Chess One wrote:
"Sanny" wrote in message
oups.com...

When I gave IQ Test when I was in School I got an IQ of "125". In that
I was asked What is capital of Australia. Where is Effile Tower
Situated, Where is Panama Canal etc.

Is true! For example I would have to guess Panama Canal was in Panama, if I
never went there to know by personal experience or never read geography. But
the question is not completely crazy, since what is being tested?

It could be logic, ie, Panama canal is named for the place, Panama.
It could be memory, if you remember where canal is.
But if you didn't read geography then its not always possible to answer this
type of question - ie, where is Lake Champlain? Because the Lake is named
for a person, not a place.

Therefore, is this part of IQ test a measure of geographical knowledge
remembered?

I don't see much point in using the original combined IQ test now. But
there is a point in considering scores in the separated tests that
cover mathermatical, linguistic, visuo-spatial reasoning etc. If people
know what their strengths are they can make better use of them.

I have yet to meet any strong chess player that didn't have powerful
innate pattern matching and abstract reasoning ability. And anecdotally
mathematicians are often also strong chess players (although aptitude
for mathematics in other strong chess players may not have been
translated into academic acheivement for a host of other reasons). eg

http://web.usna.navy.mil/~wdj/math_chess.htm

Other questions are self-inferential, either singly or as a group,

When was the War of 1812?
Who wrote Beethoven's 5th symphony.

If the "I" in IQ is taken to mean [is generally understood to mean]
'logical' intelligence [a left-brain process] then what you describe is not
a measure of that, but of memory alone [and which hemisphere is that?]. How
much of IQ testing is a measure of memory alone?

A good intelligence test should not depend signifacntly on memory.
Although it does have to rely on some basic foundations (like knowing
the alphabet, language, upto 4 letter words, logic and numbers and
numerical sequences).

The purest intelligence tests are the visuo-spatial symbol and pattern
matching tests.
Which one of these is the same but rotated ? etc. They are truly
language independent. Sudoku is another pure reasoning test.

But still there is a problem. In cultures that live in very harsh
environments (arctic or deserts) you can die if you make a mistake.
This can mean that someone stops at the first question where they
cannot see the answer - leading to massive cultural bias.

A corollary is that teaching students the exam technique of never to
spending more than a certain time on any question (and then go back to
tricky ones later) boosts scores.

For example, on IQ tests only one answer was permitted for the following:-

Complete the series: 2, 4, 8, ....

How many correct answers are there? Of all correct answers justify which one
you would choose to complete the series.

This is a classic. Anyone with common sense would choose what the
testers were obviously looking for, but common sense and IQ tend to be
anti-correlated. And in this case the sequence is far too short so that
there are multiple ambiguous answers all equally likely.

16 = 2^n and 14 = 2+n(n+1) are both very plausible testers answers.
Question is flawed.

Same with make two new 4 letter words from S( _ _ _ )L by putting a 3
letter word in the gap.

One problem for IQ tests is that they are only valid for a range of IQs
and if the test is used on someone with an IQ beyond anything the
testers expect (and no common sense) it gives a totally anomolous
score. I knew someone at university who was extremely dyslexic in
language but had a mathematical and logical reasoning IQ around the 260
mark. He also had a framed certificate showing that his IQ was 60
(since he always chose the non-obvious unintended phantom answers in
such tests).

Another favourite "obvious" series being

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, [31]

The encylopedia of series will give you a nice selection of other
alternatives to the "obvious" 32 that the test setter had almost
certainly intended. The solution would probably be unique if a term
beyond the unknown one was also provided. (2,4,8 gives far too many
alternatives)

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/se...2%2C4%2C8%2C16

I think spatial and math IQ probably does set an upper limit on chess
performance, and I strongly suspect that the age at which you first
start playing chess is also an important factor.

Regards,
Martin Brown