Daily Times

Sir: Zsuzsa Polgár was the first woman in the world to earn the Grandmaster title in chess. She was also the Women’s World Chess champion from 1996-1999.

As it is assumed that the game of chess is all about mental ability and luck does not play any part, it is said that women cannot beat men because the size of their brains are smaller than men, but one woman was keen to prove this assumption wrong. Polgar’s father used to take her to different game zones at a very early age, and at the age of 10, when most children know only about 10,000 words, she was devoting her time to learning 100,000 chess chunks.
This process physically transformed her brain, and with constant repetition, information moves from working memory into long-term memory. Working memory only lasts for seconds until the electrical connections between neurons die, but in long-term memory, the repetition of these currents stimulates the neurons to form new and permanent connections. The memorised information becomes hard-wired and can last a lifetime. And like anyone else, Polgar’s long-term memory is a storehouse of family faces and lifetime experiences but now chess chunks are also indelibly printed on her brain. At 15, she was already the top-ranked female player of the world and at the 1985 New York Open, she caused a sensation by beating a grandmaster for the first time. It is assumed that she makes moves as easily as taking a breath, and there seems to be a line direct from the brain to the end of the finger, even though it should be beyond the power of a human brain to pick the best move in a chess game. There are roughly four billion possibilities for the next three moves alone, and that is a calculation only a super computer could perform. So, how can this girl move at this incredible speed? The only explanation is that her human brain is using her very human skill. Intuition sounds more like magic than science, but researchers believe that it is a specific skill displayed by experts in all fields and it can be explained. If you have done something often enough, you do not have to think about how to do it, but the even more important thing is that if you have done something often enough you know and you sense what the result of it is going to be and you are ready with the next move. So intuition is turned out to be a learned skill; it means trusting your experience and ability to recognise and react to familiar patterns. It is rather surprising that it may seem a chess player relies more heavily on intuition than calculation. You do not calculate from where you are, you do not look at the list of possibilities, says a former British chess champion.
Polgar says she has to trust her instincts, her intuition, and it is basically pattern recognition and its instincts that tell her what her best move is, and it is almost like guessing. However, it is like guessing intelligently, basing it on prior games and experience. In order to see how Polgar’s brain is perfectly adapted for the game of chess, Professor Dr Joy Hirsch (leading expert in brain imaging techniques) from the Neurological Institute of Columbia University did an MRI (Magnetic Residence Imaging) of her brain, and the results were astonishing. The face recognition processor of her brain is not only working for face recognition but also for chess patterns. Hence, years of intense childhood training literally changed her brain for the game of chess.
UMAIR KAMRAN
Lahore