Interesting article - How experts think

A very interesting article: How experts think, by Kevin Ashton

https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/how-experts-think-91b443104b92

Adriaan de Groot, a chess master and psychologist, studied expertise by showing a chess position to players of different ranks. He found that grandmasters evaluated few moves and re-evaluated them less often than other players. One grandmaster evaluated one move twice, then evaluated another and played it. It was the best possible move. This was generally true: Grandmasters never considered moves that were not one of the top 5 best possible moves. Other players considered moves as poor as twenty-second-best. The less expert the player, the more options they considered, the more evaluations they made, and the worse their eventual move was.

Experts do not think less. They think more efficiently. The practiced brain eliminates poor solutions before they reach the conscious mind.

By evaluating so many moves, Grandmasters accumulate so much experience that they can pay selective attention to a game.
Advanced thinkers think in advance. The expert’s first impression is not a first impression at all. It is the latest in a series of millions. The more we learn from our experience and the experience of others — whether in chess, radiography, football or anything else — the more selective our attention will become, and the faster we will think.