[wewyor]

> All those grandmasters could be doing amazing things for the human race

I'm not so sure chess masters would necessarily be good at other things like say physics as they would have to have a passion in that to even become remotely viable for race saving. Grandmasters likely have been playing and practicing and have been absolutely absorbed in chess for many years in order to achieve their status, but I don't know if it would be as easy for someone who thinks chess to become absorbed in something like medicine or aeronautics or other such things.

Edit: if you have a subscription to the new yorker this was a pretty good article on what a single grandmaster is like http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_... [PAYWALL]

[derefr]

They'd likely be equally good at things that also require large-scale, long-term thinking about complex zero-sum competitive resource optimization problems. Like, for example, war strategy. I don't know if it generalizes beyond that, though.