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I don't think your conclusion follows from your premises

Posted By: Bob Koca
Date: Wednesday, 23 April 2014, at 8:13 p.m.

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

"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."

I grant that if player A is a very strong and experienced player and B hardly plays at all that the skill difference would be smaller if both had their minds wiped free of backgammon knowledge.

I don't see including those other players as being a fairer thought experiment especially since you claimed your arguments apply even more strongly to top players.

"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."

Is backgammon close to being tapped out?

Are we focusing on the whole population or just the top players? Of course the difference between top players and beginners gets larger as the the top players get better. Instead of looking at difference between 1 and 2 maybe something like top 5 players vs median of the top 128 players which might make up a large tournament.

Today I guess that top 5 is about 3.0 and that 64th is lower than 5.

25 - 30 years ago I guess that top 5 was 4.something and 64th was about 8.

In addition to having to figure things out on the fly one also has to learn on one's own a lot more in the early stages. Today there are many great books and resources. 25 - 30 years ago not so much and even some that were seriously counterproductive. That increases the skill differences.

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