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I don't think your conclusion follows from your premises

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 23 April 2014, at 2:31 p.m.

In Response To: I don't think your conclusion follows from your premises (Bob Koca)

Bob Koca wrote:

As a thought experiment take an open field at a tourney and and let them keep their game playing knowledge and other intellect but wipe knowledge of backgammon from their mind. Would there be a wider range of skill?

For a fairer thought experiment, you should also include, in the pool, people who currently don't know how to play backgammon, or who don't play seriously, or who play moderately seriously but not at the open level. If you do this, then my belief is that the skill spread would shrink enormously if you wiped out all backgammon knowledge.

Historically what has been the skill difference in chess from the best to next best player? Does your argument suggest it should be increasing over time?

I raised the issue about the gap between #1 and #2 to address more narrowly the idea that the top players have tapped out the game, not to support the argument that total skill spread increases over time. I do believe that the total skill spread increases over time for a game like chess that hasn't been tapped out (unlike tic-tac-toe for instance), but using the gap between #1 and #2 to measure the total skill spread over the whole population is an unreliable test.

They are more to the point but they do change the rules of the game.

They change what I would call second-order rules but not first-order rules.

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