On knife's edge. Stay sharp!
In the previous post I elaborated on my reasoning process which brought me some new hypotheses. It's time to focus on the core of the story. What do we have?
A simple motorskill can be learned for life by repeating it just 7-15 times. The reason why we often need 20 hours or more, or 2500 repetitions or more, is because we then are talking about a compound complex motorskill which is composed of multiple simple subtasks. Every subtask takes 7-15 repetitions. In the previous post I gave an example of how singing of the right pitch is composed by hundred or more subtasks, each taking 7-15 repetitions. Everytime when precision is needed you can expect that.
An example of a simple subtask in chess is: occupy an open file with a rook. If you repeat that 7-15 times with full attention, it will become a habit for life.
There is a situation that 7-15 repetitions don't work. That is the case when you do those repetitions on the automatic pilot. On automatic pilot there is no consciousness of sufficient intensity. When there is unsufficient attention the transformation of knowledge into procedural memory doesn't work. You are left with the knowledge alone and you become a scholar, who knows how things should be done but lacks the skill to do it.
I will give an example of failing transformation. In our choir we always make the same mistakes. For instance we sing the vocals in a bad way. Margriet has corrected us at least a hundred times for this mistake. Yet we keep making the same mistake over and over again. Why is that?
Margriet acts as the active force while we as choirmembers let it come over us in a passive way. We react on autopilot. The only way to break through this barrier is when the choirmembers themselves decide to actively work on the problem.
If the transformation from knowledge into habits fails because of lack of consciousness we get scholars, if the feedback from habits isn't transformed into knowledge you get blitzplayers with 1200 rating. Active consciousness is paramount for both transformations. The passive autopilot is the enemy.
BTW feel free to put your comments on the previous post here.
I have taken the liberty to copy Blue's comment on the previous post to here because his comment and my new post crossed each other.
ReplyDeleteBDK said:
This all seems pretty reasonable, with some lacunae of course.
A little technical point about Baars--most people assume the majority of modules are innate. Some parameters are set via feedback, but in general the innate modules need little effort to build (e.g., the language module needs inputs about the specific language to get the specifics right). A kid just picks up language naturally, very very quickly, for instance. Humans don't have to work to see things, our visual system takes care of a multitude of tasks, of which we see just the barest outputs (e.g., object segmentation, depth, color, etc, are effortless and unlearned).
Chess, of course, is more like swimming, tennis, or riding a bike. It taps into our ability to acquire skills more generally, skills that are not genetically entrenched. So it is likely that the chess "module" like the swimming or tennis "modules" indeed depends much on conscious feedback as you describe. (Here 'module' is used more generally to refer to any specialized processor for which we don't typically have conscious experience of its fine-grained operations, but its output (e.g., a back-rank mate just pops out at you--beneath the surface a lot of neuronal computation just happened that you are not aware of)).
Incidentally, I am training to swim well--it is very, very hard. There are tons of aspects (breathing, body rolling, correct micro-placement of hand as it goes into the water, the arm as you pull during the stroke, the kick, the position of the head in the water). It is impossible to practice all at the same time and end up doing it well--people's attention can't divide that way--typically attention can only focus on one thing effectively.
So there are swimming drills, such as the 'spear the fish' drill in which you practice only one thing, putting your hand into the water so as to minimize resistance in the water. This must be done many many times over many months to really get it right. At first with much feedback, thinking about little mistakes that are possible, a good swimming coach is ideal (of course). Ultimately it becomes a habit.
This is why I like MDLMs micro-drills, and general drills that have you repeat things over and over for chess.
In swimming, also, you don't just practice the water entry drill. You typically spend about half your swim sessions doing drills, half just doing your freestyle stroke trying your best to integrate everything you've learned into a coherent hole. I image this is much like singing practice--you don't just do drills, but also like to actually sing songs.
One other thing, there is some learning by osmosis in swimming (pun intended). Just by watching others swim well, an integrated whole, you pick up a lot of subtle cues that you might not pick up by looking at the drills. For instance, the way the breathing and body turn work together. It might be hard to see this if you just work on breathing in one drill, the body turn in another drill ('body turn' in swimming is when you twist your whole body so it is almost on its side as you pull your arm through the water, as that generates much more power than if you just used your shoulders).
As I mentioned in a previous post, this is probably a good motivation for studying master games.
Some questions that this spawns:
1. What is the optimal ratio of simple drills to playing? In swimming most agree you should spend about half your time on each.
2. What is the best way to split up the chess drills? E.g., focus on one thing for two months? Focus on three things, a little each day, or a different one each day? Should the study of master games count as simple drills, or is it more like playing an actual game?
3. What are the best drills to improve at chess? A corollary of the above is 'simple drills.' Of course this depends on your skill level, so it translates to 'simple for you.' So, simple (for you) endgame, tactics, strategy problems. To make the drills complex (for you) drills is a mistake. There are tons of simple tactical drills out there, but very few strategy drills (PCT seems to be the exception, as most strategy books and software are fairly sophisticated--this may be because tactical skills are the hardest to acquire, while positional skills are relatively easier as they tend to rely on general principles rather than the concrete).
4. Where does master game study fit into this? It seems qualitatively different from both doing drills and playing, but many instructors think it is a key to success.
It is kind of funny that chess is considered an 'intelligence' game, when in fact it seems to me much more like swimming. Nobody would say you were stupid if you couldn't learn to swim well. On the other hand, swimming just involves bodily movement, while superficially chess involves intense thought. But as you wrote a while ago, it is really only that extra 200 rating points or so that is really about this kind of stuff--the core rating is based not on thought but on how much you have acquired by working your ass off. This is what the studies support (well, admittedly there is an IQ component, but IQ is never as good a predictor of chess ability as is time spent studying the game).
People who don't play chess see it, and think "Wow, if I were to do that, I would have to be thinking so much, way more than I could ever think in the amount of time you are taking to make the moves, so you must be really smart." They don't realize that misses the point--people with experience actually aren't thinking as much as they would have to in the same position.
BDK said:
ReplyDeleteOn my above point about not just doing drills, but actually playing.
There were many times during the Circles when I was kicking ass at tactics problems, but was so caught up in the Circles that I wasn't playing. Invariably, when I'd come back to playing I would play horribly, I would even miss simple tactics that I would have recognized immediately in the context of a puzzle. This suggests that the coordination of drills and real games is not something to do just because a drill-only approach is boring. Integrating the two is required, there is a co-evolution of highly specific drill-dependent skills and ability to tie things together and actually play well.
Just working on the entry of the hand into the water, and then entering a swimming competition, would be a huge mistake. This is because the hand entry actually works synergistically with other proper movements (like your pull through the water, body turn, and all that). While drills can teach you compontents, it takes actual play to get the synergies down.
But this is where master games might be good, as they typically give you a picture of synergy par excellence. Then again, you gotta play too.
Perhaps with singing it is similar--you don't prepare for a performance by practicing just C sharp, or even doublets of notes. Real songs involve hundreds of notes for which no amount of one or two note drills could fully prepare you.
Dear Reader,
ReplyDeleteplease notice that both comments above were written by BDK (as comment on my previous post, but I like to conduct the discussion in one place, here.)
Blue,
ReplyDeleteThis is why I like MDLMs micro-drills, and general drills that have you repeat things over and over for chess.
Disclaimer: All answers I give are based on the hypotheses I created as if they are true.
I would rather be ready with 15 conscious repetitions:) It are the multiple subtasks of which even a simple looking task is composed that causes the big figures.
Question 1. What is the optimal ratio of simple drills to playing? In swimming most agree you should spend about half your time on each.
That ratio isn't fixed. Integration of a simple subtask I consider to be just another subtask. You can't integrate what isn't there so you must start with isolated simple subtasks. Feedback must tell you about the ratio which is needed.
Question 2. What is the best way to split up the chess drills? E.g., focus on one thing for two months? Focus on three things, a little each day, or a different one each day? Should the study of master games count as simple drills, or is it more like playing an actual game?
Putting your rook with active consciousness on an open file 15 times within a few days should, according to my untested hypothesis, be enough to create a lifelong lasting habit. I'm inclined to adress the diagnosis phase first. Starting with the scanning of all kinds of targets, converge squares etc.. You will know when you are ready to integrate it in your play. If I have learned to sing a certain interval correct, I will be able to sing it correct in any piece. So focus on the building blocks (basic skills) of your chess that are usefull in any game or even any move. I suspect integration will almost come by itself (by playing, that is). Actually any chess rule can become a drill. But you will soon run out of rules. Experimenting is necessary to find the drills that work. Feedback of the experiments will be your guide.
Question 4. Where does master game study fit into this? It seems qualitatively different from both doing drills and playing, but many instructors think it is a key to success.
It's your chess module that has to be corrected. There are two possibilities, feedback and new knowledge.
Feedback: Hide the move of the mastergame and calculate your own. Compare it with the move of the master.
New knowledge: Take the moves of the mastergame for granted. Find the idea behind the move and use that 15 times consciously in your own games. Maybe a flashcard can help you to remember.
It is kind of funny that chess is considered an 'intelligence' game, when in fact it seems to me much more like swimming.
I was very well aware of that 3 years ago already when I realized that pattern recognition played a crucial role. I deliberately never talk about it since I don't want to take away the whiff of mystique that accompanies chess. I didn't want protesting grandmasters on my blog either:) It's even worse: every expertise must be semi-intelligent because it is based on motorskills and procedural memory. Creativity exists, though. But I'm not the way to unchain my creativity, right now. I will talk about creativity in chess in a future post and make DK happy. But first I want to give everybody a chance to react on the current subjects.
15 seems way, way, way too low a number. That is, if it is anything like tennis, swimming, karate. For it to truly become a habit it will take a lot more. And it isn't just the raw number, but the number distributed over multiple sessions.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes it even more complicated in chess is that unlike swimming you don't do the same thing every time. If you have a 'rook to open file' habit, as you said there is an additional stage of learning exceptions to that rule so you can stop yourself from doing it.
If I have learned to sing a certain interval correct, I will be able to sing it correct in any piece. So focus on the building blocks (basic skills) of your chess that are usefull in any game or even any move.
In chess it doesn't typically work this way, as was my point about focusing too much on drills and then missing them when it came to games. It is crucial to do both (the proportion, and degree of overlap, of course depends on the person). This also doesn't work in swimming, where all the different movements work together in ways you won't appreciate when working on the movements in isolation. It's extra work to have them all work together in situ.
My questions don't have clearly right/wrong answers that would apply to everyone. They are the practical questions each person must answer in their chess improvement quests.
OTOH perhaps number three is the most general--if you are to do drills, make sure they are simple, where 'simple' means 'simple for you'.
My point partly with the master games is that even just going over them, memorizing them even, is enough to pull away useful knowledge that is never conscious. Your chess module can be tweaked, its internal model of the game of chess affected by the game. It may even help to try to tell yourself "This is me playing white", as our cognitive model of the game seems more sensitive to self-play than other play.
I'm thinking of something happening like as I described to Phaedrus. I think such memory integration effects are likely important.
I said (in the context of merely 'memorizing' a bunch of tactical problems):
Also, I'm not convinced simply "memorizing" 1000 positions is all that bad. It all depends on how well our brain integrates that knowledge into its chess procedures, e.g., does the brain unconsciously integrate these different memories into higher-level chunks? If so, the individual problems are like nodes in our brain that are initially implanted, but connections are formed among these nodes so ultimately it becomes a more general and useful integrated tactical skill set.
So, I'm not sure that happens, but it probably does to some degree, in which case while consciously we are merely memorizing 1000 problems, what our brain does with those problems is a much more interesting, and generalizable thing.
It's like planting a seed. At first all these seeds are alone and unconnected. In ten years there are a bunch of plants with a beatiful complicated and interconnected root system. The difference is, the roots are really neurons and they can talk to each other. This is very good for us. :)
along with tanc or happy hippo, one of the few true dependably pure chess blogs out there. thank you.
ReplyDeleteBlue,
ReplyDelete15 seems way, way, way too low a number. That is, if it is anything like tennis, swimming, karate. For it to truly become a habit it will take a lot more. And it isn't just the raw number, but the number distributed over multiple sessions.
Huzzaah! Finally controversy! You express very well common thought. But I only follow logical reasoning. I don't know the outcome of my reasoning beforehand and I'm as much surprised about the outcome as possibly most readers are. But if the reasoning is logical I have to obey it and put it to the test. And when I just repeat my hypotheses 15 times my readers might start to belief me:)
First statement: there are simple tasks that become a habit if you do them just 15 times with active attention.
Example 1: occupying an open file.
Example 2: at average it takes 45 hours to get your driver's license. That is a compound motorskill that is composed of multiple simple subtasks. If you look at it you will see that there are a lot of subtasks that you have done only 15 times: entering the highway, parking in line, starting the car on a slope (in Holland that is) etc.. Yet you get your license.
Second statement: if there is only one simple subtask that becomes a habit with just 15 repetitions then any simple subtask can become a habit with only 15 repetitions. If you have a case at hand that shows to need more than 15 repetitions then you will find that it is a compound task.
Tennis, swimming and karate are highly composed tasks. Yet I can learn to play tennis within 15 minutes. Playing good tennis is a quite different matter. Singing in tune looks like a simple task. In my previous post I showed it is a highly composed task. I sang 2500 toneladders. But everytime a different subtask was adressed. That is where your numbers and mine come together. I make that distinction because if you sing just 2500 tone ladders without adressing the subtasks, you will not be able to sing in tune at the end.
Actually 15 times is rather high. If you have really full attention then 7 times should be sufficient:)
I said:
If I have learned to sing a certain interval correct, I will be able to sing it correct in any piece. So focus on the building blocks (basic skills) of your chess that are usefull in any game or even any move.
BDK reacted:
In chess it doesn't typically work this way, as was my point about focusing too much on drills and then missing them when it came to games.
I consider integration of a learned subtask to be just another subtask. So correct yourself 15 times consciously when you miss it and you will know it for life:)
It takes a few months to be a good habit-based driver. Hell, when I parallel park, I still have to walk myself through it consciously and I have done it a zillion times.
ReplyDeletePlus, I wasn't referring to swimming proper, but even learning to do one simple drill well, to make it a habit, takes more than 15 tries. I think you may underestimate how hard it is, how long it takes, to truly form a habit. I also think you overestimate your ability to consciously control habit formation, as it is a specific neuronal process (basal ganglia dependent, among other things), that you can't force. It's like trying to control plant growth: yes, you set up the conditions, but they grow in their own time.
I just wrong a post touching on similar themes.
It probably depends on the habit, too, regardless of how simple it is.
Temposchlucker:
ReplyDeletedepending on the complexity of the subtasks esp. in motor skills, it depends on how many repetitions are needed for the brain to memorise it completely until it becomes part of a reflex action.
for example, have you ever tried entering your room in the dark and without thinking, your arm reaches out at the precise height and extension so that your fingers touches the light switch on the very first try?
in exactly the same way we talk about repetititions and doing these things on auto-pilot mode.
in chess, i feel that auto-pilot mode can work in good and bad ways.
in end games, i tend to react on auto-pilot. ie. i make moves without thinking because i believe that it is the most accurate. in this way, i knew what needs to be done in say, how to prolong a fight or salvage a draw by reflex (ie. making moves with hardly any thinking at all - not sure if you're referring to this skill as an active skill or a passive one - although i tend to think of it as a more passive skill than an active one) and it is these autopilot moves that gives a player the required accuracy in getting a draw out of say, a K+R v K+B/K+N endgame.
wrt to your questions:
1. What is the optimal ratio of simple drills to playing? In swimming most agree you should spend about half your time on each.
i do not have an answer for this. when i first started to learn how to swim back in school, i was the last student in my class to learn it. my swimming lessons were of 45 min per week. it took me 6 months to learn how to swim. i was extremely jealous of my fellow classmates who took to the water like a duck and knew how to swim in less than a month while i was struggling. what finally "turned the tide" (excuse the pun) for me was when i discovered how to coordinate my breathing and suddenly, my skills underwent a major change. not only was I able to swim but i realised that by refining my arm and calf movements, i can swim faster than my classmates who had learnt how to swim earlier.
i think the optimal ratio of drills to playing ultimately rests on the individual's ability to absorb new information and to translate that information into a "permanent" state in the brain.
2. What is the best way to split up the chess drills? E.g., focus on one thing for two months? Focus on three things, a little each day, or a different one each day? Should the study of master games count as simple drills, or is it more like playing an actual game?
i would say to focus on the weakest parts of your game. for beginners like me, this usually means tactics and endgames. as for the frequency, it depends on how willing the subject is.
3. What are the best drills to improve at chess?
imho, drills are useless if the brain is rejecting the information. it's like force-feeding a child who does not want to learn. what happens then is that the information acquired from the drills is stored only in short-term memory but not long-term ones. in the short-term, the child remembers it but after a year, will the child still remember it? i think what is more important is the effectiveness of the drills themselves. i think there is no definite best drill with a one-size-fits-all method.
4. Where does master game study fit into this?
master game study (only annotated ones) helps a player to understand the technique of chess playing. i would say it fits into somewhere below the study of tactics and endgames. it is important but not as important i feel compared with tactics+endgame study.
cheers
HH,
ReplyDelete99% of the learning is unconscious. So there is no need to bother about that. But (according to my interpretation of Baars) there is a conscious theatre that represent the other 1%. If that 1% is used suboptimal then that will reflect in the other 99%. If we are that 1% unconscious too, we end up as scholars.
I try to find out which rules govern that 1%. One thing seems to be paramount: you need active consciousness there. It seems to work by imitation. You consciously show the correct act by thinking it a few times over and the procedural brain copies it and works its own miracles.
I know my approach is very rigid, but if I allow fluffiness like "it depends on the person", "it depends on the motorskill" or "everything grows by itself, leave it alone" then it is impossible to reason.
No one has been able so far to reproduce the results of MDLM. A great amount of different methods has been tried. This means the process doesn't optimize itself. We have to find out what to do and how to optimize.
The discussion about 15 vs 2500 repetitions is about definitions. You can learn any new motorskill by doing it 15 times consciously. That's enough for the procedural memory to take over. After that the knowledge is no longer new and we are talking about the process of refinement by feedback. Which may need another 2500 repetitions.
The rules that govern the transformation of new knowledge into procedural memory are equal to the rules that govern the feedback. In the one case the new knowledge is derived from books etc., in the case of feedback the new knowledge is distilled from observing the process consciously.
HH,
ReplyDeletebtw, the questions you answered were BDK's questions. I did answer them too (sort of).