Comment Re:An absurd "crisis"! LOL (Score 2) 128
Every minute playing chess would be better spent learning about algorithms, computer programming, or biology.
The last thing any parent or teacher should do is encourage playing chess at any serious level. It's like encouraging people to compute logarithms or trigonometric functions longhand on paper; there's some initial benefit in learning some abstract ideas, but then it's just mechanics. And the same is true for chess, and computers have established this in a dramatic way, by showing that simple but fast and deep searches with very simple heuristics can beat any human who has ever lived. A $0.50 pocket calculator can bet any human at the sine function game!
The argument made in that article that chess is somehow good for the goals of "STEM" makes me laugh out loud, but simultaneously weep that the idea was proposed with apparent sincerity...
Every minute spent training for a marathon is useless because we have cars. A $50 junker can beat the fastest marathon runner.
Why is learning about algorithms useful? For every algorithm you learn, there are at least a dozen implementation of the said algorithm.