The best chess programs have reached the top level players in the human chess world. The so called opening books, which are databases containing thousands of Grandmaster games, have been seen as a big advantage of programs over humans, because the computers do never forget a variation. Interestingly, it is this opening phase, which causes most problems for the computers, not because they do not...

This study introduces the Amsterdam Chess Test (ACT). The ACT measures chess playing proficiency through 5 tasks: a choose-a-move task (comprising two parallel tests), a motivation questionnaire, a predict-a-move task, a verbal knowledge questionnaire, and a recall task. The validity of these tasks was established using external criteria based on the Elo chess rating system. Results from a repr...

1 Introduction " Chess playing makes kids smarter. " " Chess increases mathematical abilities. " " Chess improves academic performance. " Numerous similar claims have been made about the efficacy of using chess to foster education (see, for example, several papers on the USCF site for education). Argentina) offer chess as an optional subject, and some even propose compulsory classes. There is c...

We investigate experts’ ability to assess the difficulty of a mental task for a human. The final aim is to find formalized measures of difficulty that could be used in automated assessment of the difficulty of a task. In experiments with tactical chess problems, the experts’ estimations of difficulty are compared to the statistic-based difficulty ratings on the Chess Tempo website. In an eye tr...

The present study examines the dynamic aspects of perceptual processes in expert chess players. This topic is approached in terms of the anticipation processes carried out by experienced players during the encoding of chess positions. The aim of the first experiment, which used a short-term comparison task, was to stress the role of anticipation, which allows expert players to focus their atten...

Several researchers have noted that human chess players do not perceive a position as a static entity, but as a collection of potential actions. Indeed, it looks as if human chess players are able to follow promising moves without considering all the alternatives. This work studies the possibility of incorporating such capabilities into chess programs. We present a methodology for representing ...

The game of chess has always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries. In the earl...

A widely cited result asserts that experts' superiority over novices in recalling meaningful material from their domain of expertise vanishes when they are confronted with random material. A review of recent chess experiments in which random positions served as control material (presentation time between 3 and 10 sec) shows, however, that strong players generally maintain some superiority over ...