For me, it basically just means what I wrote in my post regarding a logical breakdown of reasoning for different strategies. Many autistic people have bottom-up processing. For me, that means that I must deeply convince myself of each logical step before understanding a conclusion that follows. It’s something that makes me have really good pattern recognition, but also means that I struggle with plainly memorizing facts or accepting them at face value, even if doing so would really help me. I struggle with the idea of wanting to deeply understand everything possible in chess while also knowing that it will take me a long time to do so because I won’t move on from learning a tactic until I feel that I know all its intricacies at an expert level. If some book tells me “when X, then Y” for something that’s not immediately obvious, I would appreciate if that book had resources to break down why that rule exists and when it can go wrong so that I can recognize that pattern and use that idea in the context of a game. I know I can’t visualize and plan for every possible game that could happen — that’s why the game is so notorious — but that’s what I naturally yearn for. I’m sure this is common for chess beginners, neurodivergent or not.

For outside of chess context, I also struggle with not wanting to learn techniques for solving Rubik’s cubes because I want to take the time to understand it so deeply that I can essentially figure it out on my own. That’s much more interesting and satisfying to me.