Regalado 1

Mario Regalado

Dr. Sharity Nelson

11/2/2022

English 1301

Rhetorical Analysis on

“Chess databases as a research vehicle in psychology: Modeling large data”

One of the most competitive games in the world happens to be one of the oldest. Chess is a board

game that has gone through centuries of rework and now remains one of the most psychology puzzling

games. The dozens of parameters that chess offers such as, problem solving, memory, and control, is

perfect for investigating how the cognitive mind functions.(Nemanja Vaci) A simple game has created

an outline for complex ideas to come into fruition and the German chess database sets out to conclude

these scientific thoughts.

Vaci starts by confronting one of chess's biggest mysteries - mathematics. The rules of chess are

simple to understand, so much so, that anyone can learn them. However, this doesn’t prevent it from

possessing composite illustrations that impacts cognitive ability. Players need to calculate and foresee as

many moves as possible to gain the advantage. The author uses shannons number to convince the

audience that chess is so complex, that there is controversy on whether or not there are more moves than

there are atoms in the universe. Shannos number is a theory stating that chess is finite and has around

10^120 possible moves which is greater than the amount of atoms in the universe which is estimated to

be 10^80. The idea is intriguing and is set to convince the audience that chess has a rabbit hole of

mysteries. Nemanja Vaci then introduces the databases to draw the intricate questions of how people

compare to each other in the game of chess based on the ELO rating system. One of the article's

conclusions was gathered from other research conducted (Keulers and Balota) which concluded ideas of

skill development, gender, and age. This was Vaci’s starting research to enable him to summarize ideas

of how children who take chess as a hobby tend to be more agreeable than those who take it seriously.