Adrianus Dingeman (Adriaan) de Groot ( Santpoort, 26 October 1914 – Schiermonnikoog, 14 August 2006) was a Dutch

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...

master and psychologist, who conducted some of the most famous chess experiments of all time in the 1940s-60. In 1946 he wrote his thesis ''Het denken van den schaker'', which in 1965 was translated into English and published as ''Thought and choice in chess''. De Groot played for the Netherlands in the

Chess Olympiad The Chess Olympiad is a biennial chess tournament in which teams representing nations of the world compete. FIDE organises the tournament and selects the host nation. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, FIDE held an Online Chess Olympiad in 2020 an ...

s of 1937 and 1939. In 1973 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Study of chess players

The studies involve participants of all chess backgrounds, from amateurs to masters. They investigate the cognitive requirements and the thought processes involved in moving a chess piece. The participants were usually required to solve a given chess problem correctly under the supervision of an experimenter and represent their thought-processes vocally so that they could be recorded. De Groot found that much of what is important in choosing a move occurs during the first few seconds of exposure to a new position. Four stages in the task of choosing the next move were noted. The first stage was the 'orientation phase', in which the subject assessed the situation and determined a very general idea of what to do next. The second stage, the 'exploration phase' was manifested by looking at some branches of the game tree. The third stage, or 'investigation phase' resulted in the subject choosing a probable best move. Finally, in the fourth stage, the 'proof phase', saw the subject confirming with him/herself that the results of the investigation were valid. De Groot concurred with

Alfred Binet Alfred Binet (; 8 July 1857 – 18 October 1911), born Alfredo Binetti, was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to ...

that visual memory and visual perception are important attributors and that problem-solving ability is of paramount importance. Memory is particularly important, according to de Groot (1965), in that there are no ‘new’ moves in chess, so those from personal experience (or from the experience of others) can be committed to memory.

Publications

*''Thought and choice in chess '' (1965). *'' Saint Nicholas, A psychoanalytic study of his history and myth '' (1965). *'' Methodology. Foundations of inference and research in the behavioral sciences '' (1969). *'' Perception and memory in chess: Heuristics of the professional eye '' (1996; with Fernand Gobet and Riekent Jongman).

References

External links

*
Remembering Adriaan de Groot
{{DEFAULTSORT:Groot, Adriaan De 1914 births 2006 deaths Dutch chess players Dutch psychologists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences University of Amsterdam alumni University of Amsterdam faculty People from Velsen Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows 20th-century chess players 20th-century psychologists