Kevin Pacey wrote on Wed, Sep 12, 2018 02:11 AM EDT:
Regarding what it might take for there to be a Next Chess at some point, circa 2016 Fergus wrote:
"...Chess has been finely honed by natural selection to be free of arbitrariness. Every rule and piece in Chess serves a purpose, and none are arbitrary. Since Chess is what won the survival of the fittest among Chess variants, I expect that any variant capable of succeeding Chess would also have to be free of arbitrariness. But most Chess variants differ from Chess through some arbitrary change to it, and they easily get lost in a sea of variants that each differ from Chess in their own arbitrary ways..."
Inspired by this statement, albeit one that may need much elaboration, I took a stab at trying to show that chess is free of arbitrariness in 2016, in a Canadian chess forum's blog entry of mine. I could hardly come up with any sort of a 'rigourous proof', just my own intuitive reasoning and guesswork at some points, and probably not nearly covering all things that may be debateable. It really depends what one sees as arguably arbitary (or not) about chess. Some particularly problematical issues for me in particular were why White's king is to the right of the Q in the setup (my best guess is that for right-handed people playing White, it's slightly easier to castle kingside that way - poor Black suffers one more 'indignity' at the start though, since his K is to the left of his Q; otherwise having both sides' royalty placed in mirror image to the opponent's is logical). Also, having the square h1 a light square enables the saying 'queen goes on her own colour' to be used by both sides setting up the pieces, i.e. with a saying mentioning a lady (nicer than if h1 were a dark square). You can see how I sometimes had to stretch things. Castling involves a double-step by the K either left or right, I noted - I did not even try to guess why putting the K on b1 instead of c1 is any less desirable. Pawns initial double-step is to speed up the game, leading 'logically' to the en passant rule. I also briefly mentioned hexagonal and circular board variants, to try to justify an 8x8 square board (which we know with hindsight makes Bs and Ns of practically equal value on average). I did mention that good chess variants have compensating features for anything specific they lack compared to chess, so kind of a plug for chess variants on my chess message board's blog. The blog entry is very long, so I'm not sure I could post it here, in case anyone wants to read it in a comment.
For what it's worth, recently I googled 'Are the rules of chess arbitrary' and saw on the first few pages of results no sign of anyone agreeing that they are not - search results included quotations from writers, such as mathematicians, besides chess [variant] players. A common thing mentioned was the castling rules, besides pawn rules such as double-stepping.
Here's a link to the blog entry of mine in question:
Regarding what it might take for there to be a Next Chess at some point, circa 2016 Fergus wrote:
"...Chess has been finely honed by natural selection to be free of arbitrariness. Every rule and piece in Chess serves a purpose, and none are arbitrary. Since Chess is what won the survival of the fittest among Chess variants, I expect that any variant capable of succeeding Chess would also have to be free of arbitrariness. But most Chess variants differ from Chess through some arbitrary change to it, and they easily get lost in a sea of variants that each differ from Chess in their own arbitrary ways..."
Inspired by this statement, albeit one that may need much elaboration, I took a stab at trying to show that chess is free of arbitrariness in 2016, in a Canadian chess forum's blog entry of mine. I could hardly come up with any sort of a 'rigourous proof', just my own intuitive reasoning and guesswork at some points, and probably not nearly covering all things that may be debateable. It really depends what one sees as arguably arbitary (or not) about chess. Some particularly problematical issues for me in particular were why White's king is to the right of the Q in the setup (my best guess is that for right-handed people playing White, it's slightly easier to castle kingside that way - poor Black suffers one more 'indignity' at the start though, since his K is to the left of his Q; otherwise having both sides' royalty placed in mirror image to the opponent's is logical). Also, having the square h1 a light square enables the saying 'queen goes on her own colour' to be used by both sides setting up the pieces, i.e. with a saying mentioning a lady (nicer than if h1 were a dark square). You can see how I sometimes had to stretch things. Castling involves a double-step by the K either left or right, I noted - I did not even try to guess why putting the K on b1 instead of c1 is any less desirable. Pawns initial double-step is to speed up the game, leading 'logically' to the en passant rule. I also briefly mentioned hexagonal and circular board variants, to try to justify an 8x8 square board (which we know with hindsight makes Bs and Ns of practically equal value on average). I did mention that good chess variants have compensating features for anything specific they lack compared to chess, so kind of a plug for chess variants on my chess message board's blog. The blog entry is very long, so I'm not sure I could post it here, in case anyone wants to read it in a comment.
For what it's worth, recently I googled 'Are the rules of chess arbitrary' and saw on the first few pages of results no sign of anyone agreeing that they are not - search results included quotations from writers, such as mathematicians, besides chess [variant] players. A common thing mentioned was the castling rules, besides pawn rules such as double-stepping.
Here's a link to the blog entry of mine in question:
http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/entry.php?109-Why-is-chess-so-popular-among-board-games-of-skill