[ardemchenkov]

Interesting game, but I think, practically it's not as useful for memory training as, for example, chess. Because in case of chess, you're not only storing fixed combinations (debuts especially), but training your brain using and improving it.

[prapam2]

Does playing chess improving memory unrelated to chess gameplay?

[wodenokoto]

According to moonwalking with Einstein, no, it doesn't. And the author makes a pretty good argument about how chess players can easily remember the placement of multiple chess pieces on a board - as long as they are all in legal positions.

Show a chess player a board full of randomly placed pieces and they'll have great trouble remembering the placements. So if their memory doesn't even transfer to chess pieces, how can we expect it to transfer to other domains?

[ardemchenkov]

I think there're no "yes" or "no". It depends on many factors. You're talking about "Moonwalking with Einstein", but from other point of view there's a book "How life imitates chess" by Garry Kasparov, which I recommended a couple of comments below. For me, this source is reliable.

"Show a chess player a board full of randomly placed pieces and they'll have great trouble remembering the placements" - how about "Chess960"? It uses almost random positions in the beginning, which of course doesn't allow you to use already known debuts. But if we check the list of world champions, there're the same Top grossmeisters: Aronyan, Svidler, Nakamura.

I think we will have a very good practical answer in a few years. Because in 2011 the Ministry of Education of Armenia started an educational program about teaching chess in schools. This sounds very interesting and soon we will know if it helps to improve something or not.

[S4M]

I cannot prove it, but I suspect chess improves the capabilities to remember words in foreign languages.

[ardemchenkov]

Of course. It improves not only memory, but also logic, prudence, attention, etc. And you can easily use the same skills in real life. Let's take a situation when you're trying to convince an investor to invest in your project. And now imagine that you're just playing chess against him. At the beginning he has more power, this means he's playing white. And you're playing black. To be able to win (to get money in this case) you should think at least 3-4 steps forward, trying to take an initiative and wait for his mistake. Perhaps at some point you will sacrifice or exchange something to get benefit in the future. And so on. And chess can teach you how to do it.

[Lewton]

If you're gonna open your post with "of course" then there's a serious lack of citations going on.

[ardemchenkov]

Sure, thank you for this notice. There's one interesting scientific research about it, which I read before http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00.... As you can see there's no simple yes or no.

But another very good example is a book of Garry Kasparov "How life imitates chess", where he explains how it can be transparently connected with each other.

In my opinion chess can be used as a model of real life and if someone wants to learn something useful from it, he can get it.

[forgetful9987]

I read, just recently, that they gave novices and expert players chess positions to remember. The experts remembered real positions better. There was no difference in recall between the experts and the novices when they weren't real positions. This suggests that the ability for recall is highly contextual.

I can't remember where I read this though! :)