Temposchlucker

What color do these socks have? I have done a lot of research the past days about the working of the human (and rat-) memory. That convinced me of the following: We amateurs must indeed fill our procedural memory with patterns. This has to be done by repetition. No matter how a grandmaster has done this in his youth. Scientists admit that they have no idea why the results of the study of a grandmaster are comitted to LTM while that of amateurs are not. So we are on our own here. I have reviewed all my old sessions at CTS during the past week. I use the "method J'adoube" for revision. In the mean time I did research on a hierarchy in patterns. I have not yet results that I can formulate, but it is a very interesting area. I (never start with "I" for the third time, that's impolite) noticed a strange effect during the revision of problems. A problem at CTS starts with 6 seconds silence, then the computer does a move, then 3 seconds silence again and then my cl...

Please all give a warm welcome to our newest Knight SamuraiPawn who chops his way thru CT-art! May he be able to find matching socks in the dark! I've been two days down due to food poisoning. Still a little feverish, but I can hang behind my computer again at least. It's nice to see how a discussion among the CTS-users is evolving. Sciurus asks if repetition is a neccessity for learning pattern recognition , since grandmasters in the past became grandmaster without computers and without such repetitions. I like this kind of basic questions which can put everything topsy turvy. I have of course a certain amount of repetitions under the belt, but that's no reason for not asking these kind of questions. On the contrary. Where does the idea of repetition come from? Cognitive rechearchers asked themselves how many patterns a grandmaster had stored in his LTM. Based on the amount of hours a typical expert needs to spend to become an expert in any area (=grandmaster in chess), ...

From time to time, when I feel like a good laugh, I go to a chessforum and read about what they say about DLM and his system. For years on end they say the same things. Some think it would work miracles IF they would do it, without ever getting the impuls to actually start, others thinks it is worse than useless. What keeps surprising me is that they are content with an OPINION. A sort of opinion-fetishism. What's the use of an opinion? I never need one! Just try it and see for yourself. Very funny were the posts of a person who claimed that it was impossible to follow the program because it consumes so much time. When I looked at his profile, he had more than 2300 entries posted the past few years! What everybody seems to agree about, is that you have to have a "balanced approach" to chess. This is the single most heard critic against a heavy tactical study program. There's nobody who can deny a balanced approach. But you have to see things in the right perspective. ...

60,000 done at CTS, 10,000 to go. If I should stop at 70,000, that is. But since things are going very well at CTS, I want to continue. I reached a new all time high of 1618. Date Rating avg Rating max Gain #probs #probs/pt start 1470 july 2 1540 1564 70 50,000 570 aug 3 1580 1616 40 56,529 163 aug 20 1590 1618 10 60,000 347 There is continuous growth.

I'm from an old school that doesn't allow me to have a big mouth when I have no results. I know, in these modern times that is rather old fashioned, but you can't learn an old dog new tricks. So that is why I blog so little lately. But we can always do some crude calculations. The table below is derived from a bellcurve at CTS giving the rating distribution of the problemset. The first column is your rating. The second column tells you how much problems you have to commit to your long term memory to gain another 50 ratingpoints. The third column indicates the amount of problems you have to commit for 1 ratingpoint increase at CTS. Rating #probs to commit #probs per rtg.point 1600 1700 34 1650 1500 30 1700 1500 30 1750 1200 24 1800 1000 20 1850 800 16 1900 700 14 1950 500 10 2000 500 10 2050 300 6 ...

Yesterday prof. Adriaan de Groot passed away at an age of 91. His famous doctoral dissertation about pattern recognition in chess was the main inspiration why I started with the circles. May he rest in peace. I'm working my ass off at CTS, but it is difficult to blog about that. There are enough other things to blog about, but I don't do that since it takes too much time. Chessclub is still on vacation.

Susan Polgar had a poll on her blog . She asked "Which part of your chess game needs the most work?" Much to my surprise I was the only one from fifteen who answered "endgames". There clearly is a mental barrier in people which makes them to neglect endgames. I stumbled for the umphteenth time over this barrier. But today I restarted the study of endgames again. I use PCT, and I do only the endgame modules. I continue my work on CTS ofcourse, aiming at 200 problems a day. CTS 56700 done Avg rating 1580 Max rating 1616 PCT end mod-01