That test reenacted an experiment from 1973, in which two Carnegie Mellon University psychologists, William G. Chase and soon-to-be Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, repeated the De Groot exercise, but added a wrinkle. This time, the chess players were also given boards with the pieces in an arrangement that would never actually occur in a game. Suddenly, the experts performed just like the lesser players. The grandmasters never had photographic memories after all. Through repetitive study of game patterns, they had learned to do what Chase and Simon called “chunking.” Rather than struggling to
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