Month: February 2021

If you’ve ever read books about learning or chess history, you’ve likely heard the name Laszlo Polgar before. Polgar was a Hungarian psychologist who dedicated his life to training his three daughters to become chess champions (he was interested in studying the creation of genius, as to whether it was innate or cultivated).

He chose chess for his genius-cultivating endeavor because it was something in which was fairly structured and systematic. In the end, he succeeded quite dramatically, with two of the sisters becoming the best female chess players ever and the other sister becoming a “mere” International Master (one step removed from the highest Grandmaster level).

One fun fact is that in the course of training his daughters in chess, he single-handedly created one of the largest chess databases in the world (perhaps only rivaled by the Soviet secret archives!)

I was listening to a podcast where Tyler Cowen interviewed Ed Boyden (linked here), a fascinating professor at MIT. Boyden presents the “tiling-tree” problem-solving technique, which is about thinking backwards from a problem and enumerating through all possible tools for solving the problem. I thought it was a really fascinating and systematic research approach.

Boyden gives the example of optogenetics (his research field), where he framed the problem as: how can you control the brain to repair it? The group began thinking about how you could control the brain and realized there are only so many different kinds of energy: mechanical force, magnetism, electricity, light. Then from each of these ideas, he would break them down further into discrete “nodes,” and then he would test the bottom nodes with a literature search or doing an experiment.

Apparently, Fritz Zwicky was the pioneer of this thinking (Zwicky called it “morphological analysis”) in the 1930’s. He used this method successfully to imagine (and then discover!) dark matter and a bunch of other ideas in astrophysics.

In essence, Boyden is reasoning from first principles in this problem-solving approach.