[Apocryphon]

Come to think of it, the basics of playing chess is of insufficient complexity to be compared to an algorithm interview. More like being able to mount basic strategies and chess moves. Not sure how the average player would be able to recall those if they haven't played chess in a long time, because they were instead playing games derived from basic chess moves but with very different game mechanics.

[Jensson]

If you demand more complexity then you need to take people with more skills. Do you think that Magnus Carlsen would forget how to mount a basic defence if he didn't touch chess for 20 years? He wouldn't be as good, sure, but he wouldn't forget how to play, he would still beat most people.

[Apocryphon]

And most interviewees, as chess players, are not Magnus Carlsen.

[Jensson]

My rule of thumb is that people remember things one or two layers lower than their max. If you learned calculus then you wont forget basic algebra. If you took a grad course on electromagnetism then you wont forget basic calculus. The same goes for algorithms, if you learned them once and then never had a course where you built upon those to make more advanced algorithms you will forget them. But once you start to see them as basic building blocks for other things then you wont forget.

So from this rule, if you just learned the rules for chess you would forget them. But if you started trying to win chess games and viewed the rules as building blocks for strategies, then you will remember the rules for chess. Then you start to compose strategies etc.

[Apocryphon]

The problem, then, would seem that the majority of software work is no longer building things, as it is jury-rigging together APIs and frameworks, thus leading to the loss of use of remembering the building blocks. And leads to the replacement of such vital components as building blocks with other components like design patterns or commonly used SDKs and libraries.