Adriaan D. de Groot

Thought and Choicein Chess

with a preface by sijbolt noorda

What does a chess master think about while he is contemplating his next move?

How is his thinking organized, what methods, his strategies does he employ to

solve the problem? How does he decide and how profoundly has he envisaged

the possible consequences of his move? Why do masters come up with the good

moves that lesser players overlook?

In order to answer these questions back in 1938, the author undertook an experi-

mental study in which distinguished chess masters such as Alekhine, Euwe,

Keres, Fine, Flohr, among others, served as his subjects. The book has proven to

be of fundamental interest to modern students of human thinking, decision

making and artificial intelligence – not to mention chess players of all ranks,

who may be curious about how the grandmasters think.

Adriaan D. de Groot (1914-2006) studied mathematics and later psychology, in

which he received a Ph.D. in 1946 from the University of Amsterdam. He started

his career as a secondary school mathematics teacher, but soon shifted to psy-

chology. In 1950, he became a professor at the University of Amsterdam.

The Amsterdam Academic Archive is an initiative of Amsterdam University

Press. The series consists of scholarly titles which were no longer available, but

which are still in demand in the Netherlands and abroad. Relevant sections of

these publications can also be found in the repository of Amsterdam University

Press: www.aup.nl/repository.

Ad

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Amsterdam Academic ArchiveAmsterdam University Press

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AUP -De Groot voor AAA:AUP /Crombag AAA 21-05-2008 22:43 Pagina 1

thought and choice in chess

voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina i

The Amsterdam Academic Archive is an initiative of Amsterdam University Press.

The series consists of scholarly titles which were no longer available, but which

are still in demand in the Netherlands and abroad. Relevant sections of these

publications can also be found in the repository of Amsterdam University Press:

www.aup.nl/repository. At the back of this book there is a list

of all AAA titles published so far.

voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina ii

Adriaan D. de Groot

Thought and Choice in Chess

with a preface by sijbolt noorda

Amsterdam Academic Archive

3 a

voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina iii

For this edition of Thought and Choice in Chess the second print run of 1978

has been used, published by Mouton Publishers, The Hague, the Netherlands

(isbn 90-279-7914-6).

Cover design: René Staelenberg, Amsterdam

isbn 978 90 5356 998 6

e-isbn 978 90 4850 191 5

nur 776

© Heirs A.D. de Groot / Amsterdam University Press

Amsterdam Academic Archive, 2008

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission

of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina iv

preface

Doctoral theses are usually only read by a handful of professional colleagues. It is

quite uncommon that they get a second life by reprint or translation. A dissertation

that becomes the lifelong trademark of a researcher is a unique phenomenon. The

present book is one such rarity.

Its author, A.D. de Groot (1914-2006), was a very prominent Dutch psychologist

and for three decades a professor at the University of Amsterdam. His research con-

tributed substantially to the development of psychology as an empirical discipline.

His classic Methodology (1961; English translation 1969) had a great impact on the

teaching and practice of social science research in the Netherlands. And until this

very day the Dutch school system relies on aptitude tests proposed by De Groot in his

book on selection processes in education.

His most original book, however, was his very first, a doctoral dissertation on

chess thinking. Himself an able chess player (as a young man he made it to the Dutch

national team) Adriaan Dingeman de Groot chose the process of thought and choice

in chess to test and develop conceptions and theories on thinking. He invited some

of the best chess players of the time to be his guinea-pigs. They were to study a selec-

tion of positions and try to find the best possible move in each of them. Meanwhile

they were asked to ‘think aloud’, verbalizing their thought processes as accurately as

possible.

By this experimental set up the author sought to describe the process of reasoning

on an empirical basis, by making use of the earlier theory of productive thinking pro-

posed by Otto Selz (1913, 1922).

As far as specific chess reasoning was concerned, De Groot’s study led to a number of

surprising results. Although master level players – as one would expect – more often

selected winning moves than lesser players, their thinking and decision making fol-

lowed similar procedural lines. No substantial structural variety could be observed.

The main difference between grandmasters and players of average strength is the

speed of recognizing the central issue in each position. Where lesser players tend to

spend considerable time on unimportant options, the best players almost immedi-

ately see what the real problem is. That’s their talent, or rather their competence,

acquired during long years of training and competition.

All along chess players took great interest in De Groot’s work, as an exercise in

empirical psychology, but above all as an endeavour to explaining chess genius. His

analysis was acknowledged by most and led to a new approach to the teaching and

training of young chess players. A later study by Riekent Jongman (1968) (a thesis

under supervision of De Groot and presented in his Perception and Memory in Chess, with

Fernand Gobet (1996)) corroborated De Groot’s findings and underlined the attribu-

tion of chess mastery to knowledge and experience rather than to a strong computa-

tional competence or an exceptional memory. An expert chess player sees the defin-

voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina v

ing characteristics of a chess position in the blink of an eye because he recognizes its

functional properties and possibilities. That explains the quality and the speed of his

judgment. When asked to reconstruct positions they only had had a few seconds to

observe, they showed remarkable skills in doing so, as long as these positions where

realistic, regular chess positions. Confronted with unlikely random arrangements of

pieces on the chessboard their superiority was gone.

De Groot’s original doctor’s thesis (in Dutch: Het denken van de schaker, 1946) was pub-

lished in a limited edition and has been hard to find. The English translation of 1965

showed that the topic and the study remained of great interest to a wide audience of

psychologists, chess players and computer programmers. This version is now

reprinted, as a tribute to Professor A.D. de Groot’s originality of experimentation and

strong powers of methodological research. At the same time the book is a milestone

marking the transition of the psychological study of genius to the early beginnings

of empirical cognitive science.

In fact, de Groot’s thesis inspired a major breakthrough in the development of AI

models of thinking, in part by his systematic analysis of the thinking-aloud proto-

cols of how chess thinking proceeded, and in part by his application of Selz’s theory

of productive thought as a sequence of distinct methods. Both influenced the devel-

opment of AI models of thinking, and notably the work of Herbert Simon and Alan

Newell and their epoch-making Human Problem Solving from 1972.

Sijbolt Noorda

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titles published in the AAA series

Andriessen, L. and Schönberger, E. The Apollonian Clockwork, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 856 5)

Appel, R. and Muysken, P. Language Contact and Bilingualism, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 857 3)

Bal, M. Reading Rembrandt, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 858 1)

Belinfante, A.D. In plaats van bijltjesdag, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 890 5)

Bennis, H. Gaps and Dummies, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 859 x)

Blom, H. De muiterij op De Zeven Provinciën, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 844 1)

Boutellier, H. Solidariteit en slachtofferschap, 2008 (isbn 978 90 5356 409 7)

Bruggen, C. van Hedendaags fetisjisme, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 891 3)

Crombag, H.F.M. Een manier van overleven, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 940 5)

Dehue, T. De regels van het vak, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 845 x)

Dijksterhuis, E.J. De mechanisering van het wereldbeeld, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 892 1)

Engbersen, G. Publieke bijstandsgeheimen, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 852 2)

Engbersen, G.; Schuyt, K.; Timmer, J. and Waarden, F. van Cultures of Unemployment,

2006 (isbn 90 5356 846 8)

Geyl, P.C.A. Napoleon, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 893 x)

Goedegebuure, J. De schrift herschreven, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 847 6)

Goedegebuure, J. De veelvervige rok, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 848 4)

Groot, Adriaan D. de Thought and Choice in Ches, 2008 (isbn 978 90 5356 998 6)

Hugenholtz, B. Auteursrecht op informatie, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 849 2)

Idema, H. and Haft, L. Chinese letterkunde, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 842 5)

Janssens, J. De middeleeuwen zijn anders, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 850 6)

Kohnstamm, D. Ik ben ik, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 853 0)

Komter, A. Omstreden gelijkheid, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 854 9)

Meijer, M. In tekst gevat, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 855 7)

Oostindie, G. Ethnicity in the Caribbean, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 851 4)

Pinkster, H. On Latin Adverbs, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 843 3)

Righart, H. De eindeloze jaren zestig, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 941 3)

Schöffer, I. Het nationaal-socialistische beeld van de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 2006

(isbn 90 5356 895 6)

Schulte Nordholt, H. Het beeld der Renaissance, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 939 1)

Tilburg, M. van and Vingerhoets, A. Psychological Aspects of Geographical Moves, 2006

(isbn 90 5356 860 3)

Vries, J. de Barges and Capitalism, 2006 (isbn 90 5356 897 2)

voorwerk De Groot AAA:voorwerk Engbersen eng AAA 27-05-2008 12:03 Pagina vii