How Candidates’ challenger Matthias Blübaum’s former University studied “eye gaze patterns” to understand chess excellence

‘Chess is one of the oldest – and most popular – board games,’ the blog post started, citing a chess board, game or computer as a classic gift option on Christmas Eves.

“There are numerous theories on how the brain controls attention and solves problems in both everyday situations and game situations,” Professor Dr. Thomas Schack was quoted as saying by the University blog. The sports scientist and cognitive psychologist heading the CITEC research group “Neurocognition and Action – Biomechanics” as well as the chess research project, added, “The game of chess is an ideal object of research for testing these theories because chess players have to be extremely attentive and make decisions in quick succession as to how they will proceed.”

Ceege in fact was a joint collaboration with Inria Grenoble Rhones-Aples, a research institute in France. The project name stands for “Chess Expertise from Eye Gaze and Emotion.”

“We are investigating individual game tactics, chess players’ behavior towards one another, and their body language,” Dr. Kai Essig, who together with Thomas Küchelmann worked on the project, said.

“With the findings from this project, we will be able to predict in the future how strong an individual chess player is, and how high the chances are that a player wins a match. It appears that we will even be able to recognize a series of optimal moves that will increase the player’s probability of winning.”

The various research techniques include eye tracking glasses allowing players’ gaze positions to be measured, while video cameras record their facial expressions and body language. Professor Dr. James Crowley and his team from the Institute Inria meanwhile focussed on chess players’ emotions, capturing for instance microexpressions – facial expressions that are only recognisable for a few miliseconds – as well as gestures, heart and respiratory rate, and perspiration.

More than 120 participants had so far played chess under observation in the 2016 pilot study. Of these, a third were chess experts, and the other two-thirds novices. “The current study and the pilot study already show that chess experts show significant differences in their eye movements,” said Kai Essig to the university blog.

“Chess experts concentrate for most of the time on the main chess pieces that can make or break the game in respective situations. The experts control their attention more efficiently than novices.” According to Essig, amateurs jump very frequently from one figure to the next with their gaze, and look at nearly all the pieces on the board, regardless of whether they play an important role in the particular game situation.

Ceege used special glasses, and with the knowledge gleaned from their project, the researchers closely followed the chess world championship in November of 2016. “Early in the tournament, it was already apparent that Magnus Carlsen would win. He had shown more initiative in the first six matches. It was hardly possible for his opponent Sergej Karjakin to dominate the game,” physicist Thomas Küchelmann said.

The study though back then sought to observe more minutely. Küchelmann explained: “in order to make concrete predictions, we would have actually had to measure Carlsen’s and Karjakin’s game with our test equipment. It would have been interesting to measure, for instance, Carlsen’s emotional reaction to his missed end game opportunities, and his mistake in the eighth match, which he lost, along with Karjakin’s emotional reactions to running out of time in the tie-breaker.”

The 2016 experiment led the researchers to develop an electronic chess assistant, which would analyze the weaknesses of chess novices and experts, using eye tracking for instance, and train players by providing tips and explanations. The assistant would recommend which move is optimal in the particular situation. “Looking forward, it would also be conceivable to integrate this assistive system into a robot. With their physical presence, robots could motivate players in a different way than for example an assistant operating verbally on a tablet,” explained Thomas Schack in the blog.

The “Ceege” research project ran for three years, through February 2019. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the French research funding body, Agence Nationale de la Recherche“ (ANR) provided funding to the time of €300.000 for the Bielefeld research.

Blübaum however completed his Masters in 2022, with his thesis being quite a topic of speculation, before turning to chess fulltime.

“When I started chess, there was no dream of turning professional,” he told Chessbase.

“I have three older sisters, everybody went to University at some point. For me it was quite natural to also study something but at some point I became 26 or something and was also earning but from chess. Chess is also fun for me. For now I’m extremely happy I can also make a profession out of a hobby. But good to have a University degree just in case at some point I decide I don’t want to pursue chess forever. Then maybe I can find another job,” he would add to Chessbase.