Thank you for writing this series Jonah. I’m don’t have the time now to think deeply about this topic, so I thought I’d add to the discussion by mentioning a few related interesting anecdotes.
I doubt what made the Polgar sisters great was innate intelligence.
Another interesting anecdote is von Neumann not (initially?) appreciating the importance of higher-level programming languages:
John von Neumann, when he first heard about FORTRAN in 1954, was unimpressed and asked “why would you want more than machine language?” One of von Neumann’s students at Princeton recalled that graduate students were being used to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine. This student took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work.
http://worrydream.com/#!/dbx
I doubt what made the Polgar sisters great was innate intelligence.
Their father, Laszlo Polgar, was himself a fairly strong chess player, and it is well-known that intelligence is heritable. In addition, Judit Polgar at least (I don’t know about the others) was a child prodigy, implying that she had a great deal of innate ability. Furthermore, chess requires very good working memory (due to something called the touch-move rule forcing players to calculate variations mentally), and it is theorized that working memory may actually be intelligence, further supporting the “innate ability” hypothesis.
That is a very interesting anecdote about von Neumann, if true. The man was one of a kind, and it would be interesting if the need for abstraction in this domain was not clear to him just from doing a ton of math. Maybe blindness-due-to-status (“clerical work...”)
Thank you for writing this series Jonah. I’m don’t have the time now to think deeply about this topic, so I thought I’d add to the discussion by mentioning a few related interesting anecdotes.
I doubt what made the Polgar sisters great was innate intelligence.
Another interesting anecdote is von Neumann not (initially?) appreciating the importance of higher-level programming languages:
EDIT: Apparently, von Neumann’s attitude toward assembly was common among programmers of that era. http://worrydream.com/quotes/#richard-hamming-the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering-2
Given the state of computing at the time, it’s possible that computer time really was more valuable then graduate student time.
Their father, Laszlo Polgar, was himself a fairly strong chess player, and it is well-known that intelligence is heritable. In addition, Judit Polgar at least (I don’t know about the others) was a child prodigy, implying that she had a great deal of innate ability. Furthermore, chess requires very good working memory (due to something called the touch-move rule forcing players to calculate variations mentally), and it is theorized that working memory may actually be intelligence, further supporting the “innate ability” hypothesis.
That is a very interesting anecdote about von Neumann, if true. The man was one of a kind, and it would be interesting if the need for abstraction in this domain was not clear to him just from doing a ton of math. Maybe blindness-due-to-status (“clerical work...”)