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Chess improves math skills, is it true or false?

#41
@AlexiHarvey said in #32:
> Difficult to understand this, but they are two separate almost entirely unconnected things.

> If you study for a Mathematics degree you make no use of 'calculations', and people who are professional mathematicians also make no use of 'calculations'. It's just not part of the thinking process. You might employ/deploy devices to produce 'calculations' in some fields of Mathematics but the calculation process does not form part of the thinking - one exception being 'Numerical Analysis' and even then it's a bit iffy.

I don't agree with this. In pure maths also we do calculations of some sort - calculations with some other objects, if not necessarily numerical. Saying that some diagram commutes also requires calculation (often with operations like multiplications in some algebras). I would say that formally verified proofs in proof assistants (e.g., Lean, Coq, etc.) bring much closer the conventional notion of calculation as in numerical calculation and a more general notion that I consider calculation.

In that sense chess has some similarity with maths. But relative to chess, maths is so much deeper and broader, and has such a wide range of ideas, that even many mathematicians who are top in their own field are not familiar with frontier ideas from many other fields. So my view, when it comes to comparison with maths, is that chess is at best like complicated high school arithmetic. You practice to do that arithmetic fast, and solve more and more complicated problems, remember much bigger multiplication tables, and so on, and you are a GM. (Apologies to GMs who are reading, and I still like to watch your games.) A GM has to constantly add new multiplication tables to his 'repertoire'. Superficially chess is more appealing than large multiplication tables and complicated high school arithmetic only because it is war like, it has different pieces that move differently, giving it some colour, and so on. But fundamentally it is at the level of high school arithmetic.
#42
@Akarsh_2010 said in #36:
> The closest chess is to math is counting and coordinates. So no chess won't improve your math.

Counting is maths, and coordinates are maths as shown by @Abigail-III here, so what distinction are you making?
#43
@Abigail-III said in #39:
> Yeah, I wanted to write the Q and R with vertical lines, and there are Unicode codepoints for that.
>
> Any program and website I know of can display those symbols. Except one: Lichess. It's like we're back in the 1980s!

You mean these: |?
#44
@AlexiHarvey said in #40:
> Actually they both get credit. Developments in mathematics are often done for financial reasons so much is keep secret and once something becomes public there are often counter claims for being first etc - this is aside from the language, national politics and communications of the times. In fact little has changed. Educationalists place no emphasis on the importance of profit driving progress in many areas of mathematics, engineering and science.
>
> What is very true is Leibniz nomenclature for calculus was far more convenient and useful than Newton's, although you can still see Newton's in some areas of Physics today.

Lim: a tends to X...
#45
@kajalmaya said in #41:
> I don't agree with this. In pure maths also we do calculations of some sort - calculations with some other objects, if not necessarily numerical. Saying that some diagram commutes also requires calculation (often with operations like multiplications in some algebras). I would say that formally verified proofs in proof assistants (e.g., Lean, Coq, etc.) bring much closer the conventional notion of calculation as in numerical calculation and a more general notion that I consider calculation.
>
> In that sense chess has some similarity with maths. But relative to chess, maths is so much deeper and broader, and has such a wide range of ideas, that even many mathematicians who are top in their own field are not familiar with frontier ideas from many other fields. So my view, when it comes to comparison with maths, is that chess is at best like complicated high school arithmetic. You practice to do that arithmetic fast, and solve more and more complicated problems, remember much bigger multiplication tables, and so on, and you are a GM. (Apologies to GMs who are reading, and I still like to watch your games.) A GM has to constantly add new multiplication tables to his 'repertoire'. Superficially chess is more appealing than large multiplication tables and complicated high school arithmetic only because it is war like, it has different pieces that move differently, giving it some colour, and so on. But fundamentally it is at the level of high school arithmetic.

Once more into the breech then?
#48
@heallan said in #47:
> Unicode 8 or 16? Not ASCII?!

The first sentence of the document I linked to reads: "This file contains an excerpt from the character code tables and list of character names for The Unicode Standard, Version 15.0".

So, Unicode version 15.0, which is the most current version. Although these characters were introduced in a way earlier version. Even before version 8.

And no, not ASCII. ASCII doesn't include any blackboard bold characters.

The fact that you mention versions 8 and 16 strongly suggest to me you're confusing Unicode and UTF encoding. Unicode just maps numbers to characters, and assigns properties to those characters. There are many ways to encode those numbers into byte streams, some of which are UTF encodings. Of which UTF-8 and UTF-16 are frequently used, but they aren't the only ones. Which encoding is used between the server and client (browser) is between them, and should be seamless to the user. But they remain the characters which numbers U+211A and U+211D regardless which encoding has been negotiated between the Lichess servers and the used browser.
#49
@Abigail-III said in #48:
> But they remain the characters which numbers U+211A and U+211D regardless which encoding has been negotiated between the Lichess servers and the used browser.

You lost me at: "But they remain the characters which numbers U+211A and U+211D regardless which encoding has been negotiated between the Lichess servers and the used browser."
#50
@kajalmaya said in #41:
> In that sense chess has some similarity with maths. But relative to chess, maths is so much deeper and broader, and has such a wide range of ideas, that even many mathematicians who are top in their own field are not familiar with frontier ideas from many other fields. So my view, when it comes to comparison with maths, is that chess is at best like complicated high school arithmetic. You practice to do that arithmetic fast, and solve more and more complicated problems, remember much bigger multiplication tables, and so on, and you are a GM. (Apologies to GMs who are reading, and I still like to watch your games.) A GM has to constantly add new multiplication tables to his 'repertoire'. Superficially chess is more appealing than large multiplication tables and complicated high school arithmetic only because it is war like, it has different pieces that move differently, giving it some colour, and so on. But fundamentally it is at the level of high school arithmetic.

There is truth to this--calculation of variations is a big part of chess. (But there are areas of math that are also like complicated arithmetic too like asymptotic expansions, planar graphs ...) It's a bit more complicated. In arithmetic the problem determines the order of steps and what to calculate while in chess pattern recognition does. Overall your point is a good one.

I think getting good at chess improves your ability to learn a technical subject independently, which helps with math --- given motivation. It also helps ability to focus your mind for long periods, which helped me a lot with my PhD prelims. In my time these were 4, 4ours super exams which were pass or get kicked out.

-Bill

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