Expertise in Chess and Bridge
Neil H. Charness · 1989
Many years ago, a young boy growing up in Milwaukee had occasion to play against Arpad Elo, a chess organizer in the area. He lost that game, but on doing his homework that night discovered that he could have beaten the master. On their next occasion of playing the youngster said ‘‘You know, I could have beaten you in that game,” and showed him the analysis. ‘‘Yes”, said Elo, ‘‘but that was yesterday.” It was a good lesson for the young Herbert Simon, who later went on to somewhat greater feats outside the domain of chess (Simon, informal discussion, 1978). The question of how to measure chess skill was to preoccupy Elo, who eventually engineered the chess rating scale (Elo, 1978), now adopted universally, that bears his name. It seems equally true for cognitive analyses of skilled performance in ‘‘semanticallyrich” (Simon, 1979) domains that the truths of yesterday, under closer analysis, may not apply quite so well today.