Passage3

Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion

蒂穆尔·加列耶夫——蒙眼象棋冠军

A Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King.

下个月，一位名叫Timur Gareyev的象棋手将一次性对弈近50名对手。但这并不是困难的部分。在他的对手们会以正常方式下棋之时，加列耶夫自己将会蒙住双眼。即使是以世界纪录的标准来看，这种做法也为人类行为设立了一个很高的门槛。这位28岁的棋手已经在蒙眼象棋这个阳春白雪的世界里鹤立鸡群。他喜欢颜色鲜艳的衣服和与众不同的发型，从低空跳伞这项运动中汲取极大的乐趣。他还已经证明了自己是一个高超的棋手。在2013年的一场历时10小时的象棋马拉松中，他同时在脑中下了33局象棋。他赢了其中的29局而没有输掉任何一局。这项技能已经成为他的标志：他称自己为“蒙眼国王”。

B But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. ‘The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished players,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’

但是加列耶夫的造诣还吸引了来自象棋界之外的兴趣。怀着能理解他和其他像他一样的人是如何达成这种头脑壮举的希望，加州大学洛杉矶分校（UCLA）的研究者们邀请他参加了一些测试。他们现在已经得到了第一批测试结果。“闭着眼睛下一盘棋的能力对于大多数技艺成熟的棋手来说算不上什么难事。”在UCLA运营着一间记忆力实验室的Jesse Rissman如是说。“但是Timur和其他几个人的与众不同之处在于他们能同时对弈的棋局数量。在我看来这简直令人惊异。”

C Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess grandmaster. He moved to the US soon after, and as a student helped his university win its first national chess championship. In 2013, Gareyev was ranked the third best chess player in the US.

加列耶夫六岁的时候在他的祖国乌兹别克斯坦开始学习下棋。他由自己的祖父教习，在八岁时参加了自己的第一场锦标赛并很快痴迷于参加各种比赛。16岁时，他被加冕为亚洲史上最年轻的象棋大师。在这之后他很快移居美国，以学生身份帮助他就读的高校赢得了其校史上的第一个全国象棋冠军。在2013年，加列耶夫在美国象棋手排名榜上位列第三。

D To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was played in 13th-century Florence. In 1947, the Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played 45 simultaneous games in his mind, winning 39 in the 24-hour session.

在外行看来，蒙眼象棋似乎需要超凡脱俗的技能。但是这种技艺的展示可以追溯到数个世纪之前。欧洲历史上第一次有记录的这种棋局出现在13世纪的佛罗伦萨。在1947年，阿根廷象棋大师Miguel Najdorf纯凭意念同时下了45盘棋，在24小时的鏖战里赢了39局。

E Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realising it. The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again, so the brain can move on to the next board. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy. He sometimes makes moves based on only a fragmented memory of the pieces’ positions.

技艺高超的棋手甚至有可能在本人都没有意识到的情况下发展出蒙眼下棋的技术。这种棋艺的本质就是在脑海中浏览可能的棋路，看它们如何铺陈。以这些为基础，熟练的棋手们会在脑海中搭建出所有棋子攻守交锋所构成的图谱的记忆。“你在自己的头脑中重现它们，”加列耶夫说道。“许多棋手都有能力做到我所做的一切。”真正的思维挑战来自于在脑海中一次性进行多盘棋局。不但每个棋盘上每颗棋子的位置都必须被记住，它们还必须在有需要的时候被精准回忆出来，随着每一个棋手的出招而更新，然后再重新被可靠地储存起来，这样大脑才能进而去处理下一盘棋局。起手的招式可能会很难记，因为它们都相当乏味无趣。但是收尾中的比赛也颇伤脑筋，因为疲惫感逐渐降临。当加列耶夫感到疲倦时，他的回忆就可能变得七零八落。他有时候只能基于对棋子位置的零碎记忆来出棋。

F The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.’ But next came the brain scans. With Gareyev lying down in the machine, Rissman looked at how well connected the various regions of the chess player’s brain were. Though the results are tentative and as yet unpublished, the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain that make up what is called the frontoparietal control network. Of 63 people scanned alongside the chess player, only one or two scored more highly on the measure. ‘You use this network in almost any complex task. It helps you to allocate attention, keep rules in mind, and work out whether you should be responding or not,’ said Rissman.

科学家们首先让加列耶夫做了一些标准记忆力测试。这些测试评估的是他在脑中保留数字、画面和词语的能力。一项经典测试衡量的是一个人在听到了一串数字的不久之后，能以顺序和倒序的方式重复出多少位。大多数人可以达到七位左右。“他在这些标准测试中任何一项上的表现都并不突出，”Rissman说道。“我们没有发现他在除了下象棋之外的任何一个项目上似乎是格外天赋异禀的。”但是接下来进行了脑部扫描。加列耶夫躺在机器里时，Rissman观察着这位棋手大脑中的各个区域之间是如何衔接联动的。虽然这些结论还暂不确定且尚未发表，不过扫描结果在加列耶夫大脑中那些构成了被称为“额顶控制网络”的不同部分之间发现了远高于平均值的沟通交流。在与这位棋手一起参加扫描的63人中，只有一或两人在这项指标上的数值更高。“你会在基本上任何一项复杂任务中用到这套网络。它协助你分配注意力，牢记规则，并判断是否应当做出回应。”Rissman说道。

G It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual network is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual. Initial results suggest that the areas of his brain that process visual images – such as chess boards – may have stronger links to other brain regions, and so be more powerful than normal. While the analyses are not finalised yet, they may hold the first clues to Gareyev’s extraordinary ability.

那不是唯一一个关于加列耶夫大脑有其特殊之处的暗示。扫描还显示出：Gareyev的视觉网络与其他脑区域之间的关联也高于一般水平。初始研究结果表明：他用以处理视觉图像——例如象棋局盘——的脑区域有可能与其他脑部区域有着更强的联系，因此其功能比寻常人等更为强大。虽然这些分析还未能下定论，但在它们之中也许包含着破解加列耶夫非同寻常能力的第一批线索。

H For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours. He will need to win 80% to claim the title. ‘I don’t worry too much about the winning percentage, that’s never been an issue for me,’ he said. ‘The most important part of blindfold chess for me is that I have found the one thing that I can fully dedicate myself to. I miss having an obsession.’

为了尝试拿到这项世界纪录，加列耶夫希望能在16小时内同时进行47盘蒙眼对弈。要想问鼎这个头衔，他需要赢得80％的棋局。“我对于这个获胜百分比倒是没有什么担忧，那对我来说从来都不成问题，”他说。“蒙眼象棋于我来说最重要的部分在于：我终于找到了可以全身心投入的那件事。我留恋沉醉其中的感觉。”