Intuition

Once upon a time, when the word "geek" had nothing to do with computers, a scientist named John von Neumann designed a giant "calculation machine" with thousands of vacuum tubes and switches.

It could perform 10,000 commands per minute, but it was approximately the size of Rhode Island - which is why the word "laptop" wasn't included in its description.

Von Neumann was one of a group of government scientists hired to come up with a device to speed up the tedious process of calculating mathematical equations. Instead, the scientists started playing around with Von Neumann's machine and came up with a chess program. As the story goes, the only person the computer could beat was someone who'd only learned the game the previous week.

"That was because computers don't play by intuition," said Angelina Thomas of the Hemet Chess Club. "That's the difference. We put a man on the moon before we built a computer that could beat a chess master."

So what exactly is intuition? Do we truly rely on a "sense of the board" over tried-and-true logic? How would you develop that kind of loosey-goosey skill?