Ultralearning

by Scott Young

  Chess is a game dominated by adult men. Thus a young girl competing was bound to arouse both the curiosity and the prejudice of her competitors. Grand master Edmar Mednis, facing off against the young Polgár, noted that he was very careful to play his best against the young prodigy, noting that “Grandmasters don’t like to lose to 10-year-old girls, because then we make the front page of all the papers.”1 Some of her competitors celebrated the obvious genius of Polgár’s play. Grand master Nigel Short said Polgár might be one of the “three or four great chess prodigies in history.”2 Mikhail Tal, a former world champion, suggested when Polgár was still twelve that she might eventually be a contender for world champion.

  Garry Kasparov was less convinced. The former world champion has been considered by many to be the best chess player of all time. He is most famous for his matches against IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer, winning against the machine in 1996 and losing in 1997, marking the transition to machine dominance in a game that had historically been considered one of the highest expressions of human creativity and intelligence. Kasparov was less than enthusiastic about the young Polgár’s chances. “She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle.”3

  That casual prejudice erupted into a full-blown controversy during their first match. Polgár, then only seventeen, sat across from the chess legend and former world champion, playing in a tournament in Linares, Spain. Although chess is often viewed as being coldly rational, as both players calculate moves with precision to reach their final outcome, the psychological effect of sitting opposite the dominant Russian can’t be understated. Given that incredible tension, it was almost unbelievable when Kasparov, on move thirty-four, placed his knight and, after briefly lifting his fingers from the piece, changed his mind and moved it to a better square. Polgár was stunned. According to chess rules, once a player stops touching a piece, the move is done; no changes are allowed. Half in disbelief, she glanced at the referee, expecting him to indicate that Kasparov had cheated. Yet the referee didn’t challenge the grand master. Reeling from the move, Polgár lost the game.

  Asked why she hadn’t challenged the illegal move herself, Polgár explained, “I was playing the World Champion and didn’t want to cause unpleasantness during my first invitation to such an important event. I was also afraid that if my complaint was overruled I would be penalized on the clock when we were in time pressure.”4 Still, after the game had concluded, she was incensed. She confronted Kasparov later in the hotel bar, demanding “How could you do this to me?”5 “She publicly accused me of cheating,” Kasparov said when defending himself against the accusation. “I think a girl of her age should be taught some good manners.”6 It would be years before the two spoke again, but whereas Kasparov was already well established in the chess world, Polgár was just getting started.

  Polgár is singular, not only for her prowess in the male-dominated game but also for how she learned to play. Unlike other famous players, such as Bobby Fischer, who spontaneously developed an obsession for the game, Polgár’s chess genius was no accident. Instead, it started with one man’s mission to raise genius children.

  The Making of a Genius

  Years before Judit faced down the legendary grand master, before her meteoric rise in chess or even her first game, her father, László Polgár, had made a decision: he was going to raise a genius. While studying intelligence in college, he had begun contemplating his project before having children or even a wife. “A genius is not born but educated and trained,” he maintained. 7 Studying the biographies of hundreds of great intellectuals, he was convinced that genius could be manufactured. “[W]hen I looked at the stories of geniuses,” he later remarked, “I found the same thing. . . . They all started at a young age and studied intensively.” 8

  But first, he had to find a partner for his pedagogical experiment. He found it in Klára, a Ukrainian foreign-language teacher. Far from your normal love letters, he first corresponded to her by explaining his idea to raise genius children. After agreeing to his proposal, the two met and were married in the Soviet Union before moving back to his native Hungary. Together the couple had three children, Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit. Although Judit ended up becoming the most intensely competitive and famous, all three became world-class chess players, with Zsuzsa also becoming a grand master and Zsófia reaching the status of international master.

  Living modestly in a cramped apartment, László and his wife decided to devote themselves full-time to their project of raising genius children. Their strategy was to begin the girls’ educations early, at age three, and move on to specialization in one domain no later than six. They would start by introducing the girls to that subject slowly, in short bursts, and turn it into play so that they would actively want to practice rather than feel coerced into doing so. That strategy, however, didn’t specify a topic. László and Klára considered many different possible study topics for their daughters, from foreign languages to mathematics. Eventually they settled on chess, because it was objective and progress in it was easy to measure. No doubt the preeminence of chess intellectually in the socialist countries in those years added weight to their decision to focus on the game.

  Despite the emphasis on chess, László did not believe that such specialization needed to come at the sacrifice of the broader education of his girls. All three learned foreign languages (Zsuzsa, the eldest, learned eight), as well as mathematics, table tennis, swimming, and other subjects. The decision to focus on chess with all three girls was made for a practical reason: given the intense devotion both parents would need to have, in both resources and time, spreading their effort over three different disciplines would have been more than their budget or schedule could bear.

  Zsuzsa was first to start. She began playing at age four. Six months later, she was going with her father to the smoke-filled chess clubs of Budapest, playing against elderly men—and winning. By the time it was Judit’s turn, she was already motivated to begin her training. Zsuzsa and Zsófia played chess in a small room László had devoted to the game, and she didn’t want to be left out.

  Soon the three girls were a team, traveling around to compete against much older, usually male players. Their shared mission created camaraderie rather than jealousy in playing a game that very often pushed back against their unusual status. The Hungarian Chess Federation’s policy was for women to compete in women-only chess events. However, László was strongly against the idea. “Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men,” he felt. “Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect.”9 Discrimination had already prevented Zsuzsa from obtaining the grand master title at fifteen. As the youngest, by the time Judit approached some of these barriers, her elder sisters had already broken them down a bit, allowing her to forgo competing in the women-only tournaments.

  Although their education was the same and all three reached impressive heights in chess, the girls’ prowess was not identical. Zsófia was the weakest of the three; although reaching the impressive grade of international master, she later decided to retire from chess to focus on art and her family. Zsuzsa had specialized a little less in chess from an early age, learning eight languages, which her father admits might have distracted her from reaching her maximum chess potential. Judit started more slowly, according to Zsuzsa, but she had the strongest work ethic, being “obsessed” with chess to a degree unusual even for her family.

  Rematch with Kasparov

  Eight years after her controversial defeat by Kasparov, Judit had another opportunity to face down the legendary grand master. In the 2002 Russia Versus the Rest of the World match in Moscow, Judit faced off against Kasparov in a game of rapid chess, with only twenty-five minutes allocated to each player. Judit played the Ruy Lopez, or Spanish game, named after the sixteent
h-century Spanish bishop and chess strategist. This uses one of the most common openings in chess, moving the knight and bishop out to good squares on the second and third moves. Kasparov countered with the Berlin Defense, moving a second knight to the board while ignoring the potential danger created by his opponent’s bishop; this was known to be a solid counter, often leading to draws. Kasparov wasn’t taking any chances. After a flurry of exchanged pieces, both positions were quite close. Judit, as white, had castled her king into safety. Kasparov, as black, in losing the opportunity for the same safety had retained both the light-square and dark-square bishop pair, a powerful combination that can often be decisive in winning a game. Judit calmly pushed forward, cornering one of Kasparov’s bishops and neutralizing his advantage. Slowly but surely, her moves continued to improve her position while Kasparov’s looked increasingly questionable. Eventually, the small positional advantages Judit had accumulated over the midgame were threatening to win. Two pawns down and facing looming threats of checkmate, Kasparov resigned.

  Following his defeat, Kasparov revised his earlier assessment of Judit’s ability and indeed the idea of women competing against men at the highest levels of the game. “The Polgárs showed that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude—an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed by a twelve-year-old with a ponytail.”10

  The Aftermath of an Experiment

  László Polgár’s conviction that he could turn any healthy child into a genius is the kind of assertion that would make him seem like a crackpot if he hadn’t actually been successful. Nonetheless, a careful reader will note that, as far as experiments go, László’s has plenty of holes that keep it from becoming a model of scientific purity. There was no control group, for starters. All three of the Polgár sisters received the same education. There was no fourth sister who went to school the normal way and missed László’s special training. There was no randomization. László didn’t adopt a random child to raise in his unusual system but taught his own. This also means that the influence of genetics can’t be ignored. The success of all three children may be owing to hereditary, rather than acquired, talents. There was also no blinding. All the Polgárs knew they were part of something special, a unique mission that set them apart from other families. Therefore, in the ongoing debate between nature and nurture, the success of the Polgár sisters might be suggestive of the role that unorthodox education can play, but it is far from definitive.

  Despite its failings as a purely scientific experiment, the Polgárs’ work is certainly a window into what might be possible. All three girls achieved enormous results in chess. Although we cannot know for certain, it seems likely that they could have succeeded in any number of other domains as well. Similarly, although László’s methods were strange, it does not seem as though the girls suffered, either in their broader education or in their emotional well-being. They were self-confident and happy and grew up to be successful, emotionally stable adults with loving families of their own. When asked whether his strange pedagogical methods had robbed his girls of a normal childhood, László argued the opposite, that it is a normal, mediocre education that often leads to unhappiness. Interviewer Endre Farkas, who worked with Polgár on his book Raise a Genius!, asked, “Have they been educated too narrowly, deprived of a carefree childhood? I was able to observe the Polgárs. . . . One can clearly see that they are happy.”11

  Educating Ultralearners?

  Prior to doing the research for this book, all of the ultralearners I had met were ambitious self-starters. I was convinced that ultralearning was something that held great potential for the individual. However, owing to the intensity and commitment required by the learners themselves, I was skeptical that ultralearning would have any direct implications for the educational system at large. Children already struggle against onerous studying conditions, and it seemed to me that increasing the intensity of study would only increase their stress and anxiety.

  Psychologists recognize a large difference between goals that people pursue intrinsically, based on their own interests, decisions, and targets, and goals that they pursue extrinsically, pushed by overbearing parents, punishing curricula, or demanding employers. The latter type, because the motivation for conforming to them comes primarily from outside social pressures, are the cause of much misery. Tales of depression, anxiety, and even suicide are distressingly common in environments where the pressure to perform on standardized tests is ratcheted up to an uncomfortable degree. Ultralearning, because it is a self-driven quest, not an externally imposed obligation, doesn’t need to be this way. However, because of its very nature, it was unclear to me whether it was something that could be taught.

  The Polgár sisters are an unusual case, then, because although they were trained from a very early age and worked incredibly hard, they don’t seem to have been harmed psychologically by the pressure. In contrast to the stereotypical “tiger” parent, their parents encouraged their unusual specialization through play and positive feedback, not authority and punishment. The Polgár sisters all continued to play chess well into adulthood at the competitive level. The obsession into chess, therefore, was clearly something fostered, rather than imposed. At the same time, their participation in the experiment wasn’t exactly voluntary. László had dreamed up his goal of raising geniuses before knowing whether his children would consent to the program, so it was not a case of each daughter discovering for herself that she wanted to devote herself to an intense regimen of chess practice. That feature of the Polgár experiment interested me the most, because it seemed as if László and Klára had found a loophole in the normal expectation that pushing others to study intensely necessarily leads to misery.

  How to Raise an Ultralearner

  László Polgár wrote a book entitled Raise a Genius!, documenting his unorthodox approach to education.* In the book, he outlined his strategy for turning any normal, healthy child into a genius, provided the parents are willing to go to the extremes he and his wife dedicated to the task.

  The first step is to start early. The child’s education should begin no later than three, and specialization should begin no later than six. Although the exact extent to which learning becomes harder as we age is unclear, there is evidence from fields such as music and languages that children’s brains are more plastic and flexible when younger. László took this idea to the extreme, encouraging training far earlier than is typical for early-childhood education.

  The second step is to specialize. Although the Polgár sisters did learn languages, mathematics, sports, and other subjects, their focus was always on chess. László noted that “starting from 4–5 they played chess 5 or 6 hours a day.”12 That specialization seems to have had two roles in his strategy for raising geniuses. The first is that it took advantage of any hypothetical flexibility that younger children possess to learn new subjects easily. The second is that by specializing in one subject, the children could reach proficiency at a much younger age. Winning against older and more experienced opponents in chess built their confidence and competitive spirit, so that they actively wanted to practice more to improve themselves. Had the girls spread their intellectual appetites too broadly, they might not have developed the self-confidence that leads to intense practice.

  The third step was to make practice into play. Chess, being a game, is naturally suited to play. However, László was insistent on introducing all subjects to the girls as forms of play. When the girls would become distracted or get up and wander around while playing a game, they weren’t punished but encouraged to let their minds wander as they sought a solution. Keeping the game fun and light, especially when the children were young, was a key stepping-stone to developing the drive and self-confidence that would support more serious efforts later. However, it is important to keep in mind as László insisted that “play is not the opposite of work” and “a child does not need play separate from work, but meaningful action,” adding “learn
ing presents them with more enjoyment than a sterile game.”13 Play and work combined in the Polgárs’ approach to learning, with no rigid boundary between them.

  Fourth, László was careful to create positive reinforcement to make chess a pleasant, rather than frustrating, experience. “Failure, suffering, and fearfulness decrease achievement. Following a number of successive failures, even a damaging inhibitory complex can be created,” he explained.14 Starting with the behaviorists, psychologists have known in detail that having a positive experience, such as winning a game, can create a desire to repeat the behaviors that led to the experience. Negative experiences, from losing, becoming confused, or experiencing frustration against a stronger opponent to facing an opponent who is too easy and robs the player of the satisfaction of pulling off an impressive victory, reduce enthusiasm. László carefully established the cycles of positive feedback early on. In the beginning, when he was still a stronger player than the girls, he would adjust his play so that they would be challenged but still win enough of the time to find the game enjoyable. “We should make sure not to always win against the child; we should let them win sometimes so that they feel they are also capable of thinking,” he wrote, adding “At the start it is most important to awake interest. . . . We should get the child to love what they do—to such a degree that they do it almost obsessively.”15

  Finally, László was entirely against coercing learning. Self-discipline, motivation, and commitment, he felt, must come from the girls themselves. He explained, “One thing is certain: one can never achieve serious pedagogical results, especially at a high level, through coercion.”16 He also felt that “one of the most important educational tasks is to teach self-education.”17 This final step of his process was particularly important for his daughters, as they quickly outpaced their father’s ability. Had they not been encouraged to develop their own abilities to teach themselves and adjust their learning, they might have become decent chess players but certainly not grand masters.