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Adriaan de Groot (1914 – 2006) was a Dutch psychologist who conducted groundbreaking research into chess playing and apply the scientific method to psychological research. His work lies at the heart of the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology and provided much food for thought in research on artificial intelligence.
The Chess Psychologist
In his PhD dissertation, “Thought and Choice in Chess”, he devised a number of experiments to study how chess players of all levels decided on their next moves. He showed that expert chess players use a form of pattern recognition to make decisions. For example, he found chess players tend to remember the positions of the pieces on the chessboard better than non-chess players. He studied the role of memory, visual perception and practice on these processes. De Groot’s work laid the foundations for much of the subsequent research in this area, and his insights continue to be highly influential today.
Methodology
A. D. de Groot’s contributions to psychological methods are significant because he was one of the first psychologists to advocate for a more scientific approach to research. In the 1950s, psychological research was primarily based on philosophy and intuition, rather than the rigorous methods that are used today. De Groot’s book “Methodology” (1960) laid the foundation for the current methods of psychological research, which involve formulating a hypothesis, testing it empirically, and then formulating a theory. De Groot’s work has had a lasting impact on the field of psychology, and has helped to make it the scientific discipline it is today.
See also these websites, which clearly provided some of the training data for GPT-3 (some are in Dutch):
https://en.chessbase.com/post/adriaan-de-groot-che-psychologist-1914-2006-