How Old is your Brain?

[TSP]

Robin, Hmm...The two tests are definitely different in their structure and purposes. I couldn't even guess about your discovery.

Christopher, I think setting up chess problems and putting a short time limit on solutions would certainly say something about that players blitz skills, but not necessarily their standard rating.

I was always terrible at blitz chess, but in standard games played between 1700 and 1800 back in the day. It always puzzled me how I would struggle with lower rated players in blitz, but easily win longer games against those same players.

[smirobth]

10 out of 10 correct gives a mental age score of 20, so 20 is definitely the youngest this test goes. After you get the first 7 answers correct and it is showing numerals 0-9, it starts adding additional circles in locations where there was no number, trying to fool you. Not quite sure why it bothers, since at that point even if you get one wrong it still gives you a mental age of 20.

Did you get 10 out of 10 correct to check it?

Yes. But not because I am a genius or mental 20 year old. I simply used the "Print Scrn" button to capture the screen image, since the test does not penalize slow answer response times.

The best that I could do is getting 7 digits correctly and I could get age of 20 in my best tries so I can imagine that people who could get more than 7 digits correctly could get better than 20.

Uri

[Dan]

thanks...

that was really good...

1st time - 40 year old

2nd time - 31 year old

I am 52 years young...

Dan Ellwein

[Christopher Conkie]

Christopher, I think setting up chess problems and putting a short time limit on solutions would certainly say something about that players blitz skills, but not necessarily their standard rating.

I was always terrible at blitz chess, but in standard games played between 1700 and 1800 back in the day. It always puzzled me how I would struggle with lower rated players in blitz, but easily win longer games against those same players.

I was not thinking about actual problems, just positions. So for example you might start off with something arbitary like this......

[d]8/8/3k4/8/5r2/8/1K6/8 w

.....and stagger the amount, change the location (square-wise), type and colour of pieces (note...not meant to be recalled in any particular order...although it might also be useful to know what is recalled first). In other words a form of position recollection (ie...how accurate would they be at recreating a position that was seen for only a short while). I was thinking this might be useful to know what a certain person might notice about a position...maybe pawns....location of kings.....etc and also show where they suffered "chess position blindness" for want of a better description.

Nothing to do with age of brain...more to do with what the person is aware of.

Christopher

[TSP]

Yes, being able to see the board, not only as it is, but also accurately maintaining the correct position in memory throughout the branching is obviously critical to good play. Anyone who has played the game knows how difficult it is to keep track of the board as the depth of ply search increases. Seeing the board inaccurately, even at ply one has cost many good players a game.

[Cubeman]

Robin, Hmm...The two tests are definitely different in their structure and purposes. I couldn't even guess about your discovery.

Christopher, I think setting up chess problems and putting a short time limit on solutions would certainly say something about that players blitz skills, but not necessarily their standard rating.

I was always terrible at blitz chess, but in standard games played between 1700 and 1800 back in the day. It always puzzled me how I would struggle with lower rated players in blitz, but easily win longer games against those same players.

You must be like me too.I always play worse at blitz or faster time controls but give me about 3 minutes a move then I can play so much stronger (relativly speaking).It is like my mind has to build up a memory bank of the whole game and the deep plans that I have been thinking about and each new move I can associate how that fits into the grand scheme.Other players must do somthing different or they have a small hashtable which fills up very fast and no more time helps.

[TSP]

Alex,

Yes, that is just about it for me too!

Sometimes it took me awhile to get my head into the game. Then nothing else but the game existed, that is when I got the most enjoyment out of play. Hours could go by in what seemed like only moments.