Click here to read Part 1.
So did you manage to figure out the connection between chess masters and the Tai Chi novice aspiring to be a master?
Let’s take a look at the information again :-
If anything, the masters searched fewer moves than the novices. But they could do one thing the novices could not: memorize a chess position after seeing the board for less than five seconds. One look, and they could reconstruct the arrangement of the pieces precisely, as if they’d taken a mental snapshot.
Yet they saw the chessboard in more meaningful chunks than the novices did. The superior performance of stronger players derives from the ability of those players to encode the position into larger perceptual chunks, each consisting of a familiar configuration of pieces, ….
Let’s break up the findings above in easier to digest chunks :-
i) A chess master can memorize a chess position easily
ii) A chess master sees positions on a chess board in meaningful chunks
iii) A chess master can see larger perceptual chunks made up of familiar configurations
When this is applied to the learning of Tai Chi we can rephrase the three simplified findings as :-
i) A Tai Chi master should be able to recognize a position (whether attacking or defending) easily
ii) A Tai Chi master should see his position relative to the opponent in a meaningful manner
iii) A Tai Chi master should be able to recognize familiar positions in terms of tactical and strategic advantages within the fast pace of a flurry of hands jockeying for a superior and winning position
Does the above make more sense now? Anyway, this is what I expect students to be able to do in order to Master Tai Chi Today.
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