I’m a big fan of Jerry, who posts to YouTube as ChessNetwork his videos of playing chess online.  One of the things he does regularly is playing online speed chess — ultra-rapid, “bullet” chess where each player has ~1m for the whole game.

Chess is a different game when you have 60 seconds to make every move in a whole game.  I find it compelling because it exposes the absence of calculation in very high level chess play.  At 1-2 seconds/move, it is almost purely pattern matching, habit and processes we would have to call intuition.  There is no time for anything but the most rudimentary of calculation.  And yet the level of play is pretty sharp.

Jerry is particularly entertaining because he keeps up a verbal stream of consciousness patter while playing.  He notes positional principles that guide some move selection and his voice gives away his excitement audibly when he senses a tactical play coming.

Understanding how this type of cognitive process is accomplished would tell us a lot about human cognitive function.  What he is doing here is not really hard for any chess player with decent playing experience (I am decent at bullet chess — nothing like Jerry, but I can play).  And relevant to the old post about AI & Hofstadter, the fact that computers are unequivocally dominant at chess has nothing to do with understanding how humans play bullet chess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSkMH9uBPmI

I’ve spoken with chess professionals about speed chess in the past and the general sense is that playing speed will not make you better at chess.  But studying and playing chess slow will make you better at speed chess.  Perhaps a principle of training intuition in complex tasks can be derived from that.