Adriaan de Groot

Adriaan de Groot (1914 to 2006) was a Dutch chess master and psychologist who ran some of the best known chess experiments of the 1940s to 1960s. He played for the Netherlands in the Chess Olympiads of 1937 and 1939 and wrote his thesis Het denken van den schaker in 1946, which appeared in English in 1965 as Thought and Choice in Chess. In his studies, players from amateurs to masters solved chess problems while speaking their thoughts aloud, and he found that much of what matters in choosing a move happens in the first seconds, then described four stages: orientation, exploration, investigation and proof. He stressed memory and problem solving ability as central to chess skill. He became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973.