Certain Habits

The most impressive person I’ve met—and this includes former CEOs of Fortune 20 companies, a US Attorney General, a Nobel Prize winner, multiple National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner—was World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov.

I had the opportunity to play in a simultaneous exhibition against him when I competed as a seventh grader in the National Youth Chess Championships. Three things stand out in my memory: Kasparov’s intimidating physical presence; his suffocating play where threat after threat piled up until my position was utterly hopeless; and the warmth and generosity he exhibited everywhere else.

Value of Chess Training

I owe a lot to my chess training as a youngster (I quit playing when I was 14). In nearly everything I’ve done since my sense of strategy, risk, calculation, intuition, elegance, and creativity was inherited from chess.

Since retiring from chess in 2005, Kasparov—in addition to working to overthrow Vladimir Putin—has written at length about the history of chess and what chess can teach us about strategy, psychology, and education.

Kasparov uses the metaphor of chess as a laboratory for life to explain the kinds of lessons that it can teach. It’s a game where the rules are clear, the position is known to both players, and the outcome is a product of decisions made under conditions of perfect information. There is no better abstract test of evaluation, learning, decision-making, and self mastery than high-level competitive chess. And with the growing power of chess-playing computer programs, chess has evolved into an efficient test of the limits both of human intelligence and of artificial (including brute force and statistical) intelligence.

In this week’s New York Review of Books, Kasparov revisits two strategic lessons chess teaches.

Power of Process

Middling talent aided by an efficient process can crush world class talent married to a mediocre process.

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

This doesn’t tell us how to apply the insight. I think one lesson is that we should make sure that our search process matters at least as much as our evaluation process. The amateurs won by exploring a deeper and richer set of candidate moves while evaluating any single position that resulted with less precision than the grandmasters. Evaluate enough plausible alternatives and with enough precision is an effective substitute for absolute skill and experience.

So, how do you distinguish a great search process from a poor one? There’s no one right answer. The optimal process for one set of constraints (whether rules, historical context, competitors) will be suboptimal under a different set of constraints. And the optimal process varies within a game, how much more will it vary across disciplines (whether war, politics, business, markets within business, games, etc.)?

That said, I think you can find clues to the optimal processes in the strategies that appear frequently across disciplines. “Launch and iterate”. “Seek the high ground.” “Simplify.” “Run uphill.” “Leverage your opposition’s strength and momentum.” “Go where they aren’t.” “Don’t divide your troops.” “Big fish, small pond.”

While none of these may, in isolation, be the right solution, the set of strategies is fertile ground to till. Analogies teach strategy. That’s why Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” remains one of the best strategy manuals of all time, whatever game you play.

Charlie Munger discusses this in slightly different terms. He argues that we can improve our decision making by building an interdisciplinary set of “mental models” (PDF link). Key concepts (like normal distributions, power laws, supply and demand, incentives, evolution, spontaneous order, chaos, etc.) yield insights into phenomena across disciplines. They help us avoid “man with hammer” blindness (as in “to a man who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail”). Armed with the right set of mental models, we are more likely to evaluate the right candidates with enough precision and sufficient speed.

Role of Intuition

Second, strategy is a function of intuition. What enables humans to play so well against computers (relative to human’s ability to calculate), and what separates word class chess players from patzers is evaluating the right moves more accurately. Brute force calculations matter at the margins, but are irrelevant without strategic judgment:

Capablanca’s sarcasm aside, correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves “seen ahead”—that computers rely on.

… Programming yourself by analyzing your decision-making outcomes and processes can improve results much the way that a smarter chess algorithm will play better than another running on the same computer. We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software.

Read the whole thing. And don’t miss his musings on computer poker and his hopes for real innovation. But for a better treatment of Kasparov’s thought, and for one of the best books on applied strategy I’ve read, don’t miss Kasparov’s “How Life Imitates Chess.”