Quantified chess

Hi QS Forum!

I have been idly wondering about trying to do a QS-style project around playing competitive chess. I used to play in college and after a 8 year gap, just started again (in prompted by moving to the San Francisco area, and visiting the beautiful and historic Mechanics’ Institute, a chess landmark.)

As I’ve been playing, I feel like there’s a really wonderful learning question here to unravel – of how the mind performs, and how the mind learns. Meaning: some days at the chessboard I really feel my mental state – the mind feels bright and capable, or sluggish and tired. And then I think about say, have I meditated enoughly recently, have I been doing too much analytical work lately, have I exercised enough lately – things that all feel to contribute to my mental state and immediate performance.

And other times I think about studying – there are games where I really feel like I understand what’s happening, and other times where I feel like I’ve never played the game before. And that feels more domain specific, I think: questions come to mind of how one studies and learns a mental discipline, and how one chooses to go about that learning, as opposed to say, how physically fit I am that day (though they feel linked.)


Anyhow, because chess games are all recorded, and each tournament generates a performance rating, I thought there might be a neat QS project in here. I am having trouble figuring out what parts of this to focus on, so I thought I’d submit the idea here. If anyone has seen similar talks on the QS site or heard of related research or just has ideas for how to play with this – from the mental state or the learning angle – I’d be really keen to hear!

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There are a lot of variables when playing competitive chess (especially if you are traveling). Perhaps playing against a computer would provide a better record for investigating specific correlations, as it’s easier to keep the environment consistent? Some ideas:

  • Do a quick resting heart rate test in the morning to measure your day-to-day fitness level.
  • Track the amount of time spent in bed (and time sleeping, if you have a device that works for that).
  • Track food choices (e.g. pancakes or nothing for breakfast), or even do a direct blood glucose measurement just before playing.

I’d also be curious if a (consumer-grade) EEG device and/or heart rate monitor worn before or while playing can predict how well you are playing.

I would love to see the results of a players heart-rates vs. outcome of the game.

Is chess a sport… :slight_smile:

Depends on the size of the chess set? :slight_smile:

You might like this thread.

Hi all!

Thanks all for posting. As I’ve kept up with competitive play since posting, I have thought about this thread a lot, since then, as I’ve continued to wonder about what affects the chess-playing experience I’ve had since then.

I had a flash of insight while I was home for the holidays about all this:

So at first, I was thinking about how on earth you would test anything out. Because I think there is a short-term factor, mental performance, crossed with a long-term factor, which is learning about and understanding the deep models of chess. So at first I was a little stumped: how would I test mental performance across tournaments, when tournaments are spaced out by months at a time and there’s going to be some learning happening (I hope!) along the way?

But then! I realized that in the Bay Area, there are 2 evening tournaments, that both happen at night, and have the same time control (i.e. length of game), and that I could pick a performance mod for 1 tournament and not do it for the other, and I’d have some kind of A/B test where I’d control for my deep / long-term learning.

So, that’s cool! Though knowing myself, I often become uninterested in experiments when the difference is obvious (since part of this is my own subjective experience of how lucid / tired I am at the board) – but I feel like teasing out what affects mental performance has been too subtle to be as simple as ‘just exercise beforehand’ that experimenting could be worth it.

Another way of saying that is – if I just felt more lucid at the board, ultimately I want to think more clearly and play better, and I’d just want to start doing that all the time. I guess one question is – what things are actually impactful? I feel like parameters include nutrition, exercise, time spent meditating, sleep, and then maybe study specific to the upcoming game (since in both of these tournaments you can look up your opponent and their past games prior to the game.)

Some idle observations I’ve had:

  • One day, in the fall, I had a bodywork session (Feldenkrais work), and then went to play one of the most lucid chess games I’ve ever played. I felt like I had the lucidity of my mind at say 12 years of age – just astounded at how clear my mind felt and the quality of moves coming out of my hands. The result of the game is interesting – I was playing a player considerably stronger than me (by rating he had an 85% chance to win and I had 15%), but by the time we got to the first time control (30 moves, around 2.5 hours in) I had an easily winning game. Well, not easily enough, because I think just straight fatigue overcame me and I proceeded to give the game away in the last hour / hour and a half. So I lost the game, but I could palpably tell that I was playing far stronger than I normally did, and it felt very connected to the sense of clarity I often have post bodywork.

  • More recently, I have been playing with the Slow Carb Diet, Tim Ferriss’ invention from the 4-Hour Body. It has a noticable impact on bodyfat and lean muscle and all that, but playing chess has had me wonder if there are hidden drawbacks. I felt very, very sluggish at the chess board the last two weeks I was on the diet. I’ve switched to an earlier morning work schedule lately, and perhaps that is why I felt so exhausted. I could look it up, but I’ve been on that schedule for more than a month now – so I don’t think that was it by itself. It was astounding to me that I felt extremely slow at the board both times, and sometimes I will get a second mental wind while playing, but both of these games I just felt like there was cotton in my mind. Things were confusing and fuzzy.

This made me wonder a lot about how I was practicing the slow-carb diet, and if there was some fuel the brain was used to having which in the name of lower bodyfat and conventional attractiveness I had thrown out the window.

Or maybe I just needed to tweak my diet on those days. I remember playing 10 years again, when I was 20, and chugging peanut butter banana milkshakes during all day tournaments, without any notion of “optimal diet” to chain me.


So anyhow, those are my thoughts. The realization that there is a way to test for performance across two tournaments is an interesting one to me (though to some extent, performance feels self-evident in how sluggish / lucid I feel in the moment – so I don’t know if all the work of spending 2 nights a week playing chess for some weeks is needed.)

The ideas around blood sugar really interested me, after the slow carb experiment I did, and an EEG would be awesome (because I really feel like lucidity at the board is a huge part of what makes playing both enjoyable as well as successful – so getting more information there could be great. Related to that – I find it’s not terribly fun for me to play when I feel really tired or exhausted. I find I don’t mind losing a game where I thought clearly, but I do mind losing games where I feel like I’m just not thinking clearly.)

I think know what I am wondering is what is an actionable experiment – what device would I get or measure would I use, and then what would be the experimental behavior that I play with? Design wise I would love for this to fit semi-naturally into my life (like 2 nights of chess a week is both incredibly tempting and a bit of a stretch time-wise … but I think if the experiment felt worth it, I am so curious about how all this works that I’d just go do it for a bit.)

Any thoughts – or any ideas as to who might find this idea interesting – would be very welcomed.

Thanks!!
-Nagle

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Regarding peanut butter banana milkshakes: If you’re young and healthy, it’s hard to see effects unless you’re pushing yourself to extremes, because the body is quite good at compensating. Also, when switching diets (or making other changes), the short term effect can be negative until the body has adapted, even if the long term effect is positive (or vice versa).

Don’t have any recommendations for measuring EEG (the Muse headband looks good, but seems overpriced) or blood sugar, but if you find any suitable gadgets, you might be able to establish if your subjective feeling of “lucidness” correlates with anything without having to go play chess: Just sit down and focus for a few minutes!

Including the subjective measurements is, I think, wonderful, but if you want to add more rigour into this self analysis you should take a look at the chess engines you can find online.

Particularly, they can quantify the value of movements in terms of a centipawn - 1/100 the value of a pawn in terms of board position and pieces. You take the center? Bonus points. You make a stupid move? You drop in relative value.

Of course, your absolute score would depend on the person you are playing - much easier to amass points when your opponent is playing foolishly. Instead, I would bet a relative measurement, i.e how many points you gain per turn regardless of where you start, would be more revealing. Average that out for the game and then compare your movements, potentially correlate them to whatever other features you are measuring.

You’d have to record each and every move you take, though. Might be a bit too much in the data-collection side of things, unless you play online.

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