by Jim Kerrigan

Created on: December 30, 2009

Chess is a mental exercise; anything which exercises something is developing the object it exercises. Chess develops the mind and can therefore not be a waste of time or intelligence. Now I would concede that there is a level of intelligence needed to benefit from chess but the only thing wasted on chess is indifference or simplemindedness.

Intelligence can be measured many ways by many means everything from reputation to I.Q. can be invoked as a measure of intelligence. But as a practical matter intelligence for living is developed beyond what one is born with. It is not only the memory of past successes and failures but it is also the seat of abstraction, deduction and intuition.

First abstraction, the art to chess is to think several moves ahead. This is easily qualified as one looks to computer programs designed to play chess. Their level of challenge is determined by setting how many moves ahead the program looks. One can gage one’s own growth within the game by being competitive with the program at higher and higher settings. It follow that in order to keep up with the computer the human player has to abstract the possible position of the pieces on the board more and more moves ahead. It is impossible to become a master of chess without this developed capacity of abstraction.

Second deduction, this deals with the potential consequences of all those contemplated moves ahead. Deduction makes the choice between the possible moves by evaluating the potential consequences of the possible next moves. Deduction is where we start to pull even with the computer because the computer has no emotion and is pure deduction.

Third intuition, intuition is developed by playing different people not machines. As machines can be trusted to do pure deduction human opponents carry with them their emotions and ability to bluff or produce faints (false aggression to distract you from their objective and sacrifice (the deliberate loss of a piece to distract from the objective).

In life we will have judgments to make; some will be based on pure deduction others from seeing a problem that hasn’t occurred yet – abstraction. Yet a third group that comes from the diplomacy and fencing if you will with the expectations and standards of others - intuition.

Chess gives you nothing you do not already have; however, it develops what you have to a higher level and in that way improves your quality of judgment and discernment. In this regard it cannot be called a waste of time or intelligence though those who cannot or do not want to grasp these higher brain functions may see it as such.   

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