From: Tennessee Leeuwenburg (tennessee@tennessee.id.au)
Date: Mon Mar 14 2005 - 23:35:58 MST
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spike wrote:
|> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky ...quite absurd to suppose that a lone
|> five-year-old could face down full
|
| adult
|
|> intelligences and win...
|
|
|
| Chess players get this if they start very young and have talent.
| If a sharp 8 year old can spank all the adults he knows, even when
| they get serious and really *try* to beat him, the experience has a
| profound impact on the mind of the child, do let me assure you. In
| my case, at age 8 the only person I couldn't beat consistently was
| my father.
|
| This was all great fun until I was at the club one evening and was
| spanked by the local elementary school whiz.
Chess sequences can be learned - an experienced player will always
beat an inexperienced player of equal skill.
Chess games require excellent visualisation, and dare I say it,
Chesstelligence. It's not just raw intelligence, but also the mindset
for paying attention to detail, imagining move sequences,
understanding position etc. A higher ranked player will always beat a
lower ranked player.
Frankly, most adults aren't very good at chess. It's easy to beat them
not because you are smart, but because they are not actually good
chess players. Chess has simple rules, and a fascinated child will
beat an adult who only plays once a year.
There are child prodigies in many areas, but that is not a good
counter-argument to the principle that 5-year old braniacs can go
around beating adult intelligences with ease.
Cheers,
- -T
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