comprised four people and several computers. The captain and primary decision maker was Anson Williams, a British engineer with no official chess rating. His teammate, Nelson Hernandez, told me, “What people don’t understand is that freestyle involves an integrated set of skills that in some cases have nothing to do with playing chess.” In traditional chess, Williams was probably at the level of a decent amateur. But he was well versed in computers and adept at integrating streaming information for strategy decisions. As a teenager, he had been outstanding at the video game Command & Conquer, known as a “real time strategy” game because players move simultaneously. In freestyle chess, he had to consider advice from teammates and various chess programs and then very quickly direct the computers to examine particular possibilities in more depth. He was like an executive with a team of mega-grandmaster tactical advisers, deciding whose advice to probe more deeply and ultimately whose to heed. He played each game cautiously, expecting a draw, but trying to set up situations that could lull an opponent into a mistake.
In the end, Kasparov did figure out a way to beat the computer: by outsourcing tactics, the part of human expertise that is most easily replaced, the part that he and the Polgar prodigies spent years honing.
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• • •
In 2007, National Geographic TV gave Susan Polgar a test. They sat her at a sidewalk table in the middle of a leafy block of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, in front of a cleared chessboard. New Yorkers in jeans and fall jackets went about their jaywalking business as a white truck bearing a large diagram of a chessboard with twenty-eight pieces in midgame play took a left turn onto Thompson Street, past the deli, and past Susan Polgar. She glanced at the diagram as the truck drove by, and then perfectly re-created it on the board in front of her. The show was reprising a series of famous chess experiments that pulled back the curtain on kind-learning-environment skills.
The first took place in the 1940s, when Dutch chess master and psychologist Adriaan de Groot flashed midgame chessboards in front of players of different ability levels, and then asked them to re-create the boards as well as they could. A grandmaster repeatedly re-created the entire board after seeing it for only three seconds. A master-level player managed that half as often as the grandmaster. A lesser, city champion player and an average club player were never able to re-create the board accurately. Just like Susan Polgar, grandmasters seemed to have photographic memories.
After Susan succeeded in her first test, National Geographic TV turned the truck around to show the other side, which had a diagram with pieces placed at random. When Susan saw that side, even though there were fewer pieces, she could barely re-create anything at all.
That test reenacted an experiment from 1973, in which two Carnegie Mellon University psychologists, William G. Chase and soon-to-be Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, repeated the De Groot exercise, but added a wrinkle. This time, the chess players were also given boards with the pieces in an arrangement that would never actually occur in a game. Suddenly, the experts performed just like the lesser players. The grandmasters never had photographic memories after all. Through repetitive study of game patterns, they had learned to do what Chase and Simon called “chunking.” Rather than struggling to remember the location of every individual pawn, bishop, and rook, the brains of elite players grouped pieces into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on familiar patterns. Those patterns allow expert players to immediately assess the situation based on experience, which is why Garry Kasparov told me that grandmasters usually know their move within seconds. For Susan Polgar, when the van drove by the first time, the diagram was not twenty-eight items, but five different meaningful chunks that indicated how the game was progressing.
Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw. The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear.
We all rely on chunking every day in skills in which we are expert. Take ten seconds and try to memorize as many of these twenty words as