October 24, 2011

Mastery through practice, but not for all

From the press release:
In one survey of chess players in Argentina, Campitelli and Gobet found that, indeed, practice is important. All of the players that became masters had practice at least 3,000 hours. "That was not surprising," he says. There is a theory in psychology that the more you practice, the better you'll do in areas like sports, music, and chess. "But the thing is, of the people that achieved the master level, there are people that achieved it in 3,000 hours. Other people did, like, 30,000 hours and achieved the same level. And there are even people that practiced more than 30,000 hours and didn't achieve this."

...

Campitelli and Gobet suggest that more intelligent children may be attracted to chess, and use their good reasoning skills to play well, but later they need to practice hard to learn all the strategies and plans that make a good chess player -- and intelligence isn't much help.
Intelligence is definitely necessary for achieving mastery in chess, but one of the most critical components of current practice is having a good memory. Without a substantial knowledge of opening and endgame theory, chess players of higher ability are at a disadvantage against less able but better prepared opponents. This knowledge can only be obtained by diligent study, but having the right hardware helps. But, even in the middle game one needs a good working memory, since one needs to basically do a tree traversal with a lot of redundancy whenever one analyzes variants.

Chess seems like the perfect game to use for analyzing learning and high-performance human brain functioning, as it is entirely rational, and there are literally millions of test subjects around the world.

Current Directions in Psychological Science October 2011 vol. 20 no. 5 280-285

Deliberate Practice Necessary But Not Sufficient

Guillermo Campitelli, Fernand Gobet

Deliberate practice (DP) occurs when an individual intentionally repeats an activity in order to improve performance. The claim of the DP framework is that such behavior is necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance. The proponents of the framework reject evidence that suggests that other variables are also necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance, or they claim that the relationship between those variables and expert performance is mediated by DP. Therefore, the DP framework also implies that DP is sufficient to achieve high levels of expert performance. We test these claims by reviewing studies on chess expertise. We found strong evidence that abundant DP is necessary (but not sufficient) and estimated that the minimum requirement to achieve master level is 3,000 hours of DP. We also review evidence showing that other factors play a role in chess skill: general cognitive abilities, sensitive period, handedness, and season of birth.

Link

3 comments:

Glenn Allen Nolen said...

I started playing chess about five years ago. I play every day on my computer, and I’m not all that great. I suspect it’s a lot like language: start early.

Dienekes said...

Chess, like other long-studied subjects, has an enormous literature, the distilled wisdom of centuries. So, it's not only how much you practice, but _what_ you study.

For example, one could play 100 bishop+knight+king vs. king endgames and never really learn how to win them. Or, he could read how to win them (learn theory), play half a dozen for practice, and then win every single time.

So, people with the same hours of practice achieve different results both because of differences in innate ability, but also because of differences in _what_ they practice.

It is sometimes said that an average player of today could stand their own against masters of the 18th and 19th centuries, not because they are smarter, or because they have practiced more, but simply because they've learned a lot of theory that was simply unknown a hundred years ago.

Pascvaks said...

.."There is a theory in psychology that the more you practice, the better you'll do in areas like sports, music, and chess. 'But the thing is, of the people that achieved the master level, there are people that achieved it in 3,000 hours. Other people did, like, 30,000 hours and achieved the same level. And there are even people that practiced more than 30,000 hours and didn't achieve this.'"

All true. But what I found missing in their accounting was "preference", "desire", "fascination". The champion of "anything" no doubt exhibits the same learning and skill characteristics as the Chess Master, as well as the same drives to become a Master of Whatever; the essential difference is the unique, indivdual, preference - desire- fascination (aka - Drives). Time to master, when ability is equal, often best reflects the varence in the primary drive of desire. True?