Researchers divided expert chess players into two groups and gave them a chess problem to solve.9 The players were asked to achieve checkmate using the fewest possible moves. For the first group of players, the board contained two solutions: (1) a solution that was familiar to any skilled chess player and would achieve checkmate in five moves and (2) a less familiar, but better, solution that would produce a checkmate in three moves. Many experts in the first group couldn’t find the better solution. The researchers tracked the players’ eye movements and found that they spent much of their time
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