Chess Engines, Centaur Chess and an idea for a new kind of tournament

January 1, 2025

Engines have had an enormous impact on chess - can we find ways to incorporate them into OTB play fairly?

Science of Chess: Can you tell a human opponent from a machine?

December 22, 2024

Do chess engines pass the Turing Test?

Science of Chess: Subliminal Chess in the Expert Mind?

November 25, 2024

Visual priming reveals how experts assess positions without awareness

Science of Chess: How does chess calculation depend on words vs. pictures?

November 9, 2024

Thinking ahead over the board requires maintaining some description of the position in your mind, but what is the nature of that description?

Join my new subscriber chat

November 9, 2024

A private space for us to converse and connect

Science of Chess: What happens in the brain when we see the best move?

October 2, 2024

EEG is good for measuring the timing of neural events, but can it reveal what happens when insight hits?

Science of Chess: Reflex Epilepsy induced by Playing Chess

September 13, 2024

An electrical storm in the brain reveals links between chess and (some) other forms of complex thought.

Science of Chess: Gestalt Processing in Experts' Brains

September 4, 2024

Playing chess requires a network of distinct brain areas across the cortex, but what do these areas contribute to our playing ability?

Science of Chess - Finding chess expertise in the brain: A case study

August 14, 2024

What do we learn by looking for neural networks that support chess expertise in the human brain? What do we find when we do?

Hands-on Vision Science: "Thatcherizing" real faces with inverting goggles

August 7, 2024

More #visionscience in the park leads to a neat developmental question about face perception at different ages.

Hands-on Vision Science: Chromodepth with Crayola's sidewalk chalk

June 28, 2024

In which I investigate how one of Crayola's cooler products turns colored chalk into 3D art.

Science of Chess: A g-factor for chess? A psychometric scale for playing ability

May 10, 2024

How do you measure chess skill? It depends on what you want to know.

Science of Chess - Achtung! Einstellung!

May 1, 2024

Pattern recognition is great, but the Einstellung effect can turn a master into a patzer (sort of).

Science of Chess - Eyetracking, board vision, and expertise (Part 2 of 2)

May 1, 2024

Better players move their eyes differently than weaker players - what does that tell us about their board vision?

Science of Chess - Eyetracking, board vision, and expertise (Part 1 of 2)

March 27, 2024

Looking for the best move involves, well...looking. How do players move their eyes during a game and what do they get out of it?

Science of Chess - Problem Solving or Pattern Recognition?

March 27, 2024

We often say chess is a game of patterns, but here I look at a study that suggests it is also a game of problems.

Science of Chess - Should we study GMs to understand chess and the mind/brain?

March 27, 2024

Chess research focuses a lot on experts, but should it?

Science of Chess - Spatial Cognition and Calculation

March 27, 2024

How do spatial reasoning abilities impact chess performance? What is spatial cognition anyways?

Science of Chess - David Marr, candidate moves and why it's so hard to be good.

March 27, 2024

A bird's-eye view of the cognitive and perceptual factors that make chess so tough.

A Worthy Opponent

November 1, 2023

A short story about chess, AI, and personalities

Geordi La Forge’s VISOR and the promise of prosthetic vision

September 29, 2023

Connecting a 24th-century prosthetic to our 21st-century understanding of human vision.

The Predator: A vision science perspective

September 7, 2023

There is a real argument to be made that Predator is perfect. I don’t mean that it’s objectively a good movie (though it is) but that I can’t imagine how or...

Missing the obvious over the board because of visual crowding

September 7, 2023

A bottleneck in visual processing may be (part of) why keeping track of everything on the chess board is so hard

How many kinds of chess ability are there?

September 7, 2023

I play Rapid, Blitz, and Bullet chess equally poorly, but do I use different cognitive mechanisms for them?

Superman, X-rays, and Extramission theories of vision.

September 7, 2023

The Man of Steel's visual capabilities make contact with folk theories of vision.