Chess As Mental Training
There are efforts to use the game of chess as a tool to aid the intellectual development of young people. Chess is significant in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) studies, because it represents the domain in which expert performance has been most intensively studied and measured.
Although the results of research studies have failed to produce unambiguous support for the intellectual benefits of playing chess, several local government, schools, and student organizations all over the world are implementing chess programs.
New York based Chess-In-The-Schools, Inc. has been active in the public school system in the city since 1986. It currently reaches more than 30,000 students annually. The American Foundation for Chess has initiated programs in partnership with local school districts in several U.S. cities, including Seattle, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Tampa. The Chess'n Math Association promotes chess at the scholastic level in Canada. Chess for Success is a program for at-risk schools in Oregon. Since 1991, the U.S. Chess Center in Washington, D.C. teaches chess to children, especially those in the inner city, "as a means of improving their academic and social skills."
There are a number of experiments that suggest that learning and playing chess aids the mind. The Grandmaster Eugene Torre Chess Institute in the Philippines, the United States Chess Federation's chess research bibliography, and English educational consultant Tony Buzan's Brain Foundation, among others, continuously collect such experimental results. The advent of chess software that automatically record and analyze the moves of each player in each game and can tirelessly play with human players of various levels, further helped in giving new directions to experimental designs on chess as mental training.
Read more about Chess As Mental Training: History
Famous quotes containing the words chess, mental and/or training:
“An actress reading a part for the first time tries many ways to say the same line before she settles into the one she believes suits the character and situation best. There’s an aspect of the rehearsing actress about the girl on the verge of her teens. Playfully, she is starting to try out ways to be a grown-up person.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)