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Freakonomics: Why Isn’t Backgammon More Popular?

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 15 December 2010, at 9:36 p.m.

In Response To: Freakonomics: Why Isn’t Backgammon More Popular? (Daniel Murphy)

I agree that the discussion of "optimal" moves isn't terribly enlightening. However, it did get me wondering what statistics would emerge if one were to subject chess endgame tablebases to this kind of analysis. There, we know everything perfectly, so we don't have to fuss with this "centipawn" nonsense. A mistake is a move that turns a win into a draw/loss or a draw into a loss. If you want a little more precision then you can say that an "inaccuracy" is a move that prolongs your win (if you're winning) or shortens the loss (if you're losing).

In the most spectacular examples from the endgame tablebases, it seems that every third move or so is balanced on a knife-edge: only one out of dozens of legal moves is correct (the correct move often looks indistinguishable from a random move to the human eye, even a grandmaster's eye). These spectacular examples might be atypical, of course. But I wonder what chess looks like to an omniscient player. I suspect that many critical opening lines are like this: there may be only one move that holds the draw, but we're just too stupid to see the 800-move forced losses that result from the mistakes.

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