“The phone numbers with the code at the start!
If you remember then you are a stalwart!
Or you can simply use the address book!
Pick the name and have a look!”
Remember when you did not have mobile phones?
It is a wonder how we used to remember phone numbers!
without our knowledge we actually used to use a technique even which the grandmasters of chess use!
Intrigued!?
read on!
One fine day when I was in my hostel at Calicut and it was saturday night was the day when panic started!
Those days (I used to cringe when people used to start their stories with ‘Those days!’; now I hope no one else gets that feeling when I start my stories with those days!)
Weekend in the night when many of us hostel kids used to calll home! The walk to the STD booth was an event in itself!
Those days (sorry! But it was more than twenty five years back!); the STD rates used to be reduced in the night and that is when we used to call home!
Mom would eagerly wait for my call and my brother would have called a little earlier and then I would do the same.
That day, as it used to happen so often, the lines were jammed or busy or some issue. When this used to happen, the tone would beep beep for some time and not connect!
Luckily unless it gets connected, you would not be charged! So many times we would go on trying and if lucky you would get it.
In fact I am sure my father and older generation would have similar stories with the trunk calls and maybe the telegram! Then again that is a blog for another day!
That day or night rather, the beep just kept on going but it did not get connected. It was frustrating and a little sad since those day (sorry again!); many of us used to call our homes only once a week! The few minutes of speaking to mom would keep us connected to home and keep the home sickness on hold!
The gals of the class would tell stories of how they would call home and speak for hours! We could only imagine that! It was ten minutes or so which itself was more since all we had to report would get completed in that time!
That day since I was not able to connect to Bangalore, I thought of calling my mother’s sister in Madras (yes that was the name!) and luckily I remembered her number!
This was because mom used to have a night time chat session with her sister almost every other day! The major part of our landline bill were the STD itemised calls to Madras! In fact even my aunt’s address was something which we all memorised!
Many times mom would not get her spectacles and tell me to dial the number! We used to love doing that!
Of course the big address book would have all the details which mom and dad use to treasure!
This big diary would be always near the phone!
Which may be the reason why I remembered her number!
If remembering numbers was the game, my mom was an champ! She used to tell numbers of so many folks just like that!
The method she used was to divide the number into smaller sections or ‘Chunks’! And then remember the whole number!
So anyway I also remembered the number and conveyed the message to my aunt and called mother the next day!
Now this method of remembering the number or anything by dividing is called Chunking!
So chunking, involves organizing information into smaller, more manageable groups, and this enhances understanding and recall.
Take, for instance, how we typically remember long numbers. We break them into smaller segments, like we do with phone numbers: 987-651-4321, rather than trying to recall 9876514321 as a whole!
So in chess and computer chess, chunking is about to recognize relevant patterns of a chess position!
A chunk is a group of pieces, in some sense a semantic unit, a meaningful pattern that is recognized at a glance by a chess master. Reasoning about a position in terms of such chunks as atomic units, instead of individual pieces, reduces the complexity of a position from, say, 30 units to about 7 units, assuming that each chunk consists of 4 or 5 pieces.
This hypothesis known as the Chunking Hypothesis was researched in various cognitive experiments by researcher Adriaan de Groot and others, where chess masters were able to reconstruct a chess position from a albeit unknown chess game almost perfectly after viewing it for only 5 sec, while players below the master level had sharp drop off in this ability!
However, this result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, since masters had almost the same difficulty to reconstruct the positions constructed by placing the same numbers of pieces randomly on the board!
This means that only a proper move or a recognisable move on a Chess Board was recalled by the expert level players or Grandmasters! If the move is not possible or incorrect or random then these experts remember just as many pieces as ‘normal’ people like you and me!
If you want to know that whether you are a good player of chess or not then you can try the Chunking Hypothesis! Then again it is not a hard and fast rule by the way! Mentioning rule and follower of rule reminds me of Birthday celebrity who played the rule follower Katappa or Satyaraj!
Now chunk those garbage in the dustbin and sleep!
Shubh ratri!
ramadocblog 