Word: chess
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...road emptied into a village. We bounced slowly over the cobblestones of the street, beginning to get the feeling that cars weren’t big in town. Three older Italian men in suspenders, who were tanned the color of leather from the boiling Calabrian sun, sat playing chess under the awning of a caffé while sipping espresso and motioning with their hands. Every one of them was the spitting image of my grandfather, though he’s in Florida playing bridge and sipping scotch. Suddenly, one of the men leapt out of his seat and intercepted...
...posited as long ago as 1899, when Psychological Review ran a paper saying it takes at least that long to become expert in telegraphy. The modern study of expert performance began in 1973, when American Scientist published an influential article by researchers Herbert Simon and William Chase saying chess enthusiasts had to play for at least 10 years before they could win international tournaments. (Bobby Fischer was an exception; he played for nine years before becoming a grand master...
...Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), "The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance." Ericsson, 60, is a professor at Florida State who moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in 1976 to study with Simon, co-author of the seminal chess paper. (Simon went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making.) Today Ericsson runs Florida State's Human Performance Laboratory, where Thomas and Monica participated in the robot simulations...
...large, gentle man with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair and a button on his jacket missing, has become the world's leading expert on experts, a term he distinguishes from "expert performers" - those individuals, possessing both experience and superior skill, who tend to win Nobel Prizes or international chess competitions or Olympic medals. Ericsson notes that some entire classes of experts - for instance, those who pick stocks for a living - are barely better than novices. (Experienced investors do perform a little ahead of chance, his studies show, but not enough to outweigh transaction costs...
...Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens - something that changes the rules of the game they usually play - they're little better than the rest of us. Chess grand masters can recall almost entire chessboard layouts from their games (approximately 25 pieces, compared with an average of four for novices), but when chessmen are randomly arranged on a board, those grand masters can recall the placement of only about six pieces. Similarly, experienced actors remember script lines much better than novices do, but they are no better at remembering material other than scripts...