It makes sense. The space of moves is a tree. If you're doing a breadth-first search and a grandmaster is doing a more depth-oriented search with heuristics for pruning low value branches, then the same total number of moves could be considered, but the grandmaster is reaching the better moves before you.

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tarsierscripter an hour ago | parent [-]

No, a grandmaster can also consider moves way faster than an amateur. Watch Hikaru Nakamura solve chess puzzles [1]. He has already solved the puzzle and moved on to the next one before an amateur can even see the pieces on the board.

[1] https://youtu.be/4EfSymvT59M

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ketzu an hour ago | parent [-]

1940s to 1980s papers (the source of the claims) might think "amateur" means something different from people today. (they probably mean club chess players)

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Filligree an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes? Amateur means someone who does a thing for recreation, as opposed to for money.

	▲	ketzu 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It seemed to me that in the chess community, average club players are usually considered (much) stronger than the average online player. (Especially because of the much larger number of lower skill players online.) So if you measure amateurs via club players (=what people might have considered chess amateurs before), that might give you a different result from the average online player (=what people might consider average amateurs today). It is much easier to imagine the 1600 FIDE OTB player doing 20-40 positional evaluations than the 1200 random chess.com scrub (eg me) doing the same.