2nd Kyū

As in the kingside-castling example, when you treat several pieces as a single meaningful unit, we call that a “chunk” in this app.

The more chunks you can recognize, the more efficiently you process information, and the more your calculation ability improves. You can browse the list of chunks below.

A chunk only has to make sense to you, so it does not need to be universally easy to understand. For example, if a pawn structure resembles the characters of a certain language, it will be easy to grasp for speakers of that language — but someone who does not know those characters may find the same pattern recognition difficult. Likewise, someone studying computer science might partly use binary to memorize piece locations, but someone unfamiliar with binary could not do the same.

If you come up with a chunk that others could use too, please post it below.

To install more chunks into your own mind, I believe it is more efficient to also see what kinds of pattern recognition other players use — and this app is designed so that you can do exactly that.