From Christopher D. Green’s insanely great archive, “Classics in the History of Psychology” comes George Miller’s famous 1956 paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information.” Among many wonderful things, the paper gave us the concept of “chunking.” Since Miller’s paper draws heavily from information theory as an influence, the classic example of chunking is a man trying to learn Morse code. Miller: “A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases. […] I am simply pointing to the obvious fact that the dits and dahs are organized by learning into patterns and that as these larger chunks emerge the amount of message that the operator can remember increases correspondingly. In the terms I am proposing to use, the operator learns to increase the bits per chunk.” Where’s one of the most vivid places to see chunking at work? A game of chess.