Chess Masters Research Articles

A BRIEF EXPLORATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN DENTAL HEALTHCARE: A Narrative review

Artificial intelligence is a computer system which can replicate human behavior and largely supports human actions and interpretation, but not replace human responses. Over the past few decades, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced phenomenal development and expansion. We are surrounded by several instances of AI. The most typical examples include Chat GPT, Alexa, Google Maps, autocorrect and text editors, e-payments, virtual travel booking agent, social media monitoring, gaming, including chess matches involving computers versus human chess masters, self driving cars, adaptive cruise control, parking assistance, and facial recognition for biometrics such as retinal scans and fingerprint scans. AI has applications in different branches of Dentistry. This review article attempts to highlight these points and lays an emphasis on how AI is driving dentistry in the present and will improve dental care in the future. A total of 59 papers from an electronic search using Google Scholar and PubMed were used to create this narrative review. Artificial intelligence can be utilised for diagnosis, decision-making, treatment planning, early detection and prevention of oral disease, and finally result prediction by utilising cutting-edge technology in imaging. It shows how dentists can use it as a useful tool at various phases of clinical cases. The future of AI in dentistry appears to be outstanding with advancements in full artificial intelligence technology, dental assistance, and dental instructional tools. In order to help dental professionals better grasp AI as a tool to assist their work with enhanced efficiency, investigations need to be done to uncover patterns and foresee future related to oral health concerns.

Identifying the Neurocognitive Difference Between Two Groups Using Supervised Learning


 
 
 Brain Imaging Analysis is a dynamic and exciting field within neuroscience. This study is conducted with two main objectives. First, to develop a classification framework to enhance predictive performance, and second, to conduct a comparative analysis of accuracy versus inference using brain imaging data. The dataset of chess masters and chess novices is utilized to identify neurocognitive differences between the two groups, based on their resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data. A network of connections between brain regions is created and analyzed. Standard statistical learning techniques and machine learning models are then applied to distinguish connectivity patterns between the groups. The trade-off between model precision and interpretability is also assessed. Finally, model performance measures, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and AUC, are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model framework.
 
 

Algorithms and Mathematics Education A Response and Review of Hannah Fry’s Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

At the outset, Dr. Hannah Fry’s book Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms is an engaging survey of how algorithms are being used in modern life. The book is written for a general audience with a focus on concepts and principles. As such, the narrative does not dig deeply into the details of any particular topic but instead offers a snapshot of how algorithms reside within a variety of contexts in the modern world. Through relatable examples, Dr. Fry builds a narrative that explains how algorithms are used as tools to predict, influence, augment, and mimic human behavior. Woven throughout the narrative are stories that reveal the power and pitfalls of algorithms. We learn about algorithms used by advertisers, data brokers, judges, chess masters, and healthcare workers. Along the way, Dr. Fry reveals how algorithms are being used to identify cancerous cells, build driverless vehicles, influence an online behavior, and create art. After reading the book, I was left asking practical questions such as, did that recent grocery store advertisement arrive by chance or is it based on my previous shopping behavior? How is my online browsing influencing the advertisements I see on social media? At the same time, the book inspired broader questions such as, how are algorithms being used for sentencing within the local court system? In what ways is care at the nearby hospital influenced by algorithms? In what follows, I have sought to craft a response to the book from my own lens of mathematics education rather than a detailed analysis of the particular merits. For those seeking a recommendation on whether or not to read the book, my response is: Read it. It is inextricably connected to the work that you do.

Orchestrating a digital platform ecosystem to address societal challenges: A robust action perspective

Orchestration of digital platform ecosystems has been well examined in the context of markets and the private sector where an orchestrator is a resourceful firm exploiting commercial opportunities in an industry. However, little is known about how it occurs when a government organization orchestrates to address societal challenges. We build upon the construct of “robust action”—identified with chess masters who play to advance a broad strategy while simultaneously maintaining flexibility—to explain how orchestration by a government organization might overcome initiation, stabilization, expansion, and meta-governance challenges through digital platform-enabled participative architecture, multivocal inscriptions, and distributed experimentation. Evidence for our theoretical framework is drawn from empirical studies of the Aadhaar, a platform ecosystem orchestrated to address multiple societal challenges stemming from identity and its management.

Musical expertise, musical style, and visual attention

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that people with experience within a particular domain have exceptional cognitive abilities for domain-specific information. Chess masters, for instance, are far better at memorizing visually presented chess positions than amateurs, and professional American football experts are highly sensitive to semantic changes in domain-related scenes. However, for non-domain-related material, experts’ performance becomes similar to novice performance. But how does this apply to music? We compared experienced musicians’ and novices’ attentional function and visual working memory using the change blindness flicker paradigm. The task was to detect minor changes between two otherwise identical music scores of differing styles: traditional (C-major, regular rhythms), contemporary (atonal, irregular rhythms), and random (nonsense music). We expected that (1) experienced musicians would detect changes faster, (2) the between-group difference would be larger for traditional than contemporary music, and (3) the groups’ performance would be more similar for random music. The experienced musicians detected changes significantly faster in both the contemporary and traditional music material, whereas the difference was nonsignificant for the random condition. The difference between groups was largest for contemporary music, despite its higher level of complexity. We discuss these results in relation to existing literature on expertise in visual information processing.

Morphometric and Functional Brain Connectivity Differentiates Chess Masters From Amateur Players.

A common task in brain image analysis includes diagnosis of a certain medical condition wherein groups of healthy controls and diseased subjects are analyzed and compared. On the other hand, for two groups of healthy participants with different proficiency in a certain skill, a distinctive analysis of the brain function remains a challenging problem. In this study, we develop new computational tools to explore the functional and anatomical differences that could exist between the brain of healthy individuals identified on the basis of different levels of task experience/proficiency. Toward this end, we look at a dataset of amateur and professional chess players, where we utilize resting-state functional magnetic resonance images to generate functional connectivity (FC) information. In addition, we utilize T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging to estimate morphometric connectivity (MC) information. We combine functional and anatomical features into a new connectivity matrix, which we term as the functional morphometric similarity connectome (FMSC). Since, both the FC and MC information is susceptible to redundancy, the size of this information is reduced using statistical feature selection. We employ off-the-shelf machine learning classifier, support vector machine, for both single- and multi-modality classifications. From our experiments, we establish that the saliency and ventral attention network of the brain is functionally and anatomically different between two groups of healthy subjects (chess players). We argue that, since chess involves many aspects of higher order cognition such as systematic thinking and spatial reasoning and the identified network is task-positive to cognition tasks requiring a response, our results are valid and supporting the feasibility of the proposed computational pipeline. Moreover, we quantitatively validate an existing neuroscience hypothesis that learning a certain skill could cause a change in the brain (functional connectivity and anatomy) and this can be tested via our novel FMSC algorithm.

Administrative apparatus of Stalin era and Alekhin - Botvinnik failed match (1939-1940)

This article examines the fate of the well-known chess players of the middle of the 20th century - the “expatriate defector” Alexander Alekhine and the Soviet champion Mikhail Botvinnik - as one of the little-known stories related to the history of the contacts between the representatives of the Russian diaspora and the Soviet state of the Stalin era. The author examines the history of the failed match between these two outstanding chess masters in 1939-1940 and shows why the Alekhine-Botvinnik match, which had been initially approved at the highest party and state level, was not held, and find out what role the Soviet administrative apparatus played in this. The author comes to conclusion that under the conditions of strict authoritarian leadership, with the directives of V.M. Molotov, N.A. Bulganin and A.Ya. Vyshinsky, and possibly Joseph Stalin, the managers had a sufficient set of bureaucratic methods that allowed delaying the process of preparing the match up to a favourable occasion which led to the final breakdown in the negotiations. Such methods include precaution, prolonging pauses in interdepartmental communication, requesting for “instructions”, recalculating estimates, using rumours as arguments, using erroneous addresses and redirecting correspondence. The reason for the officials’ inactivity was the fear of personal responsibility for the defeat of the Soviet champion by the “expatriate defector”, especially in the situation when some leaders of the USSR chess movement were repressed. The author’s analysis provides insight into the problems of the functioning of the executive power in the conditions of the political regime established in the USSR by the beginning of the Second World War.

Does Far Transfer Exist? Negative Evidence From Chess, Music, and Working Memory Training

Chess masters and expert musicians appear to be, on average, more intelligent than the general population. Some researchers have thus claimed that playing chess or learning music enhances children’s cognitive abilities and academic attainment. We here present two meta-analyses assessing the effect of chess and music instruction on children’s cognitive and academic skills. A third meta-analysis evaluated the effects of working memory training—a cognitive skill correlated with music and chess expertise—on the same variables. The results show small to moderate effects. However, the effect sizes are inversely related to the quality of the experimental design (e.g., presence of active control groups). This pattern of results casts serious doubts on the effectiveness of chess, music, and working memory training. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings; extend the debate to other types of training such as spatial training, brain training, and video games; and conclude that far transfer of learning rarely occurs.

Predicting the outcomes of organic reactions via machine learning: are current descriptors sufficient?

As machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithms are defeating chess masters and, most recently, GO champions, there is interest – and hope – that they will prove equally useful in assisting chemists in predicting outcomes of organic reactions. This paper demonstrates, however, that the applicability of machine learning to the problems of chemical reactivity over diverse types of chemistries remains limited – in particular, with the currently available chemical descriptors, fundamental mathematical theorems impose upper bounds on the accuracy with which raction yields and times can be predicted. Improving the performance of machine-learning methods calls for the development of fundamentally new chemical descriptors.

Chess Masters' Hypothesis Testing in Games of Dynamic Equilibrium

Chess Masters' Hypothesis Testing in Games of Dynamic Equilibrium

Effective connectivity reveals strategy differences in an expert calculator.

Mathematical reasoning is a core component of cognition and the study of experts defines the upper limits of human cognitive abilities, which is why we are fascinated by peak performers, such as chess masters and mental calculators. Here, we investigated the neural bases of calendrical skills, i.e. the ability to rapidly identify the weekday of a particular date, in a gifted mental calculator who does not fall in the autistic spectrum, using functional MRI. Graph-based mapping of effective connectivity, but not univariate analysis, revealed distinct anatomical location of “cortical hubs” supporting the processing of well-practiced close dates and less-practiced remote dates: the former engaged predominantly occipital and medial temporal areas, whereas the latter were associated mainly with prefrontal, orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate connectivity. These results point to the effect of extensive practice on the development of expertise and long term working memory, and demonstrate the role of frontal networks in supporting performance on less practiced calculations, which incur additional processing demands. Through the example of calendrical skills, our results demonstrate that the ability to perform complex calculations is initially supported by extensive attentional and strategic resources, which, as expertise develops, are gradually replaced by access to long term working memory for familiar material.

Valedictorians of the Soviet School: Professionalization and the Impact of War in Soviet Chess

September 2, 1945, is best remembered as the day World War II officially ended. But on this day the United States and the Soviet Union also formally resumed international sports competition--with a chess The occurred over l-4 September via radio receivers in New York and Moscow and was the first ever chess competition between the countries. Except for leading grandmasters Mikhail Botvinnik and Czech-born Salo Flohr, Soviet players were relatively unknown in the United States and had little international experience compared to the American team. Just days before the match, the New York Times proclaimed that a competition among 100 players might end in the Soviets' favor because of the massive popularity of the game in the USSR. In a two-game contest often American masters versus their Soviet counterparts, however, the Times had reason for misgivings as to the outcome of the forthcoming match. (1) The Times could not have been more mistaken. The Soviet team won by an overwhelming margin, 15 1/2-4 1/2. (2) Moreover, on the first and second boards in both games, Botvinnik and Vasilii Smyslov (the next two world champions) devastated the two best American masters, Arnold Denker and Samuel Reshevsky. (3) The Soviet chess journal Shakhmaty v SSSR called the victory the match of the 20th (4) Soviet commentators claimed that a style of play unique to the Soviet Union--the Soviet school of chess--accounted for the victory. This style was essentially romantic, meaning that Soviet players attempted to find hidden combinations or sacrifices that would lead to a dramatic and decisive checkmate. Soviet chess literature contrasted it with an outdated positional style supposedly used by players in the West. Players who adopted a positional strategy stressed incremental gains over the course of the game, favoring careful pawn structure over bold sacrifices. For Soviet chess experts, the obvious conclusion was that the difference between these styles represented the ideological divide between the dynamic East and the declining West; the overwhelming victories of Soviet chess masters represented the inevitable triumph of socialism. How did Soviet chess masters, virtual unknowns before the war, come to dominate international play by 1945? The answer begins with the founding of the state-run Chess Section in 1924. The Soviet state did not, of course, invent chess. The game appeared in the Russian lands before the 10th century and it was well-known among intellectuals in urban centers during the 19th century. The country's first chess society, the All-Russia Chess Association, was founded in 1914 and had approximately 5,000 members before it discontinued its activities after the outbreak of World War I. Chess, like other forms of bourgeois entertainment, was an activity the new Soviet state co-opted and shaped. Yet party-state officials did not favor all forms of recreation but rather those with a didactic bent, like mountain climbing or tourism. Chess was similar in that initially it was supposed to teach the population skills and qualities that would prove valuable outside the game. However, the goals for chess shifted over time. In the Great Turn, the aims of chess changed in a way that corresponded to what Matthew Lenoe calls the shift from mass enlightenment project to mobilization. Nonetheless, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s the Chess Section's main purpose was to spread chess, and whatever good might come with it, among the populace. (5) Unlike exponents of other didactic forms of entertainment, though, the best Soviet players were at once organizers and high-level competitors in a time of blossoming international sports competition. Barbara Keys writes that the interwar period saw a burgeoning of internationalist nationalism--a desire to prove one's country's worth through international sport. Stalin's Soviet Union was no exception. Soviet competitors in the 1920s played mostly in workers' tournaments, but by the mid-1930s authorities began to allow competition against foreign professionals. …

Chess masters show a hallmark of face processing with chess.

Face processing has several distinctive hallmarks that researchers have attributed either to face-specific mechanisms or to extensive experience distinguishing faces. Here, we examined the face-processing hallmark of selective attention failure--as indexed by the congruency effect in the composite paradigm--in a domain of extreme expertise: chess. Among 27 experts, we found that the congruency effect was equally strong with chessboards and faces. Further, comparing these experts with recreational players and novices, we observed a trade-off: Chess expertise was positively related to the congruency effect with chess yet negatively related to the congruency effect with faces. These and other findings reveal a case of expertise-dependent, facelike processing of objects of expertise and suggest that face and expert-chess recognition share common processes.

CHESS AS A BEHAVIORAL MODEL FOR COGNITIVE SKILL RESEARCH: REVIEW OF BLINDFOLD CHESS BY ELIOT HEARST AND JOHN KNOTT

This multifaceted work on chess played without sight of the pieces is a sophisticated psychologist's examination of this topic and of chess skill in general, including a detailed and comprehensive historical account. This review builds on Hearst and Knott's assertion that chess can provide a uniquely useful model for research on several issues in the area of cognitive skill and imagery. A key issue is the relationship between viewing a stimulus and mental imagery in the light of blindfold chess masters' consistent reports that they do not use or have images. This review also proposes a methodology for measuring and quantifying an individual's skill shortfall from a theoretical maximum. This methodology, based on a 1951 proposal by Claude Shannon, is applicable to any choice situation in which all the available choices are known. The proposed “Proficiency” measure reflects the equivalent number of “yes—no” questions that would have been required to arrive at a best choice, considering also the time consumed. As the measure provides a valid and nonarbitrary way to compare different skills and the effects of different independent variables on a given skill, it may have a wide range of applications in cognitive skill research, skill training, and education.

Indrek Martinson

Indrek Martinson, an internationally recognized expert on accelerator-based atomic physics, died unexpectedly but peacefully in Södra Sandby, Sweden, on 14 November 2009. Indrek was an emeritus professor at the University of Lund in Sweden and director of the university’s department of atomic spectroscopy; he also was a former chair of the physics section of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which oversees the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics.Indrek was born on 26 December 1937 in Tartu, Estonia. Although it had been independent since 1918, during World War II Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union, then by Germany, and then again by the Soviet Union. With the second Soviet occupation in 1944, Indrek and his family were forced to leave their home and become refugees in Germany. Two years later the Martinsons immigrated to Sweden, where Indrek obtained citizenship.Indrek’s first research studies began in 1961 and were in beta- and gammaray spectroscopy, carried out under Manne Siegbahn at the Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm. In 1964 Indrek, Torsten Alväger, and Hans Ryde performed a measurement that set a lower limit for the lifetime of the proton. The measurement subsequently provided a test of weak-interaction theories. In 1968, at the suggestion of institute director Ingmar Bergström, Indrek began studies in time-resolved fast-ion-beam spectroscopy. Those methods were being developed at the University of Arizona by Stanley Bashkin and William Bickel, and Indrek spent one year as a visiting scientist there.After a productive year abroad, Indrek returned to Stockholm, and together with Jan Bromander and Gordon Berry arranged the Second International Conference on Beam-Foil Spectroscopy, held in June 1970 in Lysekil on the west coast of Sweden. The conference marked a great expansion of the field of accelerator-based atomic physics, with many active laboratories reporting new results. By then, lifetime studies were complemented by fine- and hyperfine-structure measurements using coherent-excitation and quantum-beat methods. Siegbahn, retired but still active at the Nobel Institute, was intrigued by the possibilities of atomic structure studies using accelerators, and each month Indrek and Siegbahn met to discuss the latest results. In 1971 Indrek completed his filosofie doktor thesis titled “Investigations of Atomic Spectra and Transition Probabilities Using Beam-Foil Excitation.”In 1976 Bengt Edlén’s retirement from the University of Lund left vacant the professorship once held by Janne Rydberg. In a highly selective competition, Indrek was chosen to occupy that chair and lead the university’s department of atomic spectroscopy. Rather than completely reorganizing the department, Indrek established a synergy between the high-wavelength- resolution spectroscopy of Edlén and his own time-resolved measurements. He also introduced laser- and tokamak-produced plasma light sources, synchrotron- radiation measurements, and Fourier transform spectroscopy. He pioneered the measurement of lifetimes of multiply excited states, developed a method that combines quantum-beat and lifetime measurements to obtain unprecedented accuracies in half-lives and fine-structure splittings, and devised an ingenious method for measuring forbidden transition rates through differential lifetime measurements. Many of his halflife measurements have altered accepted elemental solar and stellar abundances. Indrek created an atmosphere of international collaboration that brought together many individuals and techniques. He opened exchanges between scientists in the West and those in Estonia, Lithuania, Russia, China, and Japan. A touching moment occurred in 1991, when Indrek returned to the city of his birth to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Tartu. He was awarded Estonia’s Order of the White Star in 2001 for service to the country.Indrek’s life was rich and varied. In addition to his abilities as a physicist, he had a great love for classical music and sports and a vast knowledge of both. A top-ranked chess player in Stockholm, Indrek often entertained visiting international chess masters and was able to hold Bobby Fischer to a draw.Indrek was a gifted and imaginative scientist, a great humanitarian, and one of the kindest and most personable people that I have known.Indrek MartinsonPPT|High resolution© 2010 American Institute of Physics.

LEFT LATERALIZATION IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY: AN fMRI STUDY USING THE EXPERT ARCHIVAL PARADIGM

In brain-imaging and behavioral research, studies of autobiographical memory have higher ecological validity than controlled laboratory memory studies. However, they also have less controllability over the variables investigated. This article presents a novel technique—the expert archival paradigm—that increases controllability while maintaining ecological validity. Stimuli were created from games played by two international-level chess masters. The two players were asked to perform a memory task with stimuli generated from their own games and stimuli generated from other players’ games while they were scanned using fMRI. The study found a left lateralized pattern of brain activity that was very similar in both masters. The brain areas activated were the left temporo-parietal junction and left frontal areas. The expert archival paradigm has the advantage of not requiring an interview to assess the participants’ autobiographical memories, and affords the possibility of measuring their accuracy of remembering as well as their brain activity related to remote and recent memories. It can also be used in any field of expertise, including arts, sciences, and sports, in which archival data are available.

Perceptual (Re)learning: A Leverage Point for Human-Centered Computing

At least since Adrianus Dingeman de Groot conducted his pioneering work on the reasoning of chess masters, perceptual skill has been regarded as key to the advantage of experts. Here we explore the conjunction of two facts: 1. experts can perceive things that are invisible to the novice; 2. it takes a decade or more for someone to become an expert in most significant domains; 3. this conjunction represents a leverage point for intelligent systems - not from the Turing Test perspective of building machines that emulate humans but from the human-centered computing (HCC) perspective of amplifying and extending human capabilities.

Inflexibility of experts—Reality or myth? Quantifying the Einstellung effect in chess masters

Inflexibility of experts—Reality or myth? Quantifying the Einstellung effect in chess masters

Linguistic Geometry: A Gaming Approach to Training Combat Strategies

Linguistic Geometry (LG) is a mathematical theory that captures the decision making processes similar to those of the great chess masters. In the current demonstration LG is applied to a military combat game that allows users to test their strategies against an intelligent simulated force while receiving feedback regarding the accomplishment of the task and amount of resources spent. Additionally, a usability study was conducted on LG-based software (LG-PROTECTOR) indicating that the software was easy to learn and remember and has an interface conducive to training. The next generation of LG software (LG-EXPERT) is currently under development to provide increased capabilities that will help train users to “Think Like A Commander” as they practice rules of engagement and learn effective courses of action. Additional training implications are discussed.

An Active Symbols Theory of Chess Intuition

The well-known game of chess has traditionally been modeled in artificial intelligence studies by search engines with advanced pruning techniques. The models were thus centered on an inference engine manipulating passive symbols in the form of tokens. It is beyond doubt, however, that human players do not carry out such processes. Instead, chess masters instead carry out perceptual processes, carefully categorizing the chunks perceived in a position and gradually building complex dynamic structures to represent the subtle pressures embedded in the positions. In this paper we will consider two hypotheses concerning the underlying subcognitive processes and architecture. In the first hypothesis, a multiple-leveled chess representational structure is presented, which includes distance graphs (with varying levels of quality) between pieces, piece mobilities, and abstract roles. These representational schemes seem to account for numerous characteristics of human player's psychology. The second hypothesis concerns the extension of the architecture proposed in the Copycat project as central for modeling the emergent intuitive perception of a chess position. We provide a synthesis on how the postulated architecture models chess intuition as an emergent mixture of simultaneous distance estimations, chunk perceptions, abstract role awareness, and intention activations. This is an alternative model to the traditional AI approaches, focusing on the philosophy of active symbols.