Yi Jing, Oracle of the Moon

Hexagram 29 and patterns

  I was browsing through a book, which had been recommended to me. "In search of excellence", by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman. Just opening it at random, a page here, a page there, to figure out if it would make sense to start reading. It seemed such a huge amount of words, and there is so much else to do...

  On one of the pages, I got intrigued. Someone, who was in search of artificial intelligence, studied the problem of programming computers to play chess. He started out assuming that it could be played on a rational basis, but had to abandon that idea. The computer would need something like a century to calculate all possible moves.

  So instead, he investigated what good chess players do. He asked them to look at a half-way chess game, just for a very short period, like 10 seconds. They could recall the locations of virtually all the pieces. Players of one rank below the best players scored a lot lower. But the masters could not remember where the pieces were, if they were placed on the board at random. So something else than short-time memory had to be at work.

  He believed that the 'something else' was, that the masters had highly developed long-term memories, in the form of subconsciously remembered patterns. He called it chess "vocabularies". The class A players had a memory of around 2,000 patterns, but the masters of around 50,000 patterns.

  The mark of the true professional in any field is the rich vocabulary of patterns, developed through years of education and especially through years of experience.

  I had to think of hexagram 29, water repeated. The character translated as 'repeat' also means skill, routine, learning something by training or exercise.