Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] real experts are just different from the rest of us.

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Jonathan King wrote:

> Cognitive psychologists have known that real experts are doing something 
> very, very different from most people in their domain. Interestingly, 
> they get that way by spending a lot of time in very focused practice. So 
> the bad news is that their expertise rarely transfers well to other 
> domains, including very closely related ones. So I find the following 
> video interesting because it shows a real expert working in a domain 
> that I think all of us understand fairly well. But yet...I'm willing to 
> be that none of us do it like this.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo
>
> Really, this is very impressive without being mysterious or spooky, like 
> watching an expert violinst for example.


Thanks for the comments.  I ran into that on Reddit last night.  It is 
amazing, but there are two differences between his version of Tetris and 
the one I usually play and both give him a huge advantage:  (1) He can see 
the next three pieces before he plays them (I can only see one on my PC 
version of the game) and (2) he has a joystick and keys that let him do 
really quick moves with the pieces.  But still!

I agree with what you say about the violin.  Playing Paganini's hardest 
pieces perfectly, or Rachmaninov on piano, is really much more impressive 
than this for several reasons.  Playing Tetris with the version of the 
game he was using is very much like sight reading music fairly quickly. 
In way it is sad that this kid spent so much time on Tetris when he could 
have learned to do something that mattered.

One thing I don't get:  In the end he seems to be playing in a way that 
forces him to remember the positions of the fallen pieces because they 
become invisible when they stop moving.  That must have been absurdly hard 
to master.  I wonder if it is the same very time and he memorized it.  If 
it is different every time, it would be even more astonishing.

Mike

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