, Wisconsin, this week to play in the Open (or just to visit), kindly reintroduce yourself as you shake my hand.  It's not you, it's me, and I'll be grateful.

Amaurosis schacchistica is Dr. Tarrasch's tongue-in-cheek term for "chess blindness."  Wikipedia's definition: "the failure of a chess player, during a chess game, to make a normally obvious good move or see a normally obvious danger."  Well, that summarizes my Round 2.  In the position below, I have a clearly winning position, and managed to lose. 

Bill Brock - Mohammedreza Hajiarbabi
White to Play

My good-natured opponent apologetically showed me the move I missed, and a couple others.

But I'm having fun nonetheless. Immediately after drafting this blog entry, International Master John Watson (whose face I recognized!) sat down next to me in the hotel coffeeshop.  We chatted about this position, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking: Fast and Slow, and ways of thinking about chess positions.

Edit: here's the game.

The Chinese room as seen from the dentist's chair

On Black Friday, I had two impacted wisdom teeth pulled. Our dentist is an artist—he puts his patients at ease, he's conscientious, he's fast, and like every good professional, he knows his limitations. The extractions were as close to painless as one could hope for.

Still, it was not completely painless. Squeamish person that I am, I didn't want to think about what was going on inside my mouth. 

Instead, I began thinking about (what else) chess.  One difference between human chess players and computer chess players: pull a card out of the computer's motherboard, and the computer generally doesn't say "Ouch!".  One computer chess player was famously afraid, but that was in the movies, so I don't think that counts (yet).

Half an hour earlier, on the walk to the dentist's office, I'd been listening to one of John Searle's 2011 lectures on consciousness. (The whole series can be downloaded at https://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/philosophy-132-001-spring/id438307693?mt=10.)  In the seventh lecture, Searle argued that Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov proved nothing about Deep Blue's understanding of chess. Theoretically, a human with no knowledge of the rules of the chess could be thrown in a locked room, given Deep Blue's algorithm for finding the best move, some scratch paper and sharp pencils, and (after the arbiter slips Kasparov's move through the mail slot) replicate Deep Blue's decisions.  (Granted, the human might need a couple millennia to make certain moves, but hey, it's a thought experiment.) Would we award this hypothetical human the title of the world's strongest chess player?

Searle argues that this hypothetical human has no understanding of chess whatsoever.  As Deep Blue  and Houdini 3 are doing nothing more than executing an algorithm, they too don't know what they're doing.  This is a version of Searle's famous "Chinese room" argument: as summarized by Wikipedia, "a program cannot give a computer a 'mind', 'understanding' or 'consciousness', regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave."  Passing the Turing Test alone doesn't make a computer self-aware, wise, able to enjoy victory subjectively and suffer defeat stoically, or have the intuition of a Capablanca.

Human experts are not like computer experts.  A master dentist can approach problems from both intuitive and analytically rigorous perspectives.  Suppose the patient after me also had impacted wisdom teeth: my dentist may have been able to tell from a glance at the X-rays that this patient's molars were going to be much more difficult to extract, so he referred that patient to an oral surgeon.  Being a professional is not just executing an algorithm, it's also an art.  (On the other hand, the most conscientious artist can make an error: Daniel Kahneman discusses the limitations of snap judgments in Thinking: Fast and Slow.)

Chess masters make snap judgments all the time: how else could grandmasters play forty players at once successfully?  In some positions, a master "knows" at a glance what the right move must be.  Of course, not every snap judgment is correct—grandmasters do lose games in simultaneous exhibitions—but the quality of the grandmaster's snap judgment is much higher than the quality of our considered judgments.

(I remember consoling one well-known local master after a critical loss to Aleksander Stamnov: "The problem with playing Stamnov is that he makes good moves very quickly."  He replied, "Yes, and he also makes bad moves very quickly.")

Some recent chess books tell us to look at positions with "computer eyes," calculating all the forcing moves; others advise us to move first and think later.  What's a patzer to do?  Some positions demand brute-force calculation (we can never compete on an even level with chess engines in this sphere), others ask us to use our "feel" for the game. And most positions ask us to use some of each way of thinking.

These two ways of thinking—Kahneman calls the intuitive way "System 1" and the analytical way "System 2"—actually occur in different parts of the brain.  Thinking in System 2 is hard work!  As we're surfing through the complications of each chess game, we have to toggle back and forth between the two modes of thinking.

I'll close this rambling (hey, it's a blog) with two observations:

Narrowly: you may never be able to beat Houdini, but you already understand much more about chess than Houdini ever will.  I remember a Scientific American article circa 1979 about programmers who hoped to make chess programs think in a more human fashion.  That turned out to be an absolute dead end, and "brute force" alpha-beta searches won.  It's true that useless branches of the analytical tree are pruned by the top engines, and it's true that evaluation functions have been improved, but still...chess engines are "merely" executing an algorithm, and executing an algorithm requires no understanding whatsoever.

Broadly: similar musings about the failure to date of the "strong AI" project and about how humans become expert at what they do are very much in the air right now.

Thinking: Fast and Slow

I'm about two-thirds through the audiobook version of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking: Fast and Slow.  This book is a useful corrective to Malcolm Gladwell's recent bestsellers Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success. Kahneman doesn't deny the usefulness of intuition, but argues that intuition has its limits, even for experts.  (For example, even the most experienced pediatrician assessing a newborn's health may be better off relying on the routine of the Apgar score than a subjective evaluation, even though that subjective evaluation is itself generally very accurate.)

Outliers popularized the 10,000-hour rule: years of deliberate practice in chess (or guitar, or corporate taxation, or...) will allow one to develop an expert's intution.  Kahneman (a behavioral psycholgist, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics) doesn't discount the usefulness of the grandmaster's intuition, but in summarizing his body of research for a popular audience, he argues that such intutition is a type of "fast thinking" that is wrong far more often than experts care to admit. Chess is a concrete game, and software engines have repeatedly proved the value of colorless algorithms over romantic intuition. (Botvinnik's highest praise for his archrival was—I paraphrase— "Smyslov had a very strong algorithm in the 1950s.")

But humans play chess with a clock, and in human-vs.-human play, we don't have time to figure everything out. (We try to do that in the post-mortem, and then at home, and after that we feed our analysis to the computer to check our results.)  So the intuition of a Capablanca, Kramnik, or Carlsen is a very good thing for human players to have.

How to translate these insights into studying chess and teaching chess? Algorithms are essential in pawn endings, but knowing general principles about the outside passed pawn, protected passed pawn, and the opposition are pretty darn important, too.  And knowing the general principles of rook endings (defending king belongs on the short side, checking distance, recognizing the preconditions for a successful frontal defense) is important, but sometimes you gotta calculate, too.

Thinking: Fast and Slow is strongly recommended reading for folks in business and the social sciences. It might even be tangentially useful to chess players, though I'm not sure how....