Well, obviously there is the cultural aspect like lots of emphasis on academics and stuff since very early ages. But I have more to say.
I noticed Chinese is the most "dense" language that there is. By dense, I mean the amount of information expressed per syllable in the Chinese language is pretty high. Also, I find Japanese to be similar too. Well, technically Japanese has the Hiragana/Katakana as well as the Kanji parts (adopted Chinese characters). Kanji is pretty frequently used and is also pretty vast, which again makes me expect that there is a relatively high density of information per syllable. (I'm not sure however, googling suggests that Japanese is supposedly a lower density language, don't know why. Native Japanese speakers please correct me. However the speed at which Japanese can be enunciated is quite fast and that does help in higher speed rehearsal which is somewhat relevant to the discussion below.)
The next piece of the puzzle I want to consider is the Phonological Loop component of working memory. Working memory is the component of our cognitive function, that is responsible for holding information and manipulating it in the short term. Phonological loop specifically, is that component of working memory that is responsible for "Storing Speech/Articulation".
Solving the puzzles in competitive programming (or math olympiads) involves heavy (subjective but whatever) amounts of reasoning, planning, and navigating a complex "search tree" so to speak. For me at least, everything I reason/plan about goes through the "articulation channel". Every tiny observation/claim that I have, is an "articulated sentence" that captures the complete claim. I don't know if its just me, but I am assuming everybody constantly "talks to themselves" while solving problems.
Now, the phonological loop is known to have a very small store. Well, in fact the literature claims working memory store as a whole can only store around $$$[4,7]$$$ chunks of information at any time, even though its possible to have a better "encoding" to maximally utilise these limited chunks in terms of the semantic value held per chunk. The phonological loop also rapidly decays information unless you "rehearse"(repeat to yourself) the information that you want to keep fresh in the phonological loop. (Well, its not literally that tiny there is lots of interaction with long term memory and complimentary retrieval structures are involved. But at the bleeding edge of processing incoming information it is pretty tiny.)
All of this background makes me believe that since all the raw processing of information is subvocalised, people that think in Chinese/Japanese/Russian(also pretty complex but not sure) have some non-zero advantage/assistance in being able to deal with longer chains of thoughts. Longer chains of thoughts should imply the ability to simply have a larger "context window" should help to reason more fluidly as well.
Another thing that I want to highlight about Chinese language is the kind of symbols used. They are basically pictographs. I'm not sure but I think that gives Chinese the option to "see a word" with the inner eye along with the usual "hear the word" with their inner voice. That can also be an opportunity to sort of distribute cognitive load between the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad (another part of the working memory model). For example consider the word "calculate" vs "算".
Of course there might be many-many more factors involved for why the Asians are so good at STEM in general. And of course expertise coming from practice is much more nuanced and does circumvent lots of these limitations. I just intended to put this out and get others' opinions. Also, as you may have noticed, I've used the phrase "not sure" at many places throughout the blog, because I am no expert. The intention of writing this blog, again, is primarily to hopefully to hear from some other people in the community that might have some knowledge to share or other opinions around this. I'm sure other people might have thought about this stuff, its not really some novel/original thing.
Some questions for anybody that actually reads this,
1. Is it true that your style of problem solving is indeed mostly "talking to yourself" ?
2. Do you think the ability to handle longer chains of thoughts does indeed matter ?
Of course it doesn't matter as much when you could just jot down stuff. But do you think it does matter when thinking at the bleeding edge, when you take the first look at some information/structures ?
Just comment whatever comes to your mind, I am really interested in hearing other perspectives.
As an American-born Chinese, I personally don't believe that my language has any noticeable impact on problem solving, because I don't think in words when I am solving problems (I just visualize everything).
Lengths of chains in thoughts definitely impacts your speed in making conclusions.
Thats very interesting you visualise everything. But, I wonder how. For me syllogism-like, “if this -> then this” verbal chains are the heaviest part of how it works for me. So much so that articulation is impossible to bypass for me.
If I consider the Div2A from round 1007 for a simple example. Someone that has language heavy approach would think literally in a “verbal stream” like so:
“if x and y were in the (wlog) present match and x won, then irrespective of whether x wins or loses next time, he goes out. Which means x is already guaranteed sitting outside in match 3. This means, the original z can spectate again only in the 4th match. Oh, but since z also played second match, he must sit out after the third match, which means not only he can but he must be a spectator in 4th match.”
For you is it like, your primary response is literally seeing three objects rotating around in a cyclic fashion. I’d like to hear a bit more about how the visual path to the same result looks like ? (ofc a bit too much overanalysis for a div2A, but does help to keep the focus on meta aspects)
No matter what the language is, there is no good or bad, just a cultural symbol of a region.
It's dense, but not the densest. Vietnamese is denser.
I can tell you why. Unlike in Chinese, a Chinese character in the Japanese language usually corresponds to more than one syllables. In fact Japanese is famous for being "sparse" instead of "dense", and that's why syllables are uttered very fast when the language is spoken.
I can't find anything in common in the three languages. And Russian words are generally long.
No one thinks about how words are written when they think.
I think the aspects of language that may affect problem-solving skills is (1) the "flexibility" of the grammar; and (2) how easy it is to coin field-specific "vernacular" words.
For (1), the word order and the sentence structure in the Chinese language is quite flexible, so Chinese speakers can easily put random words that come into their mind into one sentence without adjusting the word order.
For (2), Chinese people in a specific field often create terms for convenience that are not standard Chinese, should not be used in formal writing, but are acceptable in a specific academic community. Examples include:
However, it is always important to know that language, as well as anything else, is not the decisive factor that can dictate how well people do something. A lot of factors can contribute to academic performance, and even the language itself can be creatively changed if you want to.
Thanks for the corrections and I mostly agree with all points you raised.
You're right there isn't much common. I actually meant it as: Chinese for the high density, Japanese for faster rehearsal within the ~1.8s limit (somewhat overlapping with Chinese), and Russian (for inflectional nature giving it a slightly higher information density but its unclear tbh and just me extrapolating).
Also, I want to mention that there is literature suggesting that the net information transfer rate (density * articulation speed) seems to converge across all languages. However, the space taken by the said information in working memory should still differ. So yeah, this is another aspect up for debate.
Agreed. I thought of a situation where one tries to hold a visual representation with labelled objects in working memory. So yk a verbal statement is maybe more fluidly transformed into a visual without going through hoops to "build the visual". Like a named variable can just as easily be seen as visual object. But yeah, not much language specific here you're right.
So true. In some other languages, it just becomes uncomfortable to drop a word or not care about the grammar because it starts to sound wrong/incomplete. And from what little I know about Chinese, grammatical rules, tenses, verb forms, conjunctions, articles and stuff isn't such a big deal, right ?.
Also a great point. Thanks a lot, very interesting stuff.
And btw quick question, are you more visual or verbal in your thinking ? I'm trying to figure out which of the two is more common.
There is no tense in Chinese. The only verb forms are the three "aspect markers", "着", "了" and "过". Each of the three syllables can follow a verb to give information like time, and as far as I know, whether and how to use them is very difficult for learners of the language to handle. By the way, in the previous comment I mistakenly used "is" for "are" twice, because there is no such variability in Chinese.
I can't tell which is used more. I think it depends on whether the thing can be easily visualised.
Chinese start with C and Coder start with C