[blahedo]

Well, sort of. It also primes you for an awful lot of conceptual development in the area of metacognition and computer science---understanding how to reason about a problem. While it doesn't necessarily explicitly teach the concept of problem spaces and data representation and minimaxing and heuristics, I'm confident that if I tried to explain any of that to a good chess player, they'd pick it up quickly and maybe even find it "obvious".