Garry Kasparov Der Spiegel Testing Article 1987 (Translated)

Flashes of genius and blackouts
SPIEGEL tested intelligence, memory and chess art Garri Kasparows *
12/21/1987
Is Garri Kasparov, 24, a genius of the century or just a brilliant chess player?

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Flashes of genius and blackouts
SPIEGEL tested the elder son of a Jew and an Armenian for three days. In an apartment of the hotel "Azerbaijan" in Baku, pens, stopwatch and paper were usually sufficient to determine his IQ, to test his intelligence, his memory and his chess skills.

A computer was ready in the double bed, but was hardly needed.

A chess game was in a corner, but the figures were only set up for half an hour. The chess part of the test took a little longer, but for almost all tasks Kasparow did not need a board or figures, because he was supposed to solve them partly in the head or "blindly" (as it is said in chess language), partly using printed chess diagrams, that were no bigger than bank cards.

For example, he only had five seconds to memorize a game position with 22 or 30 figures on such a diagram. Then he should write them on an empty diagram.

Then the master's brain worked like a camera. He snapped 117 of the 120 characters he saw in five tasks into his memory.

Incidentally, Kasparow had ample opportunity to do what he said at the beginning of the three test days. When he was asked to tick a list of what good chess players have in common with him and what he outperforms, he saw the biggest difference in "willingness to take on new challenges".

The hotel room in his hometown and hometown became an alien world for him. Aside from chess, he had never done anything that was required of him there. He didn't even know what it was about beforehand.

The chess genius from Baku, who went down in chess history as the youngest world champion at the end of 1985 with his victory over the twelve-year-old Anatolij Karpow, has no limits.

Kasparov fights for much more fame in the game, for much more power in the chess world and, contrary to his self-portrayal ("money basically means nothing to me"), for much more dollars, francs and marks. And it will remain so until the end of its chess days.

The lack of time (Russian: "lack of time"), which he rarely comes across on the chess board, shapes his everyday life. Therefore, he had neither read test books nor practiced test tasks.

A SPIEGEL team traveled to Baku with three major intelligence tests by the Englishman Hans Jürgen Eysenck, the Scotsman John C. Raven and the Berliner Adolf Otto Jäger, a chess test and a few smaller tests.

Eysenck had compiled his test especially for Kasparow. SPIEGEL readers can take this test themselves, get to know some of the common types of tasks and compare their results with those of Kasparows (see page 135).

The tests required careful translation into Russian. She went on to convert the names so as not to pose more problems for Kasparov than either German or English have in these tests.

Erika Müller therefore became Lena Melnikowa, a messenger is no longer called Schulze, but Kusnezow is no longer an authorized signatory but Meier, but Moltschikow.

There were still two or three problems on site. There is a Russian equivalent for the German word "Krume" in the dictionary, but not in Kasparow's vocabulary. And the cockchafer - Russian: "chruschtsch" - flies in Moscow, but not in Baku, 2000 kilometers away.

The test and a performance in front of a home audience, to which he reported his way to the World Cup, were Kasparov's last contacts with the outside world before he retired with his four coaches to a camp on the Caspian Sea and from there to Seville for the title fight against his predecessor and challenger Karpow traveled.

SPIEGEL used part of the time that Kasparow spent in his camp at home in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan and then in Spain in comparison tests with German chess players, schoolchildren and students.

Kasparow had already agreed to the memory tests at a SPIEGEL discussion in Hamburg almost two years ago. In particular, he wanted to try to repeat or surpass a memory acrobatic performance by American chess players Harry Pillsbury and Bobby Fischer.

One was to remember 29 words, some of them senseless, the other was to keep sentences of a completely foreign language and to repeat them in such a way that people in that language understood them. Fischer succeeded in Icelandic, Kasparow wanted to try it in Chinese (report on these memory tests and the chess test in the next issue).

Kasparov was also taken at his word when he - maybe too big-mouthed? - At the end of 1985 said: "I read books at a rate of 100 pages per hour and have no problems reproducing the content precisely and completely in my own words for two or three hours."

In Baku, this test suddenly moved from the margins to the center of the whole project, because the result is essentially part of the image of Kasparov's intelligence. A Kasparov ability has been discovered that remains hidden in traditional intelligence tests.

He was to read an essay by Stefan Zweig unknown to him about the French poet Stendhal (83 pages) for one hour and then give a short and long version of the content.

Kasparov did not even need to read all the time and then suggested doing more than was agreed: he also wanted to give his own assessment of the work.

He hadn't been allowed to take any notes, so he was totally dependent on his memory.

There was no lecture with breaks for thoughts that only form into words and sentences. There was no lively speech either. There was a flash flood of sentences.

If there was a pause between two sentences at all, it was almost never due to a point, but only because Kasparow was not always able to take a breath simultaneously and continue speaking. And more amazing than

this speed, which would have overwhelmed almost every stenographer, was the text. As was shown when the tape record was written out and translated in Hamburg, the sentences were all ready for printing.

There should not be many who can express themselves so competently and precisely about a book that has nothing to do with their profession or their special interests and that they have only just got to know through quick reading - and at least as quickly as they can could read a written text.

What a miracle - there were also brilliant performances in the chess test. But there were not only flashes of genius, but also the other extreme: blackouts.

Kasparov completely failed in a task that any quick elementary school student would have solved right or bad:

When he received a sheet of 24 ellipses and was asked to fill as many samples as possible in three minutes, half the time passed without anything happening. Kasparov stared at the blank sheet, motionless and helpless. Then he got up and drew three patterns. There were almost the same failures for two similar tasks.

Two dozen Hamburg schoolchildren and students (chess players from HSV) were also given the ellipse task in a comparison test, and none of them came up with as little as the famous young man from Baku. Some of her ideas: the ellipse as a face, Easter egg, plum, bomb, bosom, clock, cell window, cemetery, eye stadium, baseball and manhole cover.

Between Kasparov's highlights and failures, there was a large difference between outstanding, average and moderate performance.

However, this remained hidden in two of the three larger tests, which only determine an IQ, an intelligence quotient.

Every SPIEGEL reader can also calculate "his" IQ based on his results in the Eysenck test.

But Eysenck himself, like almost all other test psychologists, warns against taking this score too closely and believing that you can classify yourself somewhere between 50 (idiocy), 100 (average) and 200 (Goethe).

The intelligence of a person cannot be measured nearly as precisely in IQ points as is possible for his weight in kilos and for his height in centimeters. No IQ can be more than a vague clue, as the results of the two corresponding tests in Baku already show: Kasparow is 135 points after the English test and 123 points after the Scottish test.

Such differences are not unusual, only the relevant psychologists do not trumpet it into the lay world.

Based on these tests, Kasparov's intelligence can only be said to be considerably above the average, but is not nearly as high as the intelligence of geniuses of the century, who include Goethe and Einstein. Their intelligence quotient was posthumously estimated at 200 by some psychologists and 180 by others.

And there is no correlation between IQ and chess players' skill level. This shows the comparison of the corresponding numbers for Kasparow and for 30 German chess players in the Bundesliga, which were also tested.

The tests of the Scotsman Raven and the Englishman Eysenck cannot say anything about the strengths and weaknesses of Kasparov. The tasks of the Raven test are all of the same type, the tasks of the Eysenck test are of different types, but they cannot be classified into groups, each of which could have been evaluated individually.

The third test, on the other hand, Jäger's "Berlin Intelligence Structure Model" (BIS), consists of 30 types of tasks that can be put together in various ways using a modular system and therefore provide information about special skills.

Kasparov's achievements differed widely - depending on whether it was about numbers, words or figures.

This can be seen when comparing his results with those of a few hundred schoolchildren in Berlin that Jäger's BIS team tested and those of the 30 Bundesliga chess players.

Kasparow is a lonely leader in almost all numerical tasks, whatever their nature. Hunter has a dozen different ones in his test.

There should be continued series of numbers; there are no digits to be inserted in invoices; long columns of numbers are to be checked for features, such as which number is "exactly 3 larger" than the previous one; double-digit numbers should be learned and repeated on the next page - many simple calculations (about 28 + 19 = 47) must be checked so quickly that their results cannot be recalculated, but only estimated.

When it comes to arithmetic, Kasparov's general and special chess skills obviously match.

The world's top chess professionals are admired by the casual gamers, who often only stumble from move to move in their own games, especially because of their ability to predict the moves in their games far ahead.

The former world champion Alexander Alekhine said that he could get 6 to 8, sometimes 10 to 15 moves. Kasparov would hardly be inferior to him there.

Among today's top players, including Karpow, he is considered the best and fastest calculator on the board.

When it comes to pictures and figures, there is a serious difference: on the chess board, Kasparow can see a difficult position within a few seconds, but his general "figural-pictorial thinking" (as the term is used) is greatly underdeveloped. He not only lags behind the German chess players, but also behind the Berlin pupils and students.

This came to light, for example, when he saw an unfolded cube in front of him and was supposed to decide which of the five cubes next to it were; when he was supposed to imagine the geometric figure to which two triangles can be put together and five were offered to choose from; when he was supposed to memorize a dozen buildings, cars and trees in the section of a city map and to draw them on the next page in a map, when he was shown logo with borders first, then separately and he was supposed to bring the matching ones back together.

But it can be explained why Kasparov sees almost everything on the chess board, but otherwise very little. The "chess look" is much more abstract than is commonly assumed, and it has little to do with the "normal look".

The good chess player sees "not a wooden figure with a horse's head" in a jumper, but "a figure with a peculiar gait, worth about three pawns", well or badly positioned with the effect on other figures and fields. This is how the German Siegbert Tarrasch (1862 to 1934) described the eyes of the masters a few decades ago.

Tarrasch (one of the best players in the world and one of the most widely read chess authors in his day) said that he himself had a game of chess at home with a slightly damaged white lady who "sometimes works with, sometimes without a head, which my wife occasionally works with Sealing wax cemented together, but this only lasts for a short time ". After a game, he wouldn't be able to tell if the lady's head was involved.

If verbal tasks were to be solved, Kasparow's results were more often than below average. Only when it was strictly about logical thinking was he far ahead of the others.

It could be very abstract and abstruse, for example if logical "conclusions" were to be drawn from absurd "statements:"

"All pencils are books" and "Some books eat sawdust" are such "statements", for example, and conclusions such as "No pencil eats sawdust" (wrong) or "All books are pencils" (also not correct). Kasparow solved almost all tasks of this type.

Does Kasparov's chess thinking have a negative impact if it is not about chess? After all, the 24-year-old genius from Baku has dedicated two thirds of his life to chess - a third mostly, a third almost entirely.

Far more often than German pupils, students and chess players, he hesitated to tick an answer as long as he still had doubts as to whether it was correct. There are many more tasks on his test sheets without an answer than with a wrong one.

It is noticeable here that even the smallest mistake can be doomed to a world-class chess professional, which can result in him winning a game and winning a tournament or match. Those who have trained their brains so that this does not happen to them - if at all possible - have a completely different attitude than many test and examination experts who prefer to give any answer at all at random rather than at all.

Another consequence of the years of extremely intense chess thinking is even more pronounced. Kasparov always found it difficult when tasks were not clearly defined and he should start from scratch, so to speak.

His results were, for example, moderate when he was free to express himself about the uses of a brick and when he was supposed to write down which characteristics would have a negative impact on the judge's profession.

The ellipsis test blacked out because two weaknesses of Kasparov came together: his horror of the blank sheet and his underdeveloped ability to think in pictures.

The reason for his problem to start himself: As a chess professional, he is used to thinking in structures. He initially plays his games for 8, 10 or 15 moves as they are in chess books or as he prepared them at home. Only then does he deviate from the "opening", which has already given the game a structure, and begins his "own" moves.

Kasparow's activities not only start from scratch, but also almost never from scratch. He takes in other people's thoughts and develops them further. Typical for him is his attempt to unite the 24 best chess players in the world in an "association" and to have super tournaments with each other all over the world according to fixed rules all year round.

The tennis circus around Lendl and Becker was clearly a model, and only gradually did Kasparow change the idea in such a way that it can also be realized profitably for chess players.

Because he couldn't do much with empty sheets, Kasparow lags behind the German chess players in terms of "ingenuity", even behind the pupils and students from Berlin. You will have to doubt whether the otherwise excellent BIS test really measures what it should measure - especially since "ingenuity" and "creativity" are considered related or even synonymous terms.

It seems wrong to attribute weaknesses to someone in this field just because they find it difficult to find sentences or draw patterns on an empty test sheet.

A special chess task could only be given to Kasparow, not - like the tasks of the chess test - to top German and club players. It required some experience in using computers.

Kasparov was to judge five top German players based on ten games each, no names were given to him, there were only players A to E. The games were saved on a floppy disk, and Kasparow replayed them step by step on his computer screen , which was taken out of the double bed for this purpose. Kasparow could do the _ (Above: Pensioners in Baku;) _ (Below: Musicians during a concert break in) _ (Moscow.)

Set your own pace. Each press of a button brought a new move to the game on the screen.

Most of the time, Kasparov typed on his computer almost as quickly as a typist on her machine when she had to write a routine letter.

Kasparow let the games whiz past on the screen more quickly than the figures could be drawn on a board. They usually lasted four to five hours; it took him an average of two minutes for each.

In most cases, he braked two or three times when the crucial phases were at stake. But even then, 10 or 20 seconds were sufficient for positions over which the German players had probably spent twice as many minutes. And, above all, his judgment was consistently accurate, often down to the last detail.

He should first name the strengths and weaknesses of two players and what concept he would play against them. Then he should find out among the five unknowns the German grand master Ralf Lau, against whom he had never played.

Lau (number 46 in the world rankings) is one of the approximately 100 best players in the world, all of whom Kasparow re-enacts and keeps in mind when they matter. For this reason, new batches of louse were selected for the test, which Kasparow could not yet know.

Two players were shortlisted in Kasparows. He did not want to decide whether A or C was Lau. He was on the right track, but didn't quite reach the goal.

There was also a blatant misjudgment, however, when Kasparov became the victim of his own zeal.

He had been able to freely allocate the time on the three days of testing in the hotel "Azerbaijan", and it turned out that he had to keep up with his strength. Twice he ended a morning or afternoon earlier than scheduled, and some time before the break, it had been apparent that his concentration was rapidly decreasing.

When he analyzed the games on the computer, he did not pay attention to his weakening strength, this task fascinated him so much - and he already declared a successful German grandmaster to be an easily defeatable opponent.

There were short periods of weakness in between. In a test, the tasks of which are becoming increasingly difficult, there was a phase in the middle in which Kasparow did not solve seven out of eight tasks. After that, he was fit again, and the more difficult ones (with one exception) were no longer a problem for him.

The high performance that Kasparow always endeavors to include obviously a high voltage, which he usually endures only for a relatively short time. This explains why he rarely stays at the table in his title fights and tournaments, but rather walks around or withdraws. He has to switch off his brain in order to let it run at full speed again. The weak phase in one test shows that he does not always succeed.

The evening after the test days, Kasparov gave a kind of gala performance in Baku's most beautiful hall when he was in front of some

told a hundred admirers about his way to the World Cup.

In order to fill a hall with chess friends in the Soviet Union, you don't need to be called Kasparow, nor to be at the top of the world. Chess is played everywhere between Siberia and Lithuania, by pensioners on park benches and by musicians in tailcoats in front of concert halls when they relax during a game break. And in the palaces of the young pioneers there is a constant search for new Kasparovs and Karpovs.

A snow-white-clad star spoke to his fans longer (just under two hours at a time), more focused, and faster than any of them could have expected.

The pace was not as fast as two days earlier when Kasparow had given the Stendhal essay on Zweig. But things were going too fast for many in the hall, and the number of those who only admired their Garri and only listened to him like someone who speaks a foreign language grew.

To talk quickly, whatever, Kasparow hardly struggles over long distances. But he is on his own, it makes almost no difference whether he is sitting somewhere at a table or standing on the stage.

At his gala in Baku, he slowed down the pace only in the last third, a little exhausted himself. And now, after the long rattled monologue, there was contact with the audience, Kasparow fired punchlines, he made the audience laugh or clap so often that he had enough breaks.

Then someone spoke who has a strong natural talent for public speaking but doesn't really know how to deal with it. He could go a long way in this field if he managed to critically analyze and train his talent.

If the KP member Kasparow would then like to be politically active at home, some ideological polishing would still be needed.

When asked which military achievements impressed him the most, none of his comrades would have thought of the answer he gave:

"The victories of Hannibal and Napoleon."

And the party could not send comrade Kasparov to all parts of the world as a political messenger.

One test was about the difference between "fact" and "opinion", and Kasparov disagreed with the phrase "European culture is still superior to African" than the psychologist who developed the test.

The superiority of Europe is only an opinion for the psychologist. For Kasparow it is a fact.

[Graphic Text]

Eight offers for a gap The "Advanced Progressive Matrices" test was developed by the Scottish psychologist John Raven in 1943 and has been renewed several times since then, under the responsibility of John Raven junior. The test is "language-free", only the instructions have to be translated into the respective language and it can be used regardless of the previous training of the participants. The test consists of 48 tasks of the same type: one pattern is shown with a gap in which each of eight sections 1 to 8 fits, but only one section correctly complements the pattern. Two questions from the test, an easy one (above) and one of the questions that Kasparow did not solve (below): The solution to the second problem: 6. 50 minutes are available to solve the 48 questions. The test can also be used without a time limit. Reason: Some tasks are so difficult that a lot of time does not help many. IN 3 MINUTES 3 "PATTERNS" In a single test (from the "Beltz Test" publishing house) Kasparow had three minutes to make as many different patterns or objects out of ellipses as possible by means of additional lines. Additional instruction: "It is not important that the drawing is particularly beautiful, but that as many different patterns or objects as possible are displayed." Kasparov drew three. For comparison. Young HSV chess players had an average of seven. Kasparov's poor performance was no accident: his "figural-pictorial thinking" is underdeveloped:

[Graphic Text End]