also , from what i gather, the only woman ever who could hang with the top men. is low female participation the reason for this? i've been told that bridge and scrabble have a female majority in participation yet the top players are 90%+ men. i have no experience with either of those two.

Yes.

btw, somewhat related to this: is there a link between IQ and being in the top 100? what would you estimate to be the average IQ of a top 100 player?

Let's put it like this: With a below average IQ, you probably don't make the top 100 in chess. But imo you don't have to be super duper intelligent.

there are some ideas that there's a true standard deviation that is smaller for women than it is for men in a lot of highly intellectual pursuits, but nothing substantiated. it's probably just a sample size thing coupled with a history of exclusion leading to a tighter bell curve. i don't doubt that women are fully capable of being both as smart as the smartest men and as dumb as the dumbest men when given the full opportunity.

I was thinking about this earlier. From what I understand, 60% of college enrollees are female, and most intellectual groups I see on facebook seem to have a large portion of women (possibly more than men), but men have a chemically-programmed urge to be aggressive and competitive with each other. When you combine that with the almost non-existent societal system for encouraging women to enter things like chess, I think this explains why we see almost no women at the Super-GM level.

Women are less powerful, maybe as a result of the bigger emotional connection in the brain.

This is probably relevant...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPlXC...tailpage#t=134

It's worth pointing out that Judith Polgar's father explicitly set out to prove that you can train someone to be a genius. Out of a sample size of three daughters, one of them became the female GOAT. Pretty nuts in that light.

He didn't prove that you can train someone to be a genius.

Unless contributing DNA is called training.

Define genius, as you're using it.

He basically forced them to study chess all day since they could talk though.

I think HunterX should define it as he's using it. He said you can train someone to be a genius. I don't see how Mr. Polgar "proved" this because his daughters are good at chess.

From Wiki:

"[Polgar sisters]...were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age.[5] "Geniuses are made, not born", was László's thesis."

I agree that (some) children can make exceptional achievements if trained in (some specific) subject from an early age.

Completely disagree that geniuses are made, not born. Nature has way more to do with who is a genius and who is not than does nurture. And I could argue that the sisters' desire and wont to learn and get better at chess was "born", though brought to light by a forceful parent.

Finally, I still don't see how he "proved" anything. Because there may be another family named the Raglops somewhere that underwent the same experiment and failed miserably and were never heard from again. Probably because the brains of those children were not strong enough or wired toward the activity.

The Gladwell 10,000 hours theory has a lot of merit, though, obviously. But probably >90% of the world could put in 10,000 hours of chess study (or, infinite hours) and never come close to becoming a Grandmaster. Nature > nurture

Obviously Polgar didn't actually prove anything scientifically, and of course Judit was born with much greater potential than most. Still, it's pretty remarkable that in a field with zero female contenders, someone who set out to create one was lucky enough that one of his three daughters was gifted. That's a really, really, really, big coincidence: certainly big enough to give us pause about our assumptions. Maybe there are plenty of women who could potentially be GMs, but almost none of them end up pursuing chess compared to the number of men who do.

genius is 5% talent and 95% the will to work as hard as possible to turn the talent into mastery.

Oh man, if Dire was still a regular poster...

I remember hearing that Laszlo Polgar, once the daughters had grown up and were already very strong chess players, expressed the wish to have more children with a different wife to try to repeat the experiment.

Unfortunately I can't find a source for this now.

Sourceless material, wow.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/artic...ter-experiment

Appears to be what RoundTower was remembering.