Chess and logical thinking?

Does chess really makes your logical thinking and reasoning better? And what about creativity??  Please, share with me with some thougths of yours regarding this. Thank you, guys! Chess is the only reason i exist so far, which helps me to overcome the hardertst days in my life. So, i wanna know everything about it.

Opening is mostly remembering

Middle game is logical thinking

End game is a mix of logical thinking and remembering

Absolutely, if you allow chess-type thinking into the rest of your life. For example, just last night as I walked home in the rain, getting soaking wet, I wondered how I got myself into such a lousy position. The answer: I was too lazy the previous two nights (and therefore lost two tempi!) by not picking up the supplies I needed when it *wasn't* raining, so by the time I really needed those supplies it was raining, and with both hands carrying those bags of supplies I couldn't also hold my umbrella, so I got soaked.

There are a number of philosophical threads on this site on how chess and life are similar. Despite my philosophical bent I haven't been interested in such threads, for some reason, but you might be.

I think chess attracts intellectually-minded people who care about logical thinking and reasoning, but I doubt it contributes much to those abilities, nor to creativity either.

There are studies which show chess improves the academic performance of students. I can believe that as chess requires sharp mental focus during a game and in ongoing study to develop one's game. Chess also hardens a player to the rigors of competition.

Otherwise chess is a beautiful, somewhat addictive game which requires no further justification. It's gotten me through some tough times too.

Take care, Forsakeme2.

I somewhat disagree. There are many principles in life that are the same as in chess. While it's true you could theoretically learn those principles elsewhere, very few books I've ever seen contain that type of wisdom, and then only in limited fashion, so chess is one place to get such wisdom, assuming you can correctly extrapolate what you've learned from games you've played and seen.

Another example: Beware of excessive greed. I knew a business owner who was too cheap to fix a broken lock for maybe $30 on his business' back garage door, so he never fixed it, and instead let a homeless guy live inside that garage area for free as sort of a watchdog. That guy got the owner in all kinds of trouble while living there, by making racist comments to a city worker that got fed back to the owner by city officials, by driving off professional architects who tried to work in the office next to that area, by breaking a number of statues while transporting them by truck, by getting drunk the night burglars broke into the company vehicle parked outside, and so on. It would've been far cheaper just to fix the stupid lock and keep that loser out of his life. If the owner had played chess and had learned not to steal poisoned pawns, not to hang onto gambit pawns, and not to grab pawns when he needed to consolidate his position, he would have been wise enough to know not to be so greedy on a financial issue when security was at stake.

Playing a lot of chess(over the last 20 years) has helped me understand myself better.  
The way we play chess(naturally) is almost a direct reflection of how we(personally) attack/approach almost any situation that requires tact. 

If the owner had played chess and had learned not to steal poisoned pawns, not to hang onto gambit pawns, and not to grab pawns when he needed to consolidate his position, he would have been wise enough to know not to be so greedy on a financial issue when security was at stake.

Sqod: You're one of the guys I like to read, but this makes no sense to me.

Human decision-making is extraordinarily complex and usually context-dependent. I can't imagine that if only this business owner had learned not to steal poisoned pawns from playing chess, he wouldn't have used a homeless guy as a watchdog.

Besides does chess really teach not to steal poisoned pawns? The two most famous poisoned pawn variations -- the Sicilian Najdorf and the French Winawer -- teach that the question remains open.

Without getting into details of poisoned pawns (some of which are guaranteed to cause your loss if you steal one), let's just say that this owner's greed and dishonesty was a constant pattern that constantly drained him. Another example: He was too cheap to divorce his wife, so he lived with his mistress, and used her to work for free as a secretary at his business. If she didn't like one of the professionals he dealt with, which she often didn't, often for superficial reasons like body odor or tone of voice, she would refuse to sleep with the owner until he stopped dealing with that person. Of course he would always cave in and break off dealing with that person, thereby ruining yet another professional relationship because of some dingy woman's superficial impression. As a result, she was constantly destroying his business. The word I heard from behind his back is that *nobody* wanted to work with him after their first business encounter with him, and that's exactly what I saw happen, too. If he'd played chess and had learned to put logic before superficial pleasures, he likely would have succeeded in a big way. If he hadn't been so greedy and had just divorced his wife and/or hired a legitimate employee, he wouldn't have had to cave in to the free secretary's whims. Instead, he demonstrated strategic foolishness at every step of his life, from what I could see, and it cost him in the long run.

Chess is very simply; a finite two player, zero-sum, perfect information game. Now that pretty much, means its not down to chance (im excluding possibilities like someone playing with their eyes closed, or a card-based variant). Technically speaking (now this is very techical, into the realms of physics we go!) the world isn't random either, but our decisions are normally down to pseudo-chance. Chess encourages the brain to analyse a situation, faster and more indepth. A similar situation will occur in othello, or blackjack (presuming you base off card counting, and know the deck, thus its no longer a game of chance)! If through chess or such you end up improving your analytical skills, it gives you more information to make decisions off of, which gives you more oppotunities to improve your logical thinking. Creativity is partially spurred from not having information, so I guess you could say its the opposite of logical decision-making, hence why you've never seen spock paint!

To sum it up: Chess does (indirectly) improve your logical thinking, but not your creativity.

let's just say that this owner's greed and dishonesty was a constant pattern that constantly drained him.

That sounds like a powerful pattern. I doubt learning to be careful about pawns over the chess board would change it.

Take Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest chess players in history. He died raving about the perfidy of the Jews and the USA. He had his teeth fillings drilled out because he believed the mercury was poisoning him. He failed to keep track of paying rent on a storage unit and lost much valuable and personally significant memorabilia.

There's a top blitz player in Boston who beats masters and even grandmasters, but has been homeless since 1997.

Chess is a very specialized skill. What one learns over a chess board does not necessarily translate to the rest of one's life. This isn't unusal. There are tons of people with high expertise which requires logical thinking who lead illogical lives.

And heck, if chess contributed to logical thinking, I rather think we would see more logical discussions here at chess.com. But instead it's the usual blather typical of internet blogs, whether commenters play chess or not.

Fiveofswords: You're another person I like to read.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Yes, that's why I said *if* you let the lessons from chess become part of your life. I'm sure many people get good at chess and never learn anything more from it than just how to play better moves, the same as many people get good at computer programming and never learn underlying wisdom about memory hierarchies, tradeoffs of time and space, the importance of representation, or other deep principles of wisdom that run through every field.

Bobby Fischer, as you mentioned, is a good example of a lot of principles, the most obvious of which is balance. I'm surprised and sorry he didn't learn about balance in life after becoming so adept at handling the balance of time and material in chess. His life was extremely out of balance. That demonstrates that intelligence and wisdom are very different things--yet another principle.

Squod: The thing is I don't believe humans are wired to generalize learning from one domain to another like you say.

So, yes, *if* you could let lessons from chess become part of your life, you would, or at least you might. But overwhelmingly that's not what humans do.

People are pretty mechanical. They get trapped in patterns easily. Just about everyone would like to change something and they often know what they ought to do, but somehow ... they don't.

A person practically has to get whacked by a two-by-four to change. This is why I don't see much hope for an insight about poisoned pawns to become an insight about business which opens a path to meaningful change. People just don't work that way.

Yes, people are certainly not hardwired to generalize well, as least in matters of logic and general principles. Still, I would think that with all the religious teachings (e.g., "Wisdom is supreme..." [Proverbs 4:6]), business teachings (e.g., optimizing profits by staying in the middle region of quality), college courses (e.g., the drawbacks of greedy algorithms), songs on the radio (e.g., "so hold on loosely..." [38 Special]), martial arts (e.g., balance in judo), science (e.g., equivalence of mass and energy [E=mc^2]), and films (e.g., "Seize the day" [Dead Poets Society]), people in an advanced society would start to see relationships between things, and to appreciate such relationships as a way to bettering their lives. The fact that they don't is largely why I don't understand people and why I would rather deal with something less insidious that I do understand, like chess.

Could somebody articulate exactly what logic is used in chess?  I can see conditionals, i.e., if-then relations.  What else?

Whip_Kitten: Good point. Other than some bare if-then stuff, I don't see chess teaches logical thinking either.

I improved my logical thinking the old-fashioned way -- by studying philosophy, math, critical thinking, general semantics, essay writing, and debate plus lots of computer programming.

I don't believe any chess player will do better at critiquing arguments or working logic proofs on account of playing chess.

Whew, that's a heavy question. I doubt anybody knows a definitive answer, including people who have studied the associated fields of logic and chess.

Let me throw out some preliminary thoughts, and if there's enough interest we can dig into the topic more deeply:

(1) "Logic" is probably a misleading term when applied to chess. For example, if your goal is to set up something like a Prolog program that finds the best move based on sheer logic (through SLD resolution), you will run into several problems, including some of the same problems that chess engines encounter, which will highlight the differences in the ways that humans solve that problem versus how programs solve that problem. Therefore I claim logic is the wrong approach for such a goal.

(2) My impression is that the majority of the representation would be the if-then statements you mentioned, with some extra structure, metrics, and heuristics. The extra structure would be best represented as a directed graph, which is a generalization of a tree. (A graph can represent transpositions, whereas a tree cannot.) The metrics would include similarity metrics that could estimate how similar one position is to another. The heuristics would be essentially numerical values on the if-then implications, although it you really use numbers you'll run into various mathematical and computational problems. There are still other things you would need to describe problemsolving in chess that don't fall into the above categories, such as learning, certain recognition issues, and abstraction issues.

I don't think so. Frankly, I think the chess = logical thinking bit is just something many chess players use to justify their hobby. For some reason, people feel the need to justify what they do, especially when there's no obvious gain in it (and really, for most of us chess is a big time sink with little to no gain aside from, maybe, becoming better at chess).

Having spent many years interacting with other chess players here, I can say playing chess does not seem to have any relation to critical thinking.

Ain't that the truth!

Chess IMO has more in common with wrestling than critical thinking.