Part 1: Words and Expressions
stumble
Twenty-six boards, 832 individual pieces, and 1,664 individual squares to keep track of—all without taking notes or having any sort of memory aid—and yet Alekhine never stumbled.
Verb
1. to hit your foot on something when you are walking or running so that you fall or almost fall
2. to walk in an awkward way?
3. to speak or act in an awkward way
E.g. : He stumbled drunkenly across the room.
Noun
an act or instance of stumbling?
E.g. : Bones are so brittle that a minor stumble can result in a serious break.
zero in
the particular mental processes that set chess masters apart from chess novices and make possible their incredible ability to analyze chess positions and zero in on the best moves.
Verb:
1. to concentrate firepower on the exact range of?
2. to bring to bear on the exact range of a target?
3. to close in on or focus attention on an objective?
E.g.: Investigators are zeroing in on a suspect.
Part 2: My Thoughts
A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.
如何理解這個 mental representation?
表面意思上來看就是精神體現，更深入的解釋的話我覺得就是事物在大腦中的體現、表征。我查閱了維基百科之后他的翻譯是心智表征或者認知表征。人們總是在說心想著一件事情，而事實上，思考的是大腦而非心臟，里面有點唯心主義的意思。所以我比較傾向于使用認知表征作為它的中文翻譯。
文章通過國際象棋大師和新手之間下盲棋的對比，向我們引出了“認知表征”這個概念。在記憶具體棋子位置這方面，大師們并不占優。而實際盲棋對局中，他們對大局觀的把握會比新手高出一個等級：通過棋譜和實戰的訓練，他們在大腦中已經形成了一個思維的大樹，不同的對局就是一個不同的分支。在盲棋對局中，他需要調用已經形成的部分樹枝，所以他是在應用之前的長期記憶，而非短期記憶。
這里我就想到了之前的“Alpha Go”，圍棋的所有可能性用目前的服務器是無法窮舉的，所以這就是谷歌母公司“Alphabet”的厲害之處，利用機器學習極大地減少無勝算的分支，也就是說它利用“剪枝”這個技術，實現了每一步的最優解。而在國際象棋領域，應用現有的計算機技術已經可以實現所有可能走法的窮舉，所以每一盤棋它都是有一個參考樹枝的，你只需要沿著一條特定的樹枝走下去，最后就能實現最后的勝利或者平局。
Part 3: Summary
Blindfold chess offers one of the most dramatic examples of what is possible to accomplish with purposeful practice. And learning a bit about blindfold chess can give us a clear idea of the sorts of neurological changes that arise from such practice.
They worked to become chess masters, and they found themselves, with little or no additional effort, able to play blindfolded.
The experienced players’ advantage had disappeared.
Similarly, chess masters don’t develop some incredible memory for where individual pieces sit on a board. Instead, their memory is very context-dependent: it is only for patterns of the sort that would appear in a normal game.
First, the mental representations are more than just ways of encoding positions.
In short, while the mental representations give masters a view of the forest that novices lack, they also allow masters to zero in on the trees when necessary.
A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.
A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed.
The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.
In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees.
The key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it.
