Only 1% of the world’s chess grandmasters are women. This underrepresentation is unlikely to be caused by discrimination, because chess ratings objectively reflect competitive results. Using data on the ratings of more than 250,000 tournament players over 13 years, we investigated several potential explanations for the male domination of elite chess. We found that (a) the ratings of men are hig...

The reported research extends classic findings that after briefly viewing structured, but not random, chess positions, chess masters reproduce these positions much more accurately than less-skilled players. Using a combination of the gaze-contingent window paradigm and the change blindness flicker paradigm, we documented dramatically larger visual spans for experts while processing structured, ...

There are millions of chess players around the world that play chess on websites like chess.com.1 According to chess.com,1 there are 600 Million chess-players worldwide, and more than 20 Million members on chess.com1 that play up to 1 Million games per day, and there are 360.000 tournament players and 1594 grandmasters of which only 2.2% are female, while it is free to play for everyone.1 Today...

We advocate the study of a very straightforward variant of chess. Twilight chess can be defined in a single sentence: pieces may be removed from the board and replaced later. The idea is to consider a variant rather close to standard chess, but at the same time more difficult (due to combinatorial explosion) for computers. The idea is to stimulate research of new programing techniques. there ar...

The relationship between memory representation and transfer of learning is a long standing question in cognitive psychology and education. It has been widely explored in many domains, but has rarely been investigated in relation to the game of chess. In 2001, Marmèche and Didierjean questioned whether concrete elements of chess problems are retained in memory when players build abstract schemas...

Does Mental Productivity Decline with Age? Evidence from Chess Players We use data on international chess tournaments to study the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players tend to leave the game in the earliest phases of their career. When the effects of age on productivity vary with unobserved ability, commonly used fi...

The two experiments presented here study perceptual processes implemented by chess players in situations related to their domain of expertise. The aim was to determine how patterns are perceived as a function of their strategic value when players acquire expertise. In this study, conducted on novice and more experienced players, it is hypothesized that with acquisition of expertise players woul...

A series of recent works studying a database of chronologically sorted chess games-containing 1.4 million games played by humans between 1998 and 2007- have shown that the popularity distribution of chess game-lines follows a Zipf's law, and that time series inferred from the sequences of those game-lines exhibit long-range memory effects. The presence of Zipf's law together with long-range mem...