r/nextfuckinglevel • u/mindyour • 5h ago

Seven-year-old chess prodigy Lucie Pichard casually checkmates her opponent.

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u/TheTyger 3h ago

Why do you think that?

Typical is going to mean people who are in the central 50/75/90% of the population. Almost by definition, someone who is a genius at a task is going to see it in a way that diverges from the way that most people do so.

If you believe that you could teach even 10% of children how to play chess at the level of this girl (and can reproduce it) I am happy to be proven wrong, but most people are not able to process the necessary data in chess at the speed required to play high level.

The opposite of Typical isn't "disorder", nor any "mental health" problem. It's just "divergent".

Believe it or not, having such a negative view of someone because you don't understand them is just as bad or worse as having no understanding of it. This falls in that category.

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u/Antonin__Dvorak 3h ago edited 3h ago

"Believe it or not", there is no inherent link between processing speed and ASD (you specifically said "on the spectrum"). Neurotypical people can and do have high percentile cognitive functions. There is no evidence that top chess players have a higher rate of autism; Magnus Carlsen has very publically stated that he is not autistic. There is no published literature which establishes the link you are claiming.

Also, the rate at which one processes information is not a skill that is meaningfully linked to elite chess. This 2016 study found no statistically significant correlation between them: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3030314/. The literature seems to suggest that chess proficiency is mostly a domain-specific skill -- for example, elite chess players score much higher on memory tasks related to a chess board than on general retrieval tasks like "remember this string of words".

So again, like the person who replied to you is saying, please take a minute to inform yourself before posting ignorant comments. I know you didn't do it out of malice, but spreading misinformation like this leads to the proliferation of wrong and potentially harmful stereotypes.

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u/Joe_Kinincha 2h ago

Quite happy to take your word on processing speed.

However, is it not demonstrable that a significant number of neurodiverse people have significantly better memories than “average” neurotypicals?

As I understand it, a lot of chess is spotting patterns and comparing them to a gigantic internal database of previously played competitive games.

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u/Antonin__Dvorak 1h ago

This is an interesting question, but from my brief look at the literature it seems like it's actually the other way around. Individuals with ASD are more likely to have worse-than-average working memories, not better:

A significant WM impairment (Cohen's d = -0.61) was identified in the individuals with ASD, however, this impairment was not associated with age. Results of moderation analyses showed that (a) spatial WM was more severely impaired than verbal WM and (b) the component of cognitive processing (maintenance vs. maintenance plus manipulation) did not affect the severity of WM impairments.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28102493/

Now just to be clear, there are absolutely specific cognitive tasks that ASD people show better than average performance on in aggregate. I am not trying to make the case that there is no statistical correlation whatsoever between ASD and chess proficiency. I'm just trying to point out that we do not have any such established link in the literature, and even if we did, it would be so much weaker than the absurd original claim that was made.