Teaching Chess History to Students in Natural Sciences: How to Do It and Why
From Firenze University Press Journal: Substantia
Vuk Uskokovic, University of California Irvine
The semantic power of the analogy is primordial, practically as old as the human thought. Narrative arts, for one, resonate strongly with humans because of pro-viding analogies with their lives. Scientific discoveries also frequently owe to analogies with phenomena from distant domains of experience. Although chess is not commonly interpreted as a narrative, the course of a chess game or its hidden variations can be perceived as a plot, meaning that chess games can relate to our intel-lects in the same way as stories do1. This ability of chess to serve as an analogy for our lives lies embedded in the storylines of numerous books and movies. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, for example, a medieval knight is being summoned by Death to play a game of chess that would determine the course of his life2. Like-wise, in Blade Runner, the replicants are all chess mas-ters who communicate with their creator through games of correspondence chess3. The systematic lack of creative thought capable of conceiving conceptually novel ideas haunts today’s sci-entific community like a plague. Today’s young scholars and seasoned scientists are solidly trained to design tech-nical novelties, but not so much the conceptual. Com-pared to the technical novelties, which are usually based on implementing greater processing speeds or introduc-ing more robust devices to experimentation, conceptual novelties are more subtle but also more groundbreaking, bringing about fundamental changes to methods, mod-els and modes of performance in science. These changes need not be as profound and substantial as those intro-duced by the frameworks of, say, theory of relativity or quantum mechanics, notwithstanding that the semi-nal findings of these two theories illustrate well what is meant by the conceptual innovation in science. Concep-tual novelties, in fact, can be more modest and take the form of, for example, reversal of the cores and shells of typical composite nanoparticle compositions used in tis-sue engineering and drug delivery4, or the reversal of the mainstream idea of controlling the differentiation of stem cells into various phenotypes by focusing instead on the conversion of differentiated primary cells to a pluripotent phenotype5. Conceiving of a nanoparticle modeled after an astral body6,7; creating models for predicting cell fate based on the indigenous arts of African storytelling8 and Micronesian canoe voyaging9; proposing alternative bio-logical models for assessment of material properties10,11and models for assessing the journey of a nanoparti-cle through the body12 also count among such modest conceptual innovations in the materials science world. Another example can be that of lipid bilayer vesicles, aka liposomes, as drug delivery carriers — proposing them for this role counts as a remarkable conceptual innovation, but altering their composition and structure or studying the many ways of achieving synergies in therapeutic safe-ty or efficacy via different vesicle/drug combinations does not, except for very special conditions. As yet another example, the prediction, the discovery or the explanation of a physical phenomenon such as superconductivity may count amongst conceptual innovations, but the dreary search for materials with a lower and lower critical tem-perature by adding up chemical elements in different orders and amounts would not. Sadly, however, today’s scientific climate is such that scientists are much more prone to come up with incremental ideas that are mere derivatives of concepts already in place than to conceive of experiments that could change the outlook of whole fields of science for good. To distill a cure for this pervasive dearth of crea-tive thought, it pays off to reach with our interests out-side of the writer’s blocks, that is, boxes, and acquaint analogies applicable readily to the scientific problems of interest. The hypothesis that chess can serve as one such source of analogies that boost creativity, which may currently be at an all-time low in natural scienc-es, pervades this paper and the idea behind the course on chess and natural sciences that it describes. In fact, numerous studies demonstrating how the exposure to chess instruction at various educational levels improves learning in different domains, ranging from math13,14,15to reading16 to poetry interpretation17 to general learning capacity18,19, are a strong indicator that analogies such as those explored here can prove useful for replenishing the dried wells of creativity amongst both the new and the old generations of scientists. The academic course elaborating these analogies was designed in the form of one-credit hour weekly ses-sions, each discussing in-class a single game of interest from the history of chess. The twenty games to be dis-cussed over the twenty weeks of a single semester follow a chronological order and form a closed circle, starting, symbolically, with the romanticism of chess in the 19th century and ending with the romanticism rediscovered by the contemporary chess engines. The importance of providing this historical perspective on the evolution of chess playstyles can hardly be overestimated. The reason is that familiarity with the history of any art or communicational medium in general encourages scientists to put their own science in a historical perspective, which presents the first step in coming up with conceptual novelties. Such novelties are inextricably tied to the historical line of progress and the turnover of trends in a given discipline. Most academic courses on chess have revolved around the building of fluency in the game under the assumption that this would positively affect learning in other academic subjects, primarily those integrating mathematics, logics and analytical reasoning. However, there are ways to go beyond simply teaching the rules and the principles of chess and expecting that students would spontaneously form neural connections that fos-ter the learning process in other disciplines, notwith-standing that even through the exposure to one such rel-atively rudimentary coursework, a lot can be achieved, including the enhancement of analytical intelligence, the building of a general learning capacity, prolifera-tion of intercultural bonds, promotion of the inclusion of underrepresented and underprivileged social groups, and the fosterage of integration of high technologies, all of which count among the advanced priorities of bring-ing chess to educational settings20. Among the many possible syllabi that would cover these more advanced grounds where chess, art and science intersect, no academic course, to this author’s knowledge, has yet attempted to correlate through analogies chess games with scientific phenomena or with principles governing the experimentation or theorization pertaining to these phenomena. The course described here, therefore, strays from the beaten path and explores pedagogic grounds not probed before. Each game selected for this course was the result of long and exhaustive analyses and over thirty years of personal experience in the theory and history of chess. Each of these twenty games is discussed with the stu-dents in its entirety, from the first to the last move, so as to build chess fluency alongside exploring its sub-tler strategic and tactical features. Given the topic of the course, most attention, naturally, is being paid to particularly relevant moments and positions in each game, from which valuable analogies applicable to natu-ral sciences could be derived. Moreover, because chess is a game that inspires, the elaboration of the analo-gies between the arts of chess and science tried to be as inspirational as possible, with the understanding that this inspiration is the key to boosting the students’ creativity in natural sciences. To elicit this inspirational potential, chess is being treated in the course as a form of art rather than a sport, let alone recreational mental gymnastics, and the competitive aspect of the game is being steadily deemphasized, while the aesthetic aspect is accentuated. Portable game notations (PGNs) of all the games for which no such information is included in the cor-responding figure captions are retrievable from www.chessgames.com. The list of games discussed in the course of the semester includes private, uncompetitive games played by the author 30 or more years ago, either against human opponents or engines, so as to encour-age the students that even purely amateurish games and those played in training against an engine can be researched for analogies that could mean millions, for their lives and their sciences alike. For the sake of pro-motion of inclusivity and diversity, a portion of the games chosen for the discussion were played by female chess players and also by children, either at various offi-cial competitions or in casual settings. For such private games discussed in this paper, PGNs are given in the relevant figure captions. A whole lot of discussion about the games anticipated to occur in a real-life instruc-tional setting is not captured in the paper because of the space limitation, meaning that the readers as well as potential students should still find the attendance of the class a valuable learning experience. This is additionally so because the in-class discussion should always follow a partially improvisational style and be open to chang-ing the flow impromptu depending on the interests and points brought up by the class. Hence, even a complete explication of discussion from a single exemplary course captured here need not discourage future students from attending it.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-2479
Read Full Text: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/subs/article/view/2479
