A 60 second search found this behind a paywall: William G Chase and Herbert A Simon. 1973. Perception in chess. Cognitive psychology 4(1):55–81. The abstract sounds right, but there were only three subjects in the study.
-- rec -- On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 6:21 AM David Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: > Just getting to this one, days late…. > > On Nov 15, 2023, at 8:58 AM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: > > I have not (yet) read this critically, the introduction just tweaked my > (confirmation biased) interests: > > https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain.html > <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fmedicalxpress.com%2fnews%2f2023-11-brain.html&c=E,1,yAfT9hJo7uUSxtZmctr_nLsgLeaHFbiw3c00tgPiz-JIVENC_gRTqM1ZLoAQ6-QyWMJG6xRzx9-DhBbc_r7ZwTXSXHCoWZFQ3taU76Zkp-0V&typo=1> > > Here is one of several research stories that Elwyn Berlekamp told to me > during a visit to SFI many years ago in which I was his host (the closest I > will ever come to the experience of those who hosted Erdos). > > Elwyn was one of the principles of the MSRI research into mathematical > analysis of combinatorial games. > > Here was one project: > > Subjects are shown a chessboard with pieces on it, for a short time, after > which the board is cleared (remember Searching for Bobby Fisher: “Here; > I’ll help you”), and the subject is asked to reconstruct the piece > locations. > > The subjects were in two categories: high-level chess players, and > ordinary people who don’t really play seriously, though perhaps they > understand the rules of the game. > > I will recount to you the outcomes as they were told to me. I have not > gone back to original sources so I don’t know if some stylization was added > to “sharpen the edges” of the picture. > > 1. For pieces placed on a board by computer-random number generators, the > experts and the novices were not much different in speed or reliability of > replacing pieces. > > 2. When the arrangements were not randomly generated, but rather taken > from various stages in the play of games by high-level players, suddenly a > big gap opened up. The novices did about the same as they had done for > randomly placed pieces at similar sparseness etc. The experts got much > faster and more reliable. > > The experimenters, of course, wanted to say something mechanistic about > why. To do this they put eye-trackers on the subjects, to find out what > they were looking at when presented with the blankened board and asked to > rebuild. So: what did the experts look at first? This is where the > tension of the joke is set up, to prepare for the punchline. > > 3. The place the experts looked first was at the “next good move” from > what had been the position, and they then backfilled the pieces in the > positions that had made it the next good move. > > > I find this story delightful. If I were less lazy and really needed it > for anything, maybe I would do the work to find out how reliable it is. > > Eric > > > > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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