@Cerberus And there's the difficulty of defining what constitutes a thought in the first place. The autonomous nervous system is apparently bigger than the consciously controlled central nervous system, and it can react to the environment too.
@Joonas: You don't need to study; the player just needs to think--it can be mentally exhausting and as frustrating as life itself. Controlling my temper, when i make a stupid mistake, adds to the fatigue. I've never read a chess-book; classic games I have looked at; but any attempt to reproduce them fails when one's opponent will not, conveniently, make the same moves! (Like the Schlieffen Plan: the belligerent countries simply would not do what the plan predicted they would do.).
@tony I don't think it's fair at all to say that to be good in chess you only need to think, not study; that's in gross disagreement with all the data. The top players are well read, and new players progress faster if they read and study in addition to just playing.
Thinking is useful but it's slow. It's better to rely on the accumulated wisdom and experience of past players and build on it than to try and come up with everything anew. The same holds for many kinds of learning.
It's logically appealing to argue that just playing the game and thinking hard will get you anywhere, but that does not seem to be the case.
@Joonas: Patterns? The only patterns I see are things that have happened before; providing a "formula" for winning. Two castles (rooks) versus a king. The temptation is to check the king on his line: fatal mistake, the king can start moving up the board and becomes almost impossible to trap. The first castle goes to the line above the king's: he cannot advance: the second castle, to the king's line...You probably know this one? If chess-champs read the same books doesn't it all cancel out?
@Joonas: Hard-thinking is good training for the mind--like Latin. Maybe I'll think about some chess-study.
@tony It might cancel out, but that doesn't undermine the argument. The point is that those who don't read will be at a serious disadvantage. And of course different readers will get different things out of a book.
Sure, mating the opponent with two rooks is easy. With one rook (and your own king) it's still pretty straightforward.
I haven't studied chess and I have little motivation to do so. I know full well that that is the main thing holding me back in development, but I don't mind. I don't aim high with chess. I hardly aim anywhere.
I've understood that top players see very, very elaborate patterns on the board. Some kind of intuitive pattern analysis is often the cornerstone of effective play, be it chess or football. Exhausting all options by reasoning is unfeasible.
@Joonas: Patterns, a clear diagonal facilitating a queen-bishop coup, don't last long--a constantly-changing picture. I give my old tricks silly names--a queen-knight coup, for example. Top players would laugh--that trick's older than you are!
@Joonas: Chess-players are always modest--I'm bad at this; then, they beat you in five minutes!! If a Russian says, I'm bad at chess., it's a lie!
@tony With chess it's fortunately quantifiable. If I crank up the difficulty setting, I invariably lose to my phone. I've never played in a tournament. I certainly have some ability, but it shouldn't be very hard to find someone to beat me in that game.
I mean patterns in a much more elaborate ways, not just bishops in their fixed colors and the like. A pattern need not be anything simple.
@JoonasIlmavirta I always thought (and have evidence to back it up) that high spatial visualization helped in chess, and you being a mathematician in topography ought to be high spatial. But I suppose there are other traits that lend itself to chess, and as you said, of course it's not all intuition, but studying strategies and becoming familiar with which setups lead to checkmates.
@cmw I'm under the same impression. Early and late game are often done by the book, but middle game is hard and humanely incalculable. Visualization of some kind and recognition of patterns, many of which transcend what is openly on the board, is certainly a great asset to a prospective player.
I certainly do a lot of spatial thought for work. And it even seems that my geometric intuition into some things is a strength even among mathematicians in the same field. I'm certainly not great and strong in all aspects, but I seem to be capable of some unusual kind of abstract visualization.
@JoonasIlmavirta We have devised these tests at work that measure it. It is indeed hard to describe, because it appears to be such a fundamental part of the brain.
@cmw In research I often need to take up such an abstract visual idea, share it with a collaborator, and run with it together. That level of sharing is hard, at least to me.
@cmw latin.stackexchange.com/a/16009/9285 in this answer, could you say VACCINATUM FUI? Also, I can't really find a dictionary with that word other than referring to cow. Could it be neutral noun?
@JohhanSantana Do you mean for "I've been vaccinated"? Latin would do that with the perfect tense: vaccinatus sum. The gender of the participle has to match the gender of the vaccinated person or thing.
I'm not sure if it's in dictionaries, but @cmw does a good job explaining why it makes sense as a Latin word. It could be seen literally as "to make related to cows", and that's not a bad summary of the original idea of vaccination.
Hi there. Do you know by any chance of a Latin translation of The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete? It's a central prayer in the Orthodox Church and available in Greek, English, etc but have not yet found a Latin translation. Any ideas?
