One half-move chess intuition. How to teach that?

The answer is quite simple: The brain tends to memorize patterns. The more you play, the bigger the patterns become. Grandmasters can see patterns on up to 20 squares. The more you play and the more you study tactics, the bigger those patterns become.
Try to read the ,,psychology of chess" by Gobet.

Too long, too complicated, I'm just an Amish chess players

My Chessvis app for Android and IOS might interest you. It has a unique "visualization" option in the Puzzle section. It will present puzzles from the Lichess collection BUT back some number of moves in the game. (You specify how far back.) You're told what moves to make to get to the beginning of the puzzle but you only do that in head, not on the board. Now having the image of the board, you have to solve the puzzle.

You can go from 1 ply back to 10 full moves. And you can specify which puzzle category. (Most people go for simple puzzles since they're working on visualization more than puzzle solving.)

(#11), thanks for the pointer, tactical motif kinetic templates i would call the type of patters you mention. I was also interest by inter tactical motif chess. Actually, once one has some of them under the belt, why not skip their inner plies when looking at game, just focusing on the sparser sub-set of plies, in between those kinetic mini-dances. That might allow different level of patterns, or patterns of association between positions and such patterns....

There are many levels where intuition might be building model(s) of chess mechanics (I know: who talks like that? where is the oil pan, or is there Newtonian Chess laws? what does board referential coordinate system as to do with mobile units mobility?, ok what is acceleration?)

I doubt that psychology of chess would be different from general psychology. It should fit within. Patterns are not a monopoly of chess. And my question is about looking deeper into how patterns are learned. And how associative memory, which is fundamental, I think, in cognitive psychology, is more than logic sequence of conscious thoughts. Or maybe that is also school of thoughts polarized...(?). I have a more nervous system based understanding, and possibly extrapolate too much from it, but i don't think so... Pavlov experimental, behavioral psychology, that is old, but is it forgotten? that is purely time-dependent statistical long term memory association.

There the pattern is "Bell ring" associated to "food it there", as probable prediction for the dog meaning to be ready for survival worthy behavior: e.g. salivate (even if you don't have it on your checklist or did not deduce it logically from seeing the lab coats putting food somewhere).

Sure, that is a controlled experiment meant to dissociate logic causal relationships from pure statistical association. This is not about learning the niche environment of the dog, that environment logic, statistically sampled by the dog in its development would create statistically more logical associations, than that show in the controlled artificial lab, with no inherent logic (but that of the will of the experimenter, forcing association out of its evolutionary context, where statistics and determinism confusing is key to survival in situations requiring speed, not time to philosophy,, the dog said).

(#10) "Playing without calculating and evaluating game trees would be like showing up to Carnegie Hall to do a piano recital only armed with some rules like "Hit the keys hard, fast and frequently". "

Why assume that asking about teaching intuition as objective (overwhelmingly neglected and left to a passive role in teaching), means neglecting the current tools. I mean as complement. This has been neglected. And with only look ahead, not intuition, your pianist would stop playing in the middle of the piece. Or use bets from the audience for the remainder, because he could not contain enough of the partition into limited memory for it.

I seem to recall, that masters, only calculate to complement their intuition. Is that a wrong summary?

#13. Thanks for the suggestion. It seems to be playing with non-consecutive positions associations, at least testing what has already been learned. Does it also help at creating such associations? I may have misread (I do that), and also, did you mean back in the source game of the puzzle? nice idea... provide the whole context....

Edit: Not about the chess content: i have to use a bloated emulator on my pc to test your app. anybody knows of a functioning android lean emulator, without the bloat, and forced distractions? Just one app and bare cloud OS on it?

Edit: will look at your site first. It seems to the point and well laid out (with actual information)

@dboing
I never really cared about psychology and i only read the psychology of chess (in other words i have no idea how we learn usually. I'm a sociopath, so i don't really care in general.). It says we memorize the board and piece constellation in ,,chunks".

Let's say you have the typical B: Ph7, Pg6, Pf7, Kg8 W: Qh6, Bf6 pattern. The only ways to defend it is to bring either a Bishop or Queen to f8 (or h8) or A Knight on h5, f5, e6 or e8. If you see that pattern a lot (let's say you play a lot against the KID or sicilian Dragon), your unconsciousness will safe it and whenever you need to attack a fianchetto (let's say you are in time trouble or play Blitz), your Intuition will tell you that this construction/pattern/chunk is a very good way to go about this. In other words: the more you play and solve tactics, the more of those constructions/patterns/chunks will be saved. It really helps when defending.

@theTestoftheWest
It fits with my understanding. And you just described more than the tactical patterns, but also the positional pattern recognition and associated some plan with it, more of tactical time scale, but this is indeed one type of association. It reminds me of frozen versions of such association that some call rules or move guide-lines or ROTs, coming from conscious verbalization of authors who, in the past, did make conscious note as you did right here. I think there is a step there from intuition sub-conscious probabilistic association to logical rule. The difference, ends up being the attitude or flexibility or belief degree pinned on that association, how flexible is it to new information exposition through more chess experience.

"The only way", that seems like logical certitude, did you actually look at it like that, or is it part of your emerging intuition increasing belief up to having never experienced another way? I do not have a lot of experience in chess, hence why i think about these issues, besides science curiosity.

Right: placing the time-control context, as forcing the priority on intuitive decision making. But that does not mean it is only used then. And that is not what you said either, just adding. Intuition is faster in human neural networks than in computer approximations of their architectures. The opposite is true for logical thought. Computers are built from the ground with logic circuits elements, and have to simulate the statistical behavior from there. While in humans, at least me, it seems that logic is a superstructure on top of the basic statistical processing system. Blame it on some pre-frontal cortex acting like a foreman or an orchestra maestro? Can't be playing all the notes, and controlling all the musicians fingers.. (hopefully sustainable analogy).

So tactical patterns, as kinetic mini-choreography involving that motif's units, itself associated to positional features prior to motif execution, the positional pattern acting as trigger for the action building-block. So there may be some set relation or hierarchies of patterns with various types of components. I think that puzzles are good for the action building-blocks, and associated positional triggers, and extending those association appropriately, if the database of puzzles has criterion ensuring good coverage of the many positions where that is useful.

I would suggest though, related to my "only way" question above*, that each consolidating example strengthening such association, be proportionally accompanied by counter examples where that might fail. Or where one might learn to extend the action pattern to another more general action pattern, with possibly also different positional trigger pattern extension (or not).

If such association was frozen consciously as a rule, during augmentation of experience, i.e. held as certitude, then new games in new positional contexts, might suffer from too rigid a hold on that association.(?)

Perhaps, instead of looking for rules, taking such intuition born association systematically as hypotheses, once conscious objects, would allow a natural dialog between conscious chess and intuitive chess. Closing that loop, and hence the idea of appropriate pro and con coverage in some feature or theme based puzzle set proposal (or any themed based tutoring or teaching material).

I think that contrasting pattern associations is a neglected part of chess teaching. Again the notion of time frame for exposing such association and their contrast, should be an important factor (some parallelism).

The contrast would allow adjusting the hypothesis belief strength (at intuition level, these associations are hypotheses than can be modified, not by deletion and replacement, but adapting boundaries, if some internal model serves as a map for all those patterns associations. Does that makes sense with current cognitive psychology knowledge or existing literature on chess psychology of learning (slight nuance with thinking by masters, i.e. how to reach such well rounded experience)? (question to readers with related knowledge or reading reminiscence).

I wish to clarify while i may appear to control what i say, English is not my first language, and i lack subtlety in my choice of words when trying to contrast certain stances. Also, using authors name to point to some attributed stance instead of using other words possibly as concise but not easy to find for me, or risking another rambling way to explain, may not be a good idea.

I have not read any of the books involved first hand, only few extracts, second hand and in discussion contexts.

So let me try to fix my bad form earlier.

Sillman was a placeholder, a shorthand meaning: Conscious only window for teaching chess, using established tradition involving various aspects of chess theory(ies), itself being done with 2 flavors.

One is directed to impatient improvers, less curious about why and how than about now and win. It seems to explain the verbal procedures being attributed to books like that of Sillman "Reassess your chess" in a book by Hendricks. So that flavor is about providing ordered checklists or methods or procedures to use systematically for move selection in game. (short version).
It appears that the ordering may not be as important as the items themselves, but one has to start somewhere, and a book begins and ends. It is not a web of content accessible per question or need to know. At least a book requires a lot of work to become modular and not expecting such ordering from its physical nature.

The other flavor, intertwined often with the other, is a more foundational one, about sets of features that can be recognized from in-game current position as input. Such features may vary from schools to schools, but seem to converge to similar notions, (more consistent and generally applicable or decidable by student own autonomous thinking in game). I consider myself, that there are possible conflicts of definitions, and sometimes un-necessary tangling with the above flavors with some variants of their definitions, but time and critical thinking during that time, has left a bunch of them standing as worthy concepts to consider, that do not have to be memorized independently of own experience. The critical point here, is that the student is able on its own, to understand the logic and rationality and how to recognize such feature with their own critical thinking, and discovery. These are not rules. They are named patterns. a system of patterns. not perfect (can be improved on the consistency side, and internal cross-correlations, like overlap, conflict, or superfluous from being already included in some other family of features). But what matters to me, is that as a student i am not force fed an arbitrary looking rule, I am given a handle on existing commonly understood as worthy recognizable pattern. That I have the means to study and evaluate their importance by myself as i increase chess experience, because they are transparent definitions from the start (at least they "try" to be so) not rule of conduct from above, without autonomous means of own experience critical assessment.

I am confident that as intuition learning and teaching goes from black-box subjective to object of study toward teaching, that ways of integrating existing non-blank slate of various walks of chess life can be developed that will allow graceful ways to take any pre-existing intuition map* of the player looking for prior knowledge from past chess community, for its own sake or for a rational or guided path to chess discovery, possibly avoiding pitfalls of aimless chess experience (other than winning most games of course).

The exaggerated stance, is to negate the existing process of intuition building, and thinking that forcing the above without regard to the intuitive processes going on and evolving per experience in any chess players, is actually the only way to improve the student chess play skills. I do not know whether that is Sillman stance, even if Hendricks, as I gather, may have been writing about that book, as representing that. But, the foundational part of that book, is apparent enough for me, to suspect that the book may have be subject to the audience diverse market potential regarding the flavors mentioned. And the separation between rule, and features does seem to be feasible for the careful reader, with the second flavor objective. Others may compensate or support this current opinion of mine, with more first hand knowledge.

Hendricks as stance placeholder:
My current perception/opinion is mostly second hand, from prior discussions. And a few first reader excerpts that were brought to my attention. I consider that MFTL was needed because the limit stance above in its established or previously established dominance, did exist and might still be a tenet for some. But even if not, this thread was not about who but about the ideas themselves... to clarify what could be in the middle by clearing the grey area.

The book main idea being against the current, I consider that some exaggeration and lumping of the above 2 flavors indicated a will to make some sound in the possibly then desert for the importance of intuition at all levels of play, and its acknowledgment as an object of teaching and learning.

Denying it, may lead to actual regression from confusion and conflict with already internalized notions that have no conscious verbal object attached and hence no docking mechanism for external concepts with words, to perhaps quickly name the closest internal thing instead of conflicting with slow conscious second-guessing. That last sentence is how I tend to understand and agree with MFTL need to have used such pamphlet style.

But even if on the recto page (some chapter) that lumping is clearly and prominently written (verbal protocols AND positional characteristics), reading a bit further, one can find more nuanced developments, where the characteristics are accepted as tutoring opportunities for teaching.

It is clear to me, that the intention of the book, beyond the style, was aiming at flavor 1, combined with a "platonic", no doubt, attitude of their teaching importance and usefulness, and the need to update chess pedagogy with modern psychology data (about experiential learning i think). I do not know of anybody holding that "platonic" stance, by the way. not that I can detect.

So what. Well. i hope that i have fixed my using these authors names (in vain) as shorthand, so that I could avoid explaining all of the above... I thought it would help placing the extremes...

Btw: Same goes with Carlsen self-awareness reference. I don't have first hand reading of that. I do gather that he has been sharing about how he thinks in the context of playing chess, and I think it was good that he did, because there is still the lingering notion that chess progress, is about calculation power in far-look ahead. It may be a prerequisite when hard-pressed, for certain levels of mastery, as an innate memory capacity ability, but it would be exhausting and slow to rely only on that. And i don't think that training can substantially increase the size of ones' "registers" to increase width or depth by practicing. I would be glad and scientifically curious to hear about knowledge or evidence to the contrary though.

• or chess internal model = the set of all things patterns, templates, mutual associations, etc.. as live evolving object representing the current experience and knowledge. with some map for accessing them without having to think verbally about it.

I forgot to talk about the other extreme, that I think, also nobody stands for really. That would be to say, that they is no other way to help improving the internal model of chess (intuition), than just accumulating any number of chess games.
Or that any exposure to community persistent set of position characteristics is either useless or counter-productive.
That did seem to be in Hendricks book, if only reading the big print mentioned above. But I am doubtful that it was not only punchline, to provoke attention to recent psychological studies in cognition. This opposite position may be held by nobody, upon further discussion, although, it does seem to be held by some here, at least at the rhetorical level. I have not seen it being argued beyond mere statement of opinion. No articulated back and forth acknowledging each others statement and replying accordingly to sustain held opinion, to see if there were nuances or possible compatibility.... I believe in opinions being informative, but they do need some follow-up, through discussion. No need to be definitive about something that is not easy to understand. That seems like assuming there is no question, or no point in discussing.