Oct 12, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min · 13 segments
Prof. Ben Balas' blog: https://lichess.org/@/NDpatzer/blog Ben's Substack: https://benbalas.substack.com/?utm\_source=sidestack.io&utm\_medium=web&utm\_campaign=directory Follow Ben Balas on X…
Benjamin BalasGuestChess Cognition Podcast HostHost
I can, I think I'd like to start by giving everybody a sense of kind of what we mean when we talk about constraints on the system.
And I think the simplest way to start thinking about it is to say, when we consider the way a chessboard gets delivered to something like a chess engine, there's sort of perfect information about the entire board and where every piece is on the board.
The thing is, that's not how our perceptual systems take in that visual when we look at the chessboard.
And that means you have a different experience of seeing different parts of the board.
That would be great.
Thank you.
But this idea that the visual system is not uniform has really important consequences for the way we play the game based on what we see.
And so I'd like to start, this is, I think a really beautiful image from a very distinguished vision scientist named Dr. Stuart Anstis that he created to sort of show off the difference between the quality of your vision right where you're looking, we would say at fixation, versus the quality of your vision everywhere else in your periphery, sort of the edges of your visual system.
Right.
So if you look at the left of this sort of nice image of San Diego, it's in nice crisp resolution everywhere you go, but this is not what your visual system sort of gets based on the way your eye and your visual brain are put together.
Instead, you get something much more like this image on the right, where I'm hoping folks can see that the very center of that image is still quite clear.
Yeah.
But the further we move out towards the edges of the picture, the blurrier and the blurrier that it gets.
Now, my guess is this is probably not so much of a surprise to many listeners.
I think most folks have a sense that your peripheral vision is not as high quality in many ways
as
Because while your peripheral vision is also lower acuity than your central vision, there is also this problem of visual crowding.
at.
And if folks looking at this image could keep their eyes on the plus sign right in the middle of the slide, my guess is that while you're looking at that plus sign, it's probably quite difficult to recognize the letter that's in the middle of that group of three letters off to the left.
I can, I think I'd like to start by giving everybody a sense of kind of what we mean when we talk about constraints on the system.
And I think the simplest way to start thinking about it is to say, when we consider the way a chessboard gets delivered to something like a chess engine, there's sort of perfect information about the entire board and where every piece is on the board.
The thing is, that's not how our perceptual systems take in that visual when we look at the chessboard.
And that means you have a different experience of seeing different parts of the board.
That would be great.
Thank you.
But this idea that the visual system is not uniform has really important consequences for the way we play the game based on what we see.
And so I'd like to start, this is, I think a really beautiful image from a very distinguished vision scientist named Dr. Stuart Anstis that he created to sort of show off the difference between the quality of your vision right where you're looking, we would say at fixation, versus the quality of your vision everywhere else in your periphery, sort of the edges of your visual system.
Right.
So if you look at the left of this sort of nice image of San Diego, it's in nice crisp resolution everywhere you go, but this is not what your visual system sort of gets based on the way your eye and your visual brain are put together.
Instead, you get something much more like this image on the right, where I'm hoping folks can see that the very center of that image is still quite clear.
Yeah.
But the further we move out towards the edges of the picture, the blurrier and the blurrier that it gets.
Now, my guess is this is probably not so much of a surprise to many listeners.
I think most folks have a sense that your peripheral vision is not as high quality in many ways
as
Because while your peripheral vision is also lower acuity than your central vision, there is also this problem of visual crowding.
at.
And if folks looking at this image could keep their eyes on the plus sign right in the middle of the slide, my guess is that while you're looking at that plus sign, it's probably quite difficult to recognize the letter that's in the middle of that group of three letters off to the left.
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