Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Sun Tzu tradition
- Steinitz as champion
- de Groot’s Thought and Choice in Chess
- Chase & Simon chunks
- Polgár experiment
- Kasparov vs Deep Blue
- Gobet / Ericsson chess papers
- Macnamara games band
- AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol
- Online rapid inflation
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Does this atlas rank groups by IQ, race or nation?
No. Pathways and evidence stay individual. Scores are browsing aids — never group biological or racial ranks.
What did de Groot find?
Masters did not always search deeper in simple measures; they saw better positions. Perception as expertise.
How much does practice explain in games?
Macnamara et al. 2014: about 26% in their games coding — minority, largest among their bands.
Were the Polgárs a proof of nurture?
László Polgár’s project produced three elite players, including Judit. It is a powerful family experiment, not a proof that any child can be world number one.
Is go the same file as chess?
Shared search and pattern; different aesthetics and institutions (Japan/Korea/China houses).
Does chess make you smarter at life?
Near transfer to similar search tasks is likelier than far transfer to every decision. “Chess in schools raises IQ” is a weaker claim.
Adriaan de Groot’s chess studies and later Chase–Simon chunking made “strategic talent” measurable as perception plus memory for positions. Soviet and later Soviet-heir schools had already treated chess as a taught sport.
The timeline below follows dated arguments and institutions, not a national myth of genius and not a group ranking.
Origin
20th c. expertise labs · Netherlands / US / Soviet schools — Adriaan de Groot’s chess studies and later Chase–Simon chunking made “strategic talent” measurable as perception plus memory for positions. Soviet and later Soviet-heir schools had already treated chess as a taught sport.
Timeline
- Sun Tzu tradition
A text on preparation and deception — strategy as writing, not a gene.
- Steinitz as champion
Modern professional chess identity.
- de Groot’s Thought and Choice in Chess
Masters’ perception in the lab.
- Chase & Simon chunks
The 50,000-position folklore begins (order-of-magnitude, not a census).
- Polgár experiment
A family nurture bet in Budapest.
- Kasparov vs Deep Blue
Search machines change what human talent has to be.
- Gobet / Ericsson chess papers
Practice and templates, still residuals.
- Macnamara games band
~26% variance for practice in games.
- AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol
Go’s human houses meet a new kind of opponent.
- Online rapid inflation
Hours rise; designed study still differs from bullet spam.
Eras
- Text strategy — Sun Tzu / manuals — Advice cultures.
- Professional chess — Steinitz onward — Elo as a public thermometer.
- Lab expertise — de Groot to Chase–Simon — Perception as the finding.
- Machine search — 1997–2016 — Humans keep evaluation and taste under new clocks.
- Platform hours — Online play — Volume without design — Ericsson’s old warning.
Shifts
- From born tactician to chunks 1973 — Trained patterns.
- From human-only to cyborg study 1997– — Engines as teachers.
- From male default to Polgár file 1990s — A folklore dented, not a finished equity story.
Strategic talent: keep the dates visible. Names of talents are younger than the work they try to capture.
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