Chess Puzzle, A Lesson About Human Mind And Framing Bias

Humans are innately lazy. A recent study established that too. Our brain is not optimised. There is enough empirical evidence to support this observation.

You must have read about Parkinson’s Law which states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Here is an example I thought of to demonstrate the same using a chess puzzle.

See the following position. The Question is: How can you reach this position by making legal chess moves?

If you are really interested in what I am trying to demonstrate, stop right now and try the problem I mentioned.

I hope you gave it a try and probably solved i.e arrived at the position shown in the above image.

If so, how many moves did you take?

Now, here is the next challenge.

You have to reach the above position in 5 moves. i.e. 5 moves by White and 5 moves by Black. On 5th move by Black you should reach the above position.

If you solved the first problem, most likely you might have taken more than 5 moves. And that’s alright. Because human mind is innately lazy. When an open ended problem is given to us, we just do enough to solve it. We don’t necessarily find an optimised solution.

That’s where Framing Bias helps. Framing Bias suggests that the way a problem is “framed”, that is stated/constructed determines the way it gets solved.

If we frame the problem differently and make it “Solve in 5 moves”, our brain would work within given constraints and find a better solution in 5 moves. Try it, if you want! You can do it in 5 moves.

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Now, here is the beauty of this lesson!

You can do it in 4 moves! It’s possible. So try it!

Whether you solve it or not, you would appreciate that how the problem was framed activates your brain differently – it changes your brain from being lazy (just solve it) to efficient (solve in 5 moves), to even more efficient (solve in 4 moves).

Very rarely someone would directly find a solution in 4 moves, when the problem is framed in an open ended manner, without giving any constraint of number of moves.

And that is a good quality we possess. We don’t over-stress the brain when it is not needed to do so. However, we can do it, if needed!

The main challenge is framing the problem in appropriate manner so that brain is activated to find an optimum solution); and more importantly, finding the problems that need optimised solutions.