Holly Capelo:

Hands over temples and eyes closed, as if trying to contain the shifting permutations of tactical possibilities, a chess champion calculates twenty moves forward in her game. In the shop windows of Istanbul, there are chess boards for sale to tourists. In the common rooms of state prisons across the United States, inmates play endless rounds over black and white boards. Right now, many of the 7.5 million registered online chess players from 160 countries are sparring with one another from their computers. Researchers in the Brain and Behavioral Sciences Department at UT Dallas ask chess players to quickly memorize and re-identify positions on a chess board, and compare this ability to the capacity for facial pattern recognition.
Each chess game holds the promise of resolution by one player’s aggressive victory, by the other’s blunder, by a draw, or by the clock. The game therefore forms a closed system, with an objective ranking system, onto which researchers can map other, less resolved, quandaries. For some decades, cognitive and social scientists have used chess as a proxy to investigate how the interpersonal aspects of a competitive experience may affect its outcome.