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Notes on Puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi

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1. I mostly don’t play chess anymore — it’s too addictive, and tends to take over your brain in a way I don’t like — but one habit I’ve retained is solving puzzles. It’s a mental warm-up, a way of occupying my brain when I don’t want to mindlessly scroll. Along the way, I came across a fantastic book called Think Like A Super-GM, by Michael Adams and Philip Hurtado. The authors take 100 or so chess puzzles, of varying difficulty, and then ask chess players of different skill levels (amateur to grandmaster) to solve them, while recording their thinking process out loud. It turns out comparing the thought process of less skilled vs. more skilled players gives you many useful insights! (I’d love to see this concept used for books in other disciplines.) The lesson I found the most striking is this: there’s a direct correlation between how skilled you are as a chess player, and how much time you spend falsifying your ideas. The authors find that grandmasters spend longer falsifying their

Notes on Puzzles Nabeel S. Qureshi Jul 11, 2023 155 17 24 Share 1. I mostly don’t play chess anymore — it’s too addictive, and tends to take over your brain in a way I don’t like — but one habit I’ve retained is solving puzzles. It’s a mental warm-up, a way of occupying my brain when I don’t want to mindlessly scroll. Along the way, I came across a fantastic book called Think Like A Super-GM , by Michael Adams and Philip Hurtado. The authors take 100 or so chess puzzles, of varying difficulty, and then ask chess players of different skill levels (amateur to grandmaster) to solve them, while re

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