Jonah Lehrer has an interesting blog entry on the role of intuition and chess in which he discusses Magnus Carlsen, the youngest chess player to achieve a number one world ranking. He notes:
At first glance, there is something surprising about a teenager weaned on chess software extolling the wonders of intuition. It’s as if we expect Carlsen to act like his software, to be as explicit in his strategic decisions as Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer. But that misses the real purpose of practice and the real genius of the human brain. When we practice properly — and this means engaging in deliberate practice — we aren’t just accumulating factual knowledge. Instead, we’re embedding our experience into our unconscious, so that even insanely complicated calculations – and Carlsen can regularly plan twenty chess moves in advance – become mostly automatic.
This is a truism of expertise. Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of facts, experts are actually profoundly intuitive. When experts evaluate a situation, they don’t systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information. Carlsen, for instance, doesn’t compute the probabilities of winning if he moves his rook to the left rather than the right. Instead, experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience.
This is the essence of the idea behind Trading from Your Gut, learning how to develop the level of expertise required to trade with intuition.
There is a big difference between merely guessing, or shooting from the hip when you have no experience, and the honed intuition of a true expert.
Trading From Your Gut
Way of the Turtle
Inside the Mind of the Turtles
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Great article!! That’s what I am trying to do now.