573 - From rigidness to fluidness via immersion

N. Lygeros

In collective unconscious, chess game represents the intelligence game par excellence. Whereas psychometric studies showed that the results for this game, of course intellectual, had no correlation with intelligence quotient. In the same way, society considers it as a strategic game whereas it is essentially tactical. For instance, the strategic degree of the go game is markedly superior. All these reassessments are explained by the fact that the discovery of chess game is actually charged with g-factor whereas its specialization is mere crystallization.
Whereas learning this game goes together with open-mindedness and intellectual fluidity, its professionalization is thinking rigidification. Mental schemata become fossilized and even if they remain efficient to play in competition, they trap players in a classical structure that prevents the achievement of a real non-uniform reasoning. Players are endowed with good heuristics but have no longer local fluidity.
An efficient way to fight against this natural rigidification is to introduce the chess game within the more mathematical combinatorial context. Eliminating the psychological aspects of competition and making the most of chess substrate, the chess game becomes again a language that has to be controlled via intellectual plasticity.
In concrete terms, the formal use of the chess game rules within an abstract context enables the player to actually cut himself/herself off from the usual game and rediscover a new way of addressing this game. For, even if studies represent a natural out of context, they still remain deeply crystallized for they exploit the extreme knowledge of the subtleties of game. Whereas combinatory problems, especially when they are basic, enable to visualize new mental schemata on a same structure and a same substrate.
Within this new context, it is in addition possible to meet the classical mentalities of chess game as well as the combinatorial one; in order to take up a position in a fluid and dynamic field, the only one fitting to intellectual plasticity. Thus, meeting the experiences of classical mathematicians and classical chess players, we can study on the one hand the fluidity of the solver and the creativity of the inventor. On the other hand, the latter that is so confined in traditional fields literally explodes when it is associated to critical phenomenon.

This way of conceptualizing the immersion of game into the cognitive world can obviously be generally applied Thus, instead of dealing with two basins of attraction such as chess game and mathematics, we can combine them with a third one that is the one of strategy proper. For, here again specialists are numerous but innovative spirits are rare. However, the combining of the three areas, far from being artificial, forms a very rich investigative field to discover new mental schemata and develop a real meta-heuristic theory.
Restructuring the chess game in a larger combinatorial world, we not only rediscover it, but we also break the uniformity of usual reasoning, real specialist formulas for they are inadequate from then on. The change of edge effect completely transforms rigid ontology and endows it with fluid teleology in order to become a real mental meta-heuristic.