Chess Vision and Decision-Making — Lessons from Jonathan Rowson

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Chess Vision and Decision-Making — Lessons from Jonathan Rowson

A murky process

Human thinking is a murky affair. This is true even for chess grandmasters, says Jonathan Rowson in The Seven Deadly Chess Sins. Thinking in chess, after all, consists of many things. With all the bounded rationality they can muster, players must generate ideas, search for moves, compare alternatives, recall patterns, evaluate positions, develop plans, and so on. So what exactly does it mean to think?

“Most chess-players”, Rowson suspects, “have no particular way of thinking.” In fact, they “think rather chaotically and inefficiently or are blinkered by one model of thinking, [perhaps] taught to them by a teacher… [or] book.” Indeed, there is so much going on inside those tiny brains of ours that we are sometimes oblivious to the process. But if we’re to improve on the chessboard and in life, we have to realize first, Rowson writes, “that ‘thinking’ means so many different things.” Only then can we wade through the mud in our minds to see what is going on.

Chess vision

Experiments by Adriaan de Groot, and later by W.G. Chase and H.A. Simon, found differences in the way chess players perceive. Weaker players, they found, tend to think about one or two pieces at any given moment. Strong players, by contrast, tend to think in ‘chunks’ or constellations of positional structures, and the ways in which they coordinate together. As de Groot writes, “the [chess] master doesn’t calculate more than the expert. Rather, he sees more, especially the more important things.” Rowson, a chess grandmaster himself, agrees. In chess, “that [which] distinguishes a strong player from a weak one is ‘vision’ or ‘visualization’.”

As Gerald Abrahams writes in The Chess Mind:

“The most important mental activity in Chess is vision, by which is meant the unforced intuition of possibilities by the mind’s eye. A capacity for apprehension of this type, the capacity of the mind for making a path through time and complexity, is the essence and the moving edge of any intellectual process.”

Gerald Abrahams. (1960). The Chess Mind. 

Chunking and history

Moreover, Rowson says that “vision is based upon chess experience.” Chunking is a product of “familiar patterns” and “personal history”. After all, our ability to contextualize and assess a new complex position must come from somewhere. And that somewhere depends in part on the principles, positions, and patterns we’ve cultivated over our lifetime. It follows that the sequencing of information can also affect the way we think. This is true not only of the short-run as a game unfolds, but also over the long-run as we assimilate knowledge into our brains.

A parallel can be drawn to the development of science. It is harder, for example, to make the conceptual leap from religious orthodoxy to Newtonian mechanics and Darwinian evolution than to leap from either branches of science to their respective progenies in general relativity and the modern synthesis. The former requires people to relinquish the building blocks from which their entire worldview and mental models are based. Whether it is easy to learn and unlearn depends a lot on your starting point and personal history.

Emotional content

More than that, Rowson says it is impossible even for chess grandmasters to think with absolute objectivity. Whether we like it or not, our pattern recognition software is intertwined with our emotions, aspirations, and preconceptions. A whole swath of feelings, from fear to regret to ego to hubris, influence how we find, evaluate, and compare candidate moves. Sure, we can control them to some extent. But it is naive to believe that we can extricate them completely. Rowson himself does not believe that there is an easy escape from this. It is another reminder that thinking is murky. A complex cocktail of analysis, history, personality, and emotions that predisposes us to particular positions and structures. “The only solution for this”, he suggests, “is self-control”—to take “a macroscopic perspective before diving into any microlines.”

Darwinian evaluation

But while thinking is nebulous and nonlinear, the manner in which we assimilate patterns is rather Darwinian-like. As Rowson explains, chess players can only attain mastery through thousands upon thousands of games in the “chess jungle”. Through experience and training, players are forever adapting—consciously and unconsciously adding and removing parts to their game and personality. As in nature and economics, chess competition acts as an unforgiving selection mechanism. Winning strategies and structures are refined, imitated, modified, and replicated across the wider community, while countervailing strategies and novel variations are developed elsewhere. In this way, the fuzzy thinking we speak of is interwoven with the thinking of our contemporaries and predecessors. It is an organic ensemble that players create and evolve together.

Assimilating unconscious structures

If you agree with our metaphorical assessment of thinking in chess, then “the key to improving”, Rowson suggests, “is to have many different ways of thinking.” After all, if we’ve never encountered a relatable class of problems in our life, we’re less likely to find good solutions, especially when we’re under time pressure. Worst still, we risk overreach—contorting ill-fitting concepts to the problem at hand. As Abraham Maslow says, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.” To wade through complexity, we must assimilate a variety of patterns and mental models. Adaptability and flexibility is key.

As Rowson puts it:

“It seems to me that the best thing to do is just to have lots of different perspectives and look for good moves rather than rely on any theoretical model to do your thinking for you.”

Jonathan Rowson. (2001). The Seven Deadly Chess Sins.

Poison patterns and positional sketches

Of course, we have to beware of what Rowson calls “a poisoned pattern.” This is the tendency to mindlessly apply rules and patterns without understanding. As Abraham Luchins warns in the Mechanization in Problem Solving, “habituation creates a mechanized state of mind, a blind attitude towards problems; one does not look at the problem on its own merits but is led by a mechanical application of a used method.” In chess, this is often manifested in a blind adherence to rules like “bishops are better than knights in open positions.” At higher levels, chess students may wrongly assume that their position is winning because they’ve won similar structures before. They fail to take into account the subtle differences that change everything. Every rule and pattern, we must remember, tends to come with a litany of exceptions and variations.

To fend against poisoned patterns, Rowson offers two tips: “guess more often” and “positional sketches”. Guessing enables us to refine our intuition, and to reveal hidden novelties or subtleties inside particular positional structures. On the other hand, positional sketches—which Rowsons says “were instrumental in [his] passage from International Master to Grand Master”—“involves the sketching of instructive positions on a card.” The goal is to make personal sense of the patterns that you’re incorporating into your knowhow. An expansive warehouse of information is no use to us if we are unable to incorporate them into new environments. Here, the distinction between mindless recall and adaptive application is crucial.

Talk to them and surprise yourself

Stranger yet, Rowson encourages us to “talk with our pieces.” Have a chat with the knight or rook or the bishop. Learn their aspirations and discover where they want to be, he suggests. But before you call Rowson crazy, try to see the rationality in such an exercise. The goal, after all, is to break out of our habituations to see the board more fully. 

Books on chess, sports, and other forms of competition often talk about the element of surprise—that the path to victory lies in novelty and catching your opponent off guard. The reality is, however, that our opponents are probably more similar to us than they are dissimilar. So if we wish to surprise our opponents, we may have to surprise ourselves first. Talking to our pieces is one such idea. But what we’re looking for, Rowson observes, are asymmetries, absurdities, amusement, and paradoxes inside our position. That which feels surprising or counterintuitive to us may feel the same for our opponents too.

The aliens who watch us play

Perhaps then, in the end, through a battle of wits, we might get to learn a thing or two about ourselves and this murky unbounded system we call thinking. But all of it is ultimately a rather strange endeavor. As Rowson muses, if aliens were to study us from afar, they might find the entire affair perplexing. What would they make of the two minds hunched over a checkered-board and thirty-two wooden pieces? Sapiens, with their squishy brains, over the course of many hours, takes turns, moving their tiny figurines from square to square. The board thins out as pieces come off. Then, just when the joint-venture looks over, they come back the next day to try again. Sure, we can try to rationalize it all we want. But it does not make the activity any less peculiar. Perhaps what we want to say about chess, then, is that there is something inherently delightful about sitting and thinking together.

Sources and further reading

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