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Objectives: We aimed to advance our understanding of the effect of chess on cognition by expanding previous univariate studies with the use of graph theory on cognitive data. Specifically, we investigated the cognitive connectome of adult chess players. We included 19 chess players and 19 controls with ages between 39 and 69 years. Univariate analysis and graph theory included 27 cognitive measures representing multiple cognitive domains and subdomains. Graph analysis included global and nodal measures of integration, segregation, and centrality. We also performed an analysis of community structures to gain an additional understanding of the cognitive architecture of chess players. Results: The analysis of global graph measures showed that chess players had a higher local efficiency than controls at the cost of a lower global efficiency, which did not permeate segregation aspects of their connectome. The nodal graph measures showed that executive/attention/processing speed and visuoconstructive nodes had a central role in the connectome of chess players. The analysis of communities showed that chess players had a slightly reorganized cognitive architecture into three modules. These graph theory findings were in the context of better cognitive performance in chess players than controls in visuospatial abilities. Conclusion: We conclude that the cognitive architecture of chess players is slightly reorganized into functionally and anatomically coherent modules reflecting a distinction between visual, verbal, and executive/attention/processing speed-related functions, perhaps reminiscent of right hemisphere and left hemisphere subnetworks orchestrated by the frontal lobe and its white matter connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article explores the connections between Vilém Flusser and Franz Kafka, focusing on their shared experiences and perspectives. Flusser sees Kafka as a product of Prague, embodying a combination of both local ethnic groups and traditions. Flusser's work reflects on the consequences of nationalism and the Holocaust, and he explores the shift from romanticism to nationalism and the emergence of the petit bourgeoisie. The article highlights the complex relationship between Flusser's critique of the apparatus and his celebration of its possibilities in technology. The text discusses the themes of bureaucracy, corruption, and the oppressive nature of apparatuses in the works of Franz Kafka. It explores how Kafka's writings depict the absurdity and lack of logic in the functioning of these systems. The text also references Hannah Arendt's analysis of the complicity of German society in the atrocities of the Nazis. Additionally, the text highlights Vilém Flusser's interpretation of Kafka as a visionary and bridge between two worlds, and his belief that Kafka's literature would only be fully understood and appreciated in the future. The text explores the dialogue between Vilém Flusser and Franz Kafka, focusing on the themes of apparatus, functionaries, and programs. Flusser situates Kafka as a product of Prague, a city located between the Western and Eastern European traditions, and influenced by Jewish culture. Flusser's own thinking is characterized by bridges between different ideas and epochs, as he engages with the history of Western thought while prospecting the future [Extracted from the article]

The essay "Behind the Fence" by Sabine Casparie discusses the overlooked talent and success of French Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot. The author reflects on her own experiences with motherhood and the choices her mother made, drawing connections to Morisot's paintings. The essay also explores the author's personal journey and regrets regarding her career choices, discussing societal expectations on women's roles. The text concludes with the author finding solace in embracing her love for art and rewriting her own story. The essay sheds light on the struggles faced by Morisot and women artists in a male-dominated field. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the concepts of the grotesque and the arabesque in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It argues that these concepts are intertwined and contribute to the success of Poe's work. The article discusses how the grotesque and the arabesque can transform the mundane into something extraordinary. It also examines the relationship between the grotesque and the baroque, as well as the role of the arabesque in concealing the grotesque. Overall, the article provides a nuanced analysis of these concepts in Poe's writing. Additionally, the text discusses Poe's fascination with palaces, his exploration of beauty and deception, and his use of grotesque and macabre imagery. It portrays Poe as a unique and influential writer who delves into the darker aspects of human existence. [Extracted from the article]

Access to regular sports competitions is often precluded for disabled people. Chess, which has been recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee in 1999, is a rare exception. Nevertheless, to compete in official tournaments, people suffering from a high level of motor impairment must rely on the assistance of a person to move their pieces on the chessboard, under their indications. This can result in a reduction of the feeling of independence and self-esteem. In this work, a service robot is employed as an assistant for competitive chess players, moving pieces on a standard chessboard for competitions, and adhering to the rules of the international chess federation (e.g. not relying on a custom sensorized chess-set). The robot is controlled through an intuitive graphical user interface. The user interface can be navigated with easy-to-use devices, such as a mouse, a touchpad, or a commodity joystick for motion-impaired people (Ottobock calibratable Mini joystick). An effective framework for the opponent's move identification from RGB-D images is proposed and used to keep track of the live game situation. The application is implemented in ROS on a PAL Robotics TIAGo robot, a service robot with a 7 degrees-of-freedom arm, an extensible torso, and a re-orientable RGB-D camera. The robustness of the application is tested by reproducing six famous chess games several times on a standard wooden competition chessboard, making TIAGo play on behalf of the player with white or black pieces, alternatively. The application is properly working without the need of operator intervention in the 91.6 % of the performed moves. The proposed approach successfully opens the door to independent competitive chess playing for motor disabled people in official tournaments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vishkin (2022) shows that female participation in chess is lower in more gender equal countries (the "gender-equality paradox") but that this relation is driven by the mean age of the players in a country, which makes it more of an epiphenomenon than a real paradox. Relying on the same data on competitive chess players (N = 768,480 from 91 countries) as well as on data on 15-year-old students (N = 312,571 from 64 countries), we show that the gender-equality paradox for chess holds among young players. The paradox also remains on the whole population of chess players when controlling for the age of the players at the individual rather than at the country level or when controlling for age differences across countries. Therefore, there is a gender-equality paradox in chess that is not entirely driven by a generational shift mechanism as argued by Vishkin (2022), and previous explanations for the paradox cannot be dismissed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the chess prodigy Samuel Reshevsky (1911–1992), this paper examines the international commercial exploitation of child prodigies and their rise to celebrity. In the early 1920s, this boy wonder toured Europe and the United States, where he defeated some of the best players in simultaneous chess exhibitions, met important personalities and became a subject of global fascination. His ascent into stardom just before Hollywood's child star era reveals the public's eagerness to capitalise on gifted children as yet another commodity of the entertainment industry. Parents played a key role in exploiting child prodigies, despite the success of recent campaigns to secure children's rights such as compulsory education and the regulation of child labour. Meanwhile, philanthropists attempted to aid children like Reshevsky and stop their public exhibition. Moreover, psychologists examined their talent and worried about their futures. Overall, Reshevsky's case reconstructs the network of interests (commercial, humanitarian, scientific) surrounding child prodigies and historicises the child star phenomenon beyond the mainstream child performer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article titled "Shah Mat: Iran's Victory" discusses Iran's capabilities and influence since the accession to power of Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in 1979. It highlights Iran's resistance to the war with Iraq and its dominance over local Shiite militias. The article also mentions Iran's extension of influence through African trading posts and enlisting Hamas under the flag of Jihad. It discusses the impact of Iran's military-terrorist operation on Israel, the internal divisions within Israel, and the inability to define a policy beyond vengeance and revenge. The article concludes by stating that Iran has emerged as a major player in global chaos and has achieved victory. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Society & Leisure / Loisir & Société is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Within team sports, players' ability to inhibit inappropriate behavioral responses and flexibly adapt to upcoming challenges relates significantly to their game performance. As such, there have been calls for cognitively fostering programs to form the basis of game teaching and coaching practice. However, only few studies have tested so far the effects of purposefully designed perceptual-cognitive interventions on players' tactical performance. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether a chess-based intervention designed to train invasion-game athletes' executive functions (EFs) could positively impact their tactical game behaviors. Twenty-six invasion-game athletes, 19 to 20 years old (M = 20.58, SD = 1.74) participated in the study and were randomly assigned to a chess group (ChG) (n = 13) and a control group (CG) (n = 13). The ChG participated in a 10-week chess training program designed to foster EFs, while the CG received no special treatment. Pre-and-post measures were completed using: (a) core EF tests and (b) the game performance assessment instrument. After the intervention, the ChG group showed improvement in working memory and selective attention (cool EFs; higher memory span, fewer errors on incongruent stimuli), as well as decision-making and flexibility in passing (tactical behaviors; more appropriate passes, variety in passes), whereas no such changes were recorded for the CG. Further, there were no differential changes in cognitive flexibility and affective decision making (cool and hot EFs), as well as support, originality and fluency in passing (tactical behaviors) for the two groups as a function of time. By embracing the idea of situated cognition, the current study provides some initial evidence for the linkage between perceptual-cognitive training and team sport performance, suggesting that EFs – as fundamental cognitive processes – can be trained to work in conjunction with the cognitive components of game performance within sport settings. The results of this work are discussed in the context of cognitive and game teaching research, extending current knowledge and understanding of how lab-based and sport training methods can be effectively combined and delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has suggested that brief protocols based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) are efficacious in improving elite chess players' performance without clinical problems. These promising results warranted the examination of the effect of longer ACT interventions with chess players suffering from emotional difficulties. This study advances in this direction by presenting two case studies of elite chess players experiencing anxiety disorders. Each participant was matched to a control participant with similar characteristics. The ACT interventions were conducted in 5 sessions and with occasional follow-ups during the following year. The primary dependent variable was an objective measure of chess performance (ELO Performance). Data analysis was conducted using the JZS+AR Bayesian hypothesis testing for single-case designs and the nonparametric Tau-U statistic. Control participants did not significantly improve their chess performance during the follow-up, but chess players who received the intervention showed significant increases in their performance. Both treated participants experienced clinically significant reductions in symptomatology and improved valued living after the intervention. This study provides empirical evidence regarding the potential benefit of applying ACT to improve chess performance in players with clinical problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those interested in Cayley's life and works should read Anthony Crilly's definitive biography [[6]]; see pp. 193-195 for classification in Cayley's mathematics. She assigned Jacobi, Plücker, and Cayley to the "latter division" and pointed to Cayley's lack of sympathy with Riemann's ideas as indicative of his relative disinterest in foundational questions - adding further nuance to Glaisher's exception of the philosophy of mathematics. Arthur Cayley, unlike most of his contemporaries, contributed to almost every nineteenth-century mathematical subdiscipline. Even more specifically, though Salmon and Cayley had worked together on geometric topics, Salmon accorded with "Mr. Glaisher, who has described [Cayley] as the greatest living master of algebra" [[25], p. 483]. [Extracted from the article]

Research Summary: We apply a resource‐based view to investigate how the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) affects competitive capabilities and performance. Following prior work on using chess as a controlled setting for studying competitive interactions, we compare the same players' capabilities and performance across conventional, centaur, and engine chess tournaments. Our analysis shows that AI adoption triggers interrelated substitution and complementation dynamics, which make humans' traditional competitive capabilities obsolete, while creating new sources of persistent heterogeneity when humans interact with chess engines. These novel human‐machine capabilities are unrelated, or even negatively related, to traditional capabilities. We contribute an integrated view of substitution and complementation, which identifies AI as the driver of these dynamics and explains how they jointly shift the sources of competitive advantage. Managerial Summary: AI‐based technologies increasingly substitute and complement humans in managerial tasks such as decision making. We investigate how such change affects the sources of competitive advantage. AI‐based engines' adoption in chess allows us to investigate competitive capabilities and performance in human, AI, and hybrid settings. We find that neither humans nor AI in isolation explain performance differences in the AI and hybrid settings. Instead, a new decision‐making resource emerges at the human‐AI intersection, which drives performance but is unrelated or even negatively related to humans' original capability. Our results document how AI adoption changes the sources of competitive advantage and, in turn, requires managers to develop new capabilities to stay relevant in an AI‐based competitive landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential meta-analyses have concluded that only a small to medium proportion of variance in performance can be explained by deliberate practice. We argue that the authors have neglected the most important characteristic of deliberate practice: individualization of practice. Many of the analyzed effect sizes derived from measures that did not assess individualized practice and, therefore, should not have been included in meta-analyses of deliberate practice. We present empirical evidence which suggests that the level of individualization and quality of practice (indicated by didactic educational capital) substantially influences the predictive strength of practice measures. In our study of 178 chess players, we found that at a high level of individualization and quality of practice, the effect size of structured practice was more than three times higher than that found at the average level. Our theoretical analysis, along with empirical results, support the claim that the explanatory power of deliberate practice has been considerably underestimated in the meta-analyses. The question of how important deliberate practice is for individual differences in performance remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems of artificial intelligence from the very beginning of this applied area of science in the mid-20th century have closely intersected with psychological problems, primarily with the psychology of thinking. As experience shows, not only real developments in artificial intelligence but also the discussed prospects for building its working models largely depend on technological progress in the field of computers and software. The paper discusses the changes in representations of heuristics understood as creative thinking and as techniques or rules that are useful for finding solutions to problems. The following issues are specifically considered: the psychological side of the problems of heuristic programming, the similarities and differences between human and computer heuristics, the probability and possible consequences of the singularity phenomenon (understood as the superiority of artificial intelligence over natural one), including the example of the functioning of the community of professional chess players. It is concluded that the progress of computer models and artificial intelligence systems are promising for the positive transformation of the human psyche.