Concentration et mode interrupt de l’ordinateur :
une analogie
[L’auteur cite Hendrickson dans Total Chess, pages 106-107.]
'Put another way, there are probably just as many women who could concentrate on a chess problem for hours on end as there are men, but there is something that prevents them from doing so.'
To explain what it is, Hendrickson takes an analogy from computers, the 'interrupt'condition. When a computer is performing a given task, sometimes at 25 million calculations a second, it may be delayed by a peripheral unit, say a magnetic tape wich has to be switched on, start to run and pass through a recording head, all of wich might take a second of time.
In order not to waste this valuable time, the interrupt enables the computer to perform another task. As soon as the magnetic tape comes to an end, a signal is sent to the computer to resume its first task. This kind of process is analogous to human life.
[...]
Men and women are both subject to interrupts, but not to the same extent. To take a familiar setting, a mother hears her baby cry when she is sleeping, and gets up to nurse it although the father sleeping beside her does not 'hear' the baby, or only in a muffled way senses what is going on.
Women have the same physical make-up, the same IQ, the same bio-chemistry, as men ; the one area in wich the difference exists is in the interrupts ; or, in modern society, external events occur with a higher probability of causing interrupts in women than in men.
The interrupts interfere with the train of tought, and take precedence over the previous activity. According to Hendrickson, this is not acquired trait but based on genetic structure, derived from birth and sex. (This theory, interesting enough, seems to bear out Botvinnik’s intuitive explanation of the organic difference between men and women, mentioned earlier.)
[Note d’Évariste :
Botvinnik était Monsieur échecs en URSS. Champion du monde en 1948-57, 1958-60, 1961-63. Le texte de Botvinnik se trouve en page 113 de Total Chess.]
'We suggest that adult women have a far larger number of interrupt conditions to attend to than men,' as the paper puts it. 'These interrupts conditions are stimuli wich are attended to because there is a molecule, a repository of meaning, in the brain scanning for the condition. This particular molecule is tought to be there not as a result of learning but comes from DNA transcription.'
The biological purpose of such chemical constructs is to programme the woman to respond to such things as infant’s cry, or a possible threat from external source. Men have the same make-up, of course ; all that is suggested is that women have a much larger repertoire of events wich they are biologically programmed to respond to. When some of these events occur, it may be impossible to store the original task, i.e. it overload the memory capacity.
Take problems at chess. 'If an interrupt of sufficient magnitude occurs whilst solving a difficult chess problem, the only way that one can return to the problem is to start at the beginning. If, before you have reconstructed the point at wich the interrupt occured, another interrupt occurs, the effect can be very frustrating !' The task is effectively destroyed. 'This, we believe, is the reason for the lack of women in the professions wich require long periods of concentartion,' Hendrickson concludes.
Bon. Il resterait un tibout à taper mais j’ai mon voyage ;-)
La question n’est pas de savoir si monsieur et madame Hendrickson de même que notre auteur, David Spanier, ont raison sur tous les détails. L’hypothèse des interrupts n’est qu’une hypothèse, bien sûr.
P.-S. :
Puisqu'il est question des femmes et des échecs :
http://members3.boardhost.com/echephile/msg/13307.html
Évariste
Related link: http://members3.boardhost.com/echephile/msg/13307.html