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| Father - son chess is fun also! |
Learning Chess at Forty
By Tom Vanderbuilt, From
The Week,
September 30, 2016
My 4-year-old daughter and I were deep in a game of checkers one day about
three years ago when her eye drifted to a nearby table. There, a
black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures, like horses
and castles. "What's that?" she asked. "Chess," I replied.
"Can we play?" she asked. I nodded absently.
There was just one problem: I didn't know how. I dimly remembered having
learned the basic moves in elementary school, but it never stuck. This fact
vaguely haunted me through my life; idle chessboards in hotel lobbies or
puzzles in weekend newspaper supplements teased me like reproachful riddles.
And so I decided I would learn, if only so I could teach my daughter. The
basic moves were easy enough to pick up. But it soon became apparent, however,
that I had no concept of the larger strategy. The chess literature was
dauntingly huge, and achingly specific, with several-hundred-page tomes devoted
to unpacking single openings.
So, time-starved and not wanting to curse my daughter with my ill-formed
knowledge, I hired a coach to teach us both.
It wasn't long before it struck me that chess seemed to be a game for the
young. When my daughter began doing scholastic tournaments, I would chat up
other parents and ask whether they played — usually the reply was an apologetic
shrug and a smile. I would explain that I, too, was learning to play, and the
resulting tone was cheerily patronizing: Good luck with that! Reading about an
international tournament, I was struck by a suggestion that a grandmaster had
passed his peak. He was in his 30s. We are used to athletes being talked about
in this way. But a mind game like chess?
Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were
embarking on a sort of cognitive experiment. We were two novices, attempting to
learn a new skill, essentially beginning from the same point but separated by
some four decades of life. I had been the expert to that point in her life — in
knowing what words meant, or how to ride a bike — but now we were on a
curiously equal footing. Or so I thought.
I began to regularly play online, do puzzles, and even leafed through books
like
Bent Larsen's Best Games. I seemed to be doing better with the
game, if only because I was more serious about it. When we played, she would
sometimes flag in her concentration, and to keep her spirits up, I would commit
disastrous blunders. In the context of the larger chess world, I was a patzer —
a hopelessly bumbling novice — but around my house, at least, I felt like a
benevolently sage elder statesman.
And then my daughter began beating me.
The age question
is hoary in chess. Indeed, one of the
earliest discussions of the now universal player ranking system called the Elo
rating (named for its inventor, Arpad Elo) was in a 1965 article in
The
Journal of Gerontology. Using his novel statistical analysis, Elo found
that the peak age for master-level chess performance was around 36, with a
slow, steady decline after that.
That was then. Today, chess is only getting younger. Neil Charness, a
professor of psychology at Florida State University, has long studied the
question of chess and performance. "Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster at
age 15," he says. "Then Judit Polgar beat his record." And then
Sergey Karjakin beat Polgar, by doing it in 2002 at age 12. "The record of
the youngest age to achieve grandmaster status," Charness tells me,
"keeps getting beat." Magnus Carlsen, the world's current top-ranked
player, was the youngest player to reach No. 1, at age 19. Charness notes that
"younger players are getting skilled faster than they used to,"
thanks, in part, to better tools and better feedback: Sophisticated computer
engines, databases, the ability to play players of any level at any time of the
day.
Chess — which has been dubbed the "fruit fly" of cognitive
psychology — seems a tool that is purpose-built to show the deficits of an
aging brain. The psychologist Timothy Salthouse has noted that cognitive tests
on speed, reasoning, and memory show age-related declines that are "fairly
large," "linear," and, most alarming to me, "clearly
apparent before age 50." And there are clear consequences on the
chessboard. In one study, Charness had players of a variety of skills try to
assess when a check was threatened in a match. The more skilled the player, the
quicker they were able to do this, as if it were a perceptual judgment,
essentially by pattern recognition stored up from previous matches. But no
matter what the skill level, the older a player was, the slower they were to
spot the threat of a check.
As we get older, there is one thing at which we get worse: being a novice.
Charness, in one study, had subjects of various ages learn a novel
word-processing application; some were experienced with similar programs,
others were novices. The older the novice, the longer it took them to learn.
"If you're talking about two novices," Charness said, when I asked
him about my daughter, me, and chess, "your daughter would probably pick
things up about twice as fast as you could." My daughter is, in effect,
learning chess like a first language, whereas I am learning it like a second
language.
Her brain, like a chessboard at the beginning of a game, is still full of
infinite possibility, bristling with countless synapses that have yet to be
"pruned." As the neuroscientist Peter Huttenlocher noted in
Brain
Research, a 7-year-old, like my daughter is today, has a brain that is
almost fully formed but has a "synaptic density" some 36 percent
higher than the adult mean. She is, in a sense, still making sense of the
world, and as she does, those synapses are closed — like emptying one's hard
drive of little-used applications in order to help optimize overall
performance.
What was happening in my brain-as-chessboard, by contrast, seemed more like
a cagey, defensive middle-game battle, in which I was trying to hold on to
pieces in the face of a closing denouement.
Denise Park, the director of research at the University of Texas Center for
Vital Longevity, described what was happening to me in unsettling terms.
"As you get older, you actually see clear degradation of the brain, even
in healthy people. Your frontal cortex gets smaller, your hippocampus — the
seat of the memory — shrinks." My brain volume is atrophying annually, my
cortical thickness dropping some 0.5 percent a year.
It was my daughter's sense of effortlessness that got to me. Where I would
carefully ponder the board, she would sweep in with lightning moves. Where I
would carefully stick to the scripts I had been taught — "a knight on the
rim is dim" — she seemed to be making things up. After what seemed a
particularly disastrous move, I would try to play coach for a moment, and ask,
"Are you sure that's what you want to do?" She would shrug. I would
feel a momentary shiver of pity and frustration; "It's not sticking,"
I would think. And then she would deliver some punishing pin on the queen, or a
deft back rank attack I had somehow overlooked.
I would sometimes wander into the room when Coach Simon was there, watching
him present her with some puzzle on the board. I would struggle toward some
solution, feeling smug, only to find I had completely botched it. My daughter,
meanwhile, swiftly moved the right piece into position. He would shoot me a
look, beaming at her precociousness.
I was proud, I was frustrated. There are surely fewer greater parental
satisfactions than to see one's progeny doing well at something. But there is
an altogether different feeling — a sobering slap of pathos, a vague sense of
alarm that some genie has been let out of a bottle — when they exceed you on
the same task.
When a person who still cannot always successfully tie her own shoes, who
has yet to do long division, can beat me at the royal game. She was Deep Blue,
and I was the human race, being slowly outmoded.
I resisted the
idea that I was just too old. I was
stubbornly proud, competitive, but also curious. Was it just age, or was my
daughter an inherently better player?
I returned to the experts for reassurance. Park told me I was most likely at
the peak of my cognitive power. For all my daughter's seemingly spritely
processing power, I had higher-order capacities I could draw upon. "If
you're younger, you can process information super-fast," she told me,
"but you may not know what to do with that information as you process
it."
There are, I learned, two forms of intelligence: "fluid" and
"crystallized." Fluid intelligence is, basically, being able to think
on one's feet, to solve new problems. Crystallized intelligence is what a
person already knows — wisdom, memories, metacognition. Even if I was only
learning chess for the first time, I had a lifetime of play behind me. Fluid
intelligence is generally seen to favor the young, with the crystallized variety
rewarded by age (though there are many exceptions). Old mathematicians doing
their best work are as rare as young Supreme Court justices. Chess, especially
at the top levels, can encompass both fluid and crystallized intelligence — one
needs the firepower to quickly think through a novel position, but it also
helps to draw upon a deep reservoir of past games (grandmasters like Carlsen
can often identify a historical game with a glimpse at a single position).
Of course, my daughter, like most children her age, has not memorized a huge
library of games; nor does she consciously think in terms of higher-level
strategy. She seems to play with some brute instinct, pure fluid intelligence.
As Daniel King, a London-based retired professional chess player who now
analyzes and commentates chess matches, tells me, "Children just kind of
go for it — that kind of confidence can be very disconcerting for the
opponent."
When I asked Coach Simon about the differences he sees in trying to teach
beginner children and beginner adults, he said, "Adults need to explain to
themselves why they play what they play. Kids don't do that. It's like with
languages. Beginner adults learn the rules of grammar and pronunciation, and
use those to put sentences together. Little kids learn languages by
talking."
Here was my opening. I would counter her fluidity with my storehouses of
crystallized intelligence. I was probably never going to be as speedily
instinctual as she was. But I could, I thought, go deeper. I could get
strategic. I began to watch Daniel King's analysis of top-level matches on
YouTube. I could simply put in more effort.
The house took on a war-room atmosphere. Then, months into her winning
streak, I beat my daughter at chess twice in a row. Even if I had to work twice
as hard to do it.
I learned that, as good as my daughter is at launching aggressive attacks,
at almost clinically probing my weaknesses, she has a blind spot: what I am
doing. She played, in those games, as if I were just some lower-level chess
engine making haplessly random moves. Indeed, when I made my moves, her eyes
would often drift elsewhere — as if what I was doing was almost inconsequential
to the larger game. She failed to spot that my seemingly minor, unthreatening
moves were all part of a larger strategic purpose. Against her onrushing
fluidity, I was laying in a minefield of crystallized traps.
It was, in the end, a Pyrrhic victory. Not only has she since beaten me many
times, but there was the look in her eyes as I checkmated her a second time. For
whatever the games had taught me about brains young and old, about the
different ways we learn and deploy our cognitive resources, they also taught me
that the only thing harder than losing to your daughter in chess is winning
against her.
