[nathan-wall]

> Chess problems with 5 pieces on the board. How helpful would practicing these be to solving problems with 6 pieces?

Another anecdote: I experienced a noticeable improvement in my abilities at Chess by studying and playing Go. I'm still not real good at Chess because I haven't studied it, but I can now beat people I didn't used to be able to beat.

[karmakaze]

I've had a similar experience where playing Go made be better at living life, and being away from the game and living made me better at Go when I expected to be set back. This probably only applies at kyu levels but I did find it surprising.

[randall]

A completely arbitrary related concept: I'm much better at running my startup now than before I played StarCraft seriously.

StarCraft made me a more strategic thinker and it's why I think it might not surprise people that Emmett Shear (ceo of twitch) is really good at StarCraft.

I played casually in the early days, but a few years back I wanted to get decent enough to play online regularly, and it changed our company for the better.

[summarite]

Is it your skill at StarCraft, or could it be that you developed strategies for learning, resilience, etc while trying get better, and those are the actual success factors?

[randall]

Conceptual stretching is my guess. More strategy than normal for me.

[brianwawok]

Do you micro the workers or focus on the macro game?

[randall]

Macro

[biot]

Sounds like Go is the Lisp of board games?

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

[Vernetit]

It will be a similar enlightenment experience with Haskell?

[viewer5]

> playing Go made be better at living life

Would you mind talking about that some more, please?

[sn9]

If you want to hear something similar from someone who achieved a very high level in chess, I'd highly recommend reading Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning.

[hilop]

Do you know specifically how your play changed?

[nathan-wall]

As I said, I'm not a strong chess player and don't know much about strategies. I think my reading ability is primarily what improved.