Adriaan de Groot, chess psychologist (1914–2006)
16.08.2006
– In the 40s, 50s and 60s the Dutch psychologist and chess master conducted
a number of ground-breaking experiments in the cognitive processes that occur
in the brains of strong chess players. A recent Scientific
American article bears testimony to this research. Adriaan de Groot died
in Schiermonnikoog, Holland on August 14. He was 91. In memoriam.
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Nigel Davies:
A busy person’s opening system
Players with interests and commitments away from the chess board often find it difficult to compete against those with more study time. Their opponents come to the board armed with the latest theory and can bash out moves well into the middle game. On this DVD Nigel Davies addresses this issue by demonstrating a simple and easy to learn opening system designed for the busy person.
More information...
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Adrianus Dingeman de Groot, commonly known as Adriaan de Groot, was born on
October 26, 1914 in Santpoort, Netherlands. He was a pyschologist and chess
master, and became famous for conducting cognitive chess experiments in the
40s, 50s and 60s. His initial thesis on the subject, "Het denken van
den schaker", was published in 1946. The English translation, Thought
and Choice in Chess, appeared in 1965.
De Groot conducted his chess experiments on players from many different backgrounds,
all the way from rank beginners to strong grandmasters. His goal was to explain
how chess experts could grasp a full board position, assess the situation,
find constructive ideas of what to do next, and in fact find good moves, all
withing seconds of being confronted with the position.
In his experiments the participants were required to look at a chess position,
while expressing their thought processes verbally, while a researcher recorded
them. De Groot's most startling result was to show that in grandmasters most
of the processes that went into finding a good move occurred during the first
few seconds of contemplation of the position. He defined four stages of the
thought process:
- The orientation phase – here the strong chess player grasped
the position and formulated general ideas of what to do.
- The exploration phase – this was characterised by the analysis
of concrete variations.
- The investigation phase – this was where the strong player
actually decided on a probable best move.
- The proof phase – here the subject spent time in confirming
the validity of the choice reached in phase three.
De Groot drew attention to the role of memory and visual perception in these
processes, and to how strong players, especially grandmasters, used experience
with past positions to expediate the processes listed above.
Drawing on earlier studies (by Djakow, Petrowski and Rudik in the 20s) de
Groot also exposed subjects very briefly, for 3-4 seconds, to positions taken
from a game. He found that grandmasters and masters were able to recall the
location of 93% of the pieces, while the experts remembered 72% and the class
players merely 51%.
In later (1973) studies conducted by Herbert A. Simon and W.G. Chase the experiments
were conducted with real game positions and compared with random positions.
The Americans discovered that in the real positions the performance of their
subjects declined proportionally to their chess ratings, but that in the random
position players of all levels did approximately the same. Simon and Chase
came to the conclusion that higher-ranked players use a form of chunking, or
pattern-matching, that allows them to rapidly encode macro features of the
positions.
 Normal
club players easily recognize the fianchettoed bishop on the kingside in a
single glance, grasping the six pieces involved as a set or chunk, which rank
amateurs will need to memorize each piece and its location separately. Grandmasters
know tens of thousands of such chunks and can find relevant patterns in any
meaningful game position. Further analysis, conducted by de Groot, suggested
that they recognised the functional relationships between the pieces, rather
than the actual positions and spatial relationships. For instance a chunk of
pieces in which a bishop pinned a knight against the queen would be remembered
as a pin rather than by the actual positions of the bishop, knight and queen
on the board.
On a personal note
In the 80s I did a series of TV documentaries for national German television
on computer chess and the cognitive processes involved in human chess processing.
Naturally we drew heavily on the works of Adriaan de Groot, and of Simon and
Chase, and other researchers. In particular we measured the accuracy with which
amateurs and grandmasters were able to reproduce a position they had been exposed
to for 3-5 seconds; the ability of both groups to come up with a meaningful
continuation; and the way their eyes moved while processing the position. But
this is the subject for another article.
Eye movement experiments with GMs (here Andras Adorjan and Helmut Pfleger)
Because of the importance of his work to the computer chess community, de
Groot was the Honoured Guest of the International Computer Chess Association
during the 1986 World Computer Chess Championship in Cologne, which I helped
to stage. It is from this event that I find the only picture I have of the
Dutch researcher.
Frederic Friedel with Adriaan de Groot in Cologne 1986
At 71 Adriaan de Groot was lively, engaging and also quite humorous in the
discussions we had. I kept him briefed on the experiments we had conducted
in our TV documentaries and on recent developments in computer chess. He was
deeply interested in the subject, and especially in the consequences for the
philosophical definition of computer intelligence. Many of the opinions which
I hold today in this area were first vented in our discussions in Cologne.
I did not meet him often after that, but we corresponded for a while and he
"lent" me a number of books on the subjects we had discussed (later
he told me I could keep them). I thank Adriaan for all the wonderful ideas
he implanted into my mind.
Frederic Friedel
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