Why you’ll never truly master chess

Mastering the game is in fact impossible, scientists claim. Picture: Courtney Africa

Mastering the game is in fact impossible, scientists claim. Picture: Courtney Africa

Published Jan 14, 2013

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London - The best chess players may earn the right to call themselves Grandmaster – but it seems that may actually be something of a misnomer.

Mastering the game is in fact impossible, scientists claim.

A physicist at Manchester University says games of skill such as poker and chess are just too complex for the human mind to fully understand.

Dr Tobias Galla ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behaviour affects decision-making.

When games became more complex and when there were a lot of possible moves, they found that players’ actions became less rational and it was harder for them to arrive at the best strategies.

Dr Galla said the findings could also be applied to explain the perils of playing the stock market. Many economists base financial predictions on the theory of “equilibrium”, which assumes traders will make rational decisions based on potential outcomes.

But Dr Galla said this was rarely the case. He added: “It could be that we need to drop these conventional game theories and instead use new approaches to predict how people might behave.” - Daily Mail

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