Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world’s leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game. He found that although experts–the class just below master–did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones
Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.
Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: “The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory.”
Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player’s progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.
Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. L�szl� Polg�r, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters–the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polg�r, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.
I was just upgrading WordPress and noticed I haven’t said much in a while! Not for lack of anything going on, but it’s mostly been personal stuff and work stuff. Seeing as this is already a meta post, I’ll summarize for those following my stream that care (hello, facebook).
Oh yeah. So was I. The current version of Adobe Flash for Linux (9.0.124 for the intrepid) breaks as soon as you load the myspace music player. If you’re any kind of music fan, that kinda ruins 50% of new music availability. I got agitated enough to do something about it today, here’s how i installed the new flash 10 beta and fixed the issue.
I spent a good chunk of the night reading the transcript of The Fog of War which I got from a post on Ben Fry’s blog which I was reading because Zero informed me Ben Fry dropped some serious Glagolitic Capital Spidery Ha. It’s the wisdom of Robert McNamara from being involved in WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. If you believe that failure is the best chance to learn, this is a chance to read about insight gained from probably the biggest failures in the past century; the atomic bombing of Japan (after already essentially decimating them by firebombing their cities), the willingness to lose everything in atomic war, and the inability to understand the central motivations of what was essentially a civil war. McNamara gives the following lessons with amazing historic perspective:
Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self.
Lesson #4: Maximize Efficiency.
Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Lesson #6: Get the data.
Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Please see exhibit A, Episode 3 of Oddistry, a video blog produced in part by my pal Chadrick who is evidently Valleywag’s mascot. As if I didn’t have enough ego gratification.
I just built my own computer, and I’ve been planning a writeup, but I’m still doing research because this went so well that I am planning on rebuilding my main server as well now. I decided on a low-wattage AMD CPU (the 45W BE-2400) so I could run fanless, and it was the best decision I made. I decided to look in against the performance of the Core 2 Duo E6600, which has become somewhat of a standard. The performance of the E6600 beats the BE-2400 but the BE-2400 is a $90 part, and as I suspected you get a lot more bang for the buck as it seems you do with all AMD CPUs right now. How is AMD allegedly doing so poorly if it’s satisfying customers with great value like this?
I use ubuntu (now kubuntu, whatevs) and had the little network manager applet go AWOL on me - it was stuck with “manual configuration” and wouldn’t do its magic for me. Now, I’ve had to write my own nastiness for ifup/down scripts before, so I could cope, but it sucked. I have looked around, but only recently found a page with the solution to the problem. Life is tastes better now.
these people know. If you live in CA they’ll tell you to go to the state info page which points you to Earth911 which takes your zip code and tells you to go to some local place. In the end it just tells me to go to Cole Hardware in the haight, which is exactly what a pal told me. LMAO@me.
Hey folks! If you’re a unix nerd like me, you probably use rsync for everything. Unfortunately I learned today that if you do rsync -vaP --delete source dest you may not have sync’d files. Why? Because that only uses the timestamp.
Yeah.
Anyhow, rsync -c is what you want. This does a checksum everytime regardless of timestamp. A word of caution though: it takes forever. However, my 80GB cache of corrupted MP3s are thanking me.
If you are in the USA and have Comcast high speed internet, you may have had to call them on certain occasions. If so, you are familiar with their particular brand of pain. I’ve had 2 run ins with them lately, one good and one bad.
So it’s the holidays, and cards pour in. My roommate has “family members” who like to “inappropriately” quote things in cards. (ie: with “love” to you).
What a surreal existentialist post-modern urban masterpiece. If the bout of pretension in the last sentence didn’t knock you unconscious, or if you generally like creepy shit, check out Terminus:
One of my biggest gripes with Getting Things Done since I started trying to heed its sage wisdom in 2004 was once you make these lists, they are your new psychic hell. I have been experiencing that for a while now. Basically, you need to go through your inbox one item at a time and decide to do it if it takes less than 2 minutes, defer it, or delegate it. Delegation doesn’t really happen that often for personal lists, so you have a huge pile of “deferred” - a bunch of stuff that isn’t in your inbox because you’ve already looked at it, but you haven’t done it because it takes more than 2 minutes.
