“You can’t ignore it and you can’t explain it”
– Agatha Christie describing intuition.
What is intuition? It is quick and ready insight. We cannot explain it but it is real. Mikhail Tal, a Russian world champion, was a master of intuition as he perennially outfoxed his opponents all the way up to the world championship title. Tal could not explain what intuition was but he utilized it all the same.
A world chess champion is someone who searched for perfection and found it, much in the same way that Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo or William Shakespeare or Beethoven or a mathematical genius did. The coup de grace comes with a flash of vision. It is one of intellectual and aesthetic beauty. As such, the genius appears in any art form. He/she takes a situation that is composed of materials that is available to everybody and by sheer imagination creates something unique and almost perfect.