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Re:Ask HN: Working Memory And Understanding by gahahaha on Sunday December 18, 2011 @04:57PM (#3367598)
I am reminded of this article on learning math: http://www.ams.org/notices/201010/rtx101001303p.pdf

"""The alternative route to acquiring problem- solving skill in mathematics derives from the work of a Dutch psychologist, De Groot (1946–1965), investigating the source of skill in chess. Research- ing why chess masters always defeated weekend players, De Groot managed to find only one difference. He showed masters and weekend players a board configuration from a real game, removed it after five seconds, and asked them to reproduce the board. Masters could do so with an accuracy rate of about 70% compared with 30% for weekend players. Chase and Simon (1973) replicated these results and additionally demon- strated that when the experiment was repeated with random configurations rather than real-game configurations, masters and weekend players had equal accuracy (±30%). Masters were superior only for configurations taken from real games."""

And what I'm thinking is that maybe (just maybe) you just haven't programmed enough to become a "master programmer" with the ability to remember your program like master chess players remember their games.

Re:Ask HN: Working Memory And Understanding by gwern on Monday December 19, 2011 @04:15PM (#3371170)
There are other results on chess, you know, like grandmasters spending more effort on falsifying their suggested moves: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117...

Correlation is not causation, and of the two correlations, I think falsificationism is more useful than quick board-encoding - you don't play chess from memory, you play the position the game is currently at.