Professional Documents
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3 a
Adriaan D. de Groot
3 a
For this edition of Thought and Choice in Chess the second print run of 1978
has been used, published by Mouton Publishers, The Hague, the Netherlands
(isbn 90-279-7914-6).
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission
of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina v
preface
As far as specific chess reasoning was concerned, De Groot’s study led to a number of
surprising results. Although master level players – as one would expect – more often
selected winning moves than lesser players, their thinking and decision making fol-
lowed similar procedural lines. No substantial structural variety could be observed.
The main difference between grandmasters and players of average strength is the
speed of recognizing the central issue in each position. Where lesser players tend to
spend considerable time on unimportant options, the best players almost immedi-
ately see what the real problem is. That’s their talent, or rather their competence,
acquired during long years of training and competition.
All along chess players took great interest in De Groot’s work, as an exercise in
empirical psychology, but above all as an endeavour to explaining chess genius. His
analysis was acknowledged by most and led to a new approach to the teaching and
training of young chess players. A later study by Riekent Jongman (1968) (a thesis
under supervision of De Groot and presented in his Perception and Memory in Chess, with
Fernand Gobet (1996)) corroborated De Groot’s findings and underlined the attribu-
tion of chess mastery to knowledge and experience rather than to a strong computa-
tional competence or an exceptional memory. An expert chess player sees the defin-
voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina vi
ing characteristics of a chess position in the blink of an eye because he recognizes its
functional properties and possibilities. That explains the quality and the speed of his
judgment. When asked to reconstruct positions they only had had a few seconds to
observe, they showed remarkable skills in doing so, as long as these positions where
realistic, regular chess positions. Confronted with unlikely random arrangements of
pieces on the chessboard their superiority was gone.
De Groot’s original doctor’s thesis (in Dutch: Het denken van de schaker, 1946) was pub-
lished in a limited edition and has been hard to find. The English translation of 1965
showed that the topic and the study remained of great interest to a wide audience of
psychologists, chess players and computer programmers. This version is now
reprinted, as a tribute to Professor A.D. de Groot’s originality of experimentation and
strong powers of methodological research. At the same time the book is a milestone
marking the transition of the psychological study of genius to the early beginnings
of empirical cognitive science.
In fact, de Groot’s thesis inspired a major breakthrough in the development of AI
models of thinking, in part by his systematic analysis of the thinking-aloud proto-
cols of how chess thinking proceeded, and in part by his application of Selz’s theory
of productive thought as a sequence of distinct methods. Both influenced the devel-
opment of AI models of thinking, and notably the work of Herbert Simon and Alan
Newell and their epoch-making Human Problem Solving from 1972.
Sijbolt Noorda
voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina vii
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Engbersen, G. Publieke bijstandsgeheimen, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 852 2)
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