RE: About the Chinese Chess - Xiangqi, 象棋
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Yes, it is less easy to visualize because we don't have enough practice. But it gives me an interesting insight when it comes to blindfold chess.
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I think blindfold skill is necessary to become truly good at any of these games, because the advantage comes from person who can see the board several steps into the future, which means they have to visualize positions they can't see. I guess that's why all the grandmasters have this ability.
Apparently the way it works can be described by the way we read. New readers (children) read and see character by character, and eventually syllables. Advanced readers just recognise words like they would a photo. So when you look at the word "Chess", you just see "Chess" as a picture that you recognise without having to read it. Speed readers can see entire sentences or even the following sentence in their heads before reading it out.
Those chess moves are easy for the grandmasters to visualise as they're just words or sentences to them, so they can just see them without having to think much about it.
I saw the analogy in a book I was reading about the brain and cognitive ability. Interesting stuff.
It makes sense. I've heard some people argue that the way the brain works when you play chess is very similar to when you use spoken language. So they argue that chess is a language and that would explain why children who practice chess develop better language skills. These are things I have read and remember from memory. Right now I can't cite any specific source.
On the other hand, besides the ones you pointed out, I think there are also other cognitive concepts and analogies involved here to interpret and explain the way chess players do when they play chess blindfolded or not, like intuition, you know, the ability to do things without putting a lot of conscious effort into it. It's like some tasks in daily life that you do without paying much attention because after enough practice you can do them automatically, like a routine. Chess players who are very well trained and reach a certain level can play high quality games seemingly without effort. The moves simply come to their mind and it is something easy to notice, for example, when they play bullet chess online. Of course, we can argue that this happens to some extent to players of different levels, but in advanced players the skill is remarkable and extends to different aspects of the chess game, and so on.
I think this is to some extent true. After I played games of go, I could often reconstruct the moves of the games afterwards, and it was mainly because me and my opponent were generally making high probability (i.e. relatively good) moves. Similarly, you could view words as high probability arrangements of letters, which is the underlying reason we can recognize a word right away and remember its spelling, whereas it is more difficult to remember a random string of letters.
But where this would probably fall apart is if an expert played a total amateur who was making nearly random moves at times. Such a game board wouldn't be encodable into a high probability subset of "words".
So, the question I don't have the answer to is, could a go master recall such a game? I can't say for sure, but my suspicion is "yes", which would weaken the word recognition theory somewhat. So my guess is that they have a few skills working in concert: 1) the ability to recognize and recall high probability patterns, 2) a stronger ability to remember raw go board positions, and 3) they may attach extra significance to a stone's position such as difficulties associated with its placement such as "that stone will break my ladder attack" that make it easier to recall the placement relative to the other stones on the board.
I agree, blindfold chess is always recommended to improve calculation and visualization. I've heard about a few old psychologists who have written about it.