A chess neophyte with a stratospheric IQ yet no knowledge of chess squares off against an international grandmaster (who himself is no slouch in the IQ department.) Just before the game commences, the basic rules of chess are explained to the genius. I realize my question is close to IMHO or CS, but I’m interested in a factual discussion of strategy vs sheer brainpower re: level of playing in chess.
(Yes, I realize a 400 IQ is not possible.)
Hard to say, but I would make a guess that before this 300-IQ guy has gotten into a groove as the game has only just begun, the grandmaster would have already checkmated him in, say, 10 or fewer moves. There are some tactics that work for ultra-quick kills in chess.
Now, if we’re talking a series of games instead of just one game, then, maybe, with each and each successive game, the odds start to tip in favor of the genius.
No one knows the mental capabilities of someone with a “300 IQ”, so I would say the question is unanswerable.
Not sure about the hypothetical, but here’s what I do know…
I had a friend who was seriously intelligent. Don’t know what his IQ was, but I’m sure it was up there. He worked in a technical field involving some higher mathematics, and anyone who met him could tell he was very, very bright.
And he couldn’t play chess for s**t.
He knew the rules, knew how to play, but had zero knack for the game. I was never a serious chess player (and was nowhere near as intelligent as him) and I could beat him easily. One time we turned the board around near the end of a game, I took over the poor position he had been in and I still won.
So at least in that one case, raw intelligence didn’t translate into good chess sense.
Much of playing strategy games like chess and go involves pre-defined sequences that have been analysed before and memorised by the players. They don’t make up the Sicilian Defence (in chess) or a 3-3 invasion joseki (in go) from scratch; they know these sequences by heart (and know when to use and when not to use them) because they’ve played a million games before and have studied theoretical literature (and perhaps taught others). The IQ 300 player wouldn’t have any of that but would rather have to start from zero.
So my bet is that the IQ 300 newbie wouldn’t stand a chance against the grandmaster.
I think the story of AlphaZero is relevant here: a machine designed to be as “intelligent” as possible in the very narrow field of chess (and shogi and go, in other iterations) who was programmed to learn by self-playing. It becam very good very fast, but it had to play innumerable games against itself first.
I think the same applies to a person with an hypothetical IQ of 300, only such a person would get bored to death before mastering the game by playing against herself. For very intelligent people the limit is often set by their capacity to motivate themselves.
For a sufficiently advanced intelligence chess should be as obvious as tic-tac-toe. A Pak Protector would win.
The 300 IQ person would need to play like a computer, they have no feel or experience of position and need to go through the permutions of possible moves.
Modern computers can beat GMs but have only been able to do so fairly recently I douby anyone even with an IQ of 300 could process the trillions of permutations fast enough to trouble a grand master.
No. A 300 IQ means that they’re smarter than about 1 in 10^41 people (13.33 standard deviations). Even if every planet in every solar system in every galaxy in the universe had 100 billion people, you still wouldn’t fit that many people in the universe. It’s rare, to say the least.
But they’d still be human, with a brain that weighs a couple of pounds and has about 100 billion neurons. Everyone’s brain works the same way, bioelectrically speaking.
So while some people seem to be more efficiently wired than others, there’s going to be some upper bound. A 300 IQ, despite being vastly more rare, isn’t going to be much smarter than a 200 IQ. You might contrast with top athletes in various sports, where although they’re all much better than average people, they tend to be all within a few ticks of each other (a few seconds in a race, etc.). The best of the best are, in absolute terms, only a little better than fairly good players.
That minimal level of improvement just isn’t going to dominate over any reasonable level of practice and experience in the game.
I was married to a woman like this.
The bulk of her intelligence came from a freakishly good memory. (It took her 6 weeks to learn fluent Spanish)
But when it came to logic problems (or any problem that doesn’t require memory recall) she was average at best.
It’s an amazing gift for sure. But is it really intelligence?
An excellent way of putting it. It would be like taking some parallel universe version of the best baseball players ever, except that in that universe they never played baseball, and putting them up against a middle of the pack MLB team. The MLB team will win every time, and so would the grandmaster.
I think the better comparison would be Deep Blue. It did have some chess heuristics programmed in, but mostly, it just played by brute force, by being able to see every possible board position a large number of moves in advance. Which put it at nowhere near as good as AlphaZero (but then, it was two decades earlier), but it could play on a level comparable to Kasparov.
'Zactly. Our putative 300IQ person would need not superhuman reasoning, but superhuman data storage capacity to construct the ginormous look-ahead tree to do anything useful at the game without experience.
Knowing only the rules of chess, it’s doable for a fairly modest programmer to write a program to explore the entire chess game tree from set-up through checkmate and pick the optimal move at each turn. Just as one can do for tic-tac-toe.
The problem comes in trying to run that program, since that tree is so huge you’d need to convert all the matter in the entire universe into computer storage and you’d still be many orders of magnitude short of what you’d need. IQ (whatever the hell that is) isn’t going to defeat a fundamental obstacle like that in the absence of skill.
I should clarify that Deep Blue’s “large number of moves in advance” was 6 or 8, while a typical chess game might go 40 or so, and looking at every possible chess game would probably require 1000 or more. And the storage required grows exponentially with the number of moves in advance you’re looking, which is how the problem can grow beyond the bounds of the Universe.
Still, as Deep Blue demonstrated, you don’t need to actually build out the tree that far to play a very good (by human standards) game of chess.
And this is even more true of the modern deep-learning engines. They can sacrifice a piece without explicitly calculating out a combination that gets the material back or mates an opponent.
They have…somehow…an intrinsic sense of e.g. “It’s worth losing a knight here to put my opponent in a straightjacket”
Is this a timed game?
People with IQ scores far below 300 beat Grand Masters all the time, but they have experience to draw on. I’m not clear what a super-genius is supposed to do to find a way to win, not sure how a 300 IQ was determined. I kind of imagine the super-evolved big head version of David McCallum in The Sixth Finger.
There are two mythologies colliding in this OP. The first is that a high IQ tells us, without any other context, anything useful about a person’s capabilities. The second is that chess grandmasters are genius savants and not people who have put thousands of hours into learning a skill.
There are two mythologies colliding in this OP. The first is that a high IQ tells us, without any other context, anything useful about a person’s capabilities. The second is that chess grandmasters are genius savants and not people who have put thousands of hours into learning a skill
Actually, I framed my OP well aware that chess grandmasters channel many years of serious study into learning their craft. Regarding your first point, a colossal IQ does indicate superior analytical ability. The question then becomes: How helpful is that to a chess neophyte in a game of chess against an international grandmaster?
As others pointed out, high IQ usually only means smart in some things but not in others. There is probably no individual in the world who is smart at everything or even most things.
Mensa is not remotely close to 300 IQ (more like 130-140,) but the OP’s question is a bit like asking whether a Mensan can solve a Rubik’s Cube faster than some average layperson who has a lot of practice in Rubik’s Cubes. Many Mensans are totally unable to do Rubik’s Cubes no matter how much time you give them, it’s just not how their brain works. They can’t visualize in 3-D space. Many Mensans would never get perfect music pitch no matter how much time you gave them to develop it. Similarly, I’d imagine that, if you could get a room full of 300-IQ people, a significant number of them would be unable to do the “planning-and-visualizing-in-advance” stuff that chess requires.
I was deliberately steering away from the modern deep-learning engines, because those do have deep knowledge of chess. Or at the very least, they have something that we can’t rule out being a deep knowledge of chess, because we don’t have a sufficient understanding of how they work. They’re certainly not just brute-forcing the problem the way that Deep Blue did. My point was that brute force does work, even at the very finite level that’s actually achievable, and a hypothetical supergenius could presumably use it also.