The Chess Mind

As many of you who have been reading the comments to my post on Clint Ballard's BAP system have probably noticed, the inventor himself has weighed in with a pair of long replies. (Here and here.) A massive reply is forthcoming, but I first wish to take care of some housekeeping.

Ballard seems to take a rather dim view of this blog and its participants (at least where the BAP system is concerned), but then hopes that although we're probably incapable of rational discussion, we won't censor him. (An ironic request, as his website includes his responses to this blog (here and here), but without mentioning the blog or linking to my and others' critiques.) Now, as any long-time reader of this blog will acknowledge, I don't censor comments or commentators for disagreeing with me. (Fewer than five people have been banned from commenting in the 16+ months I've been at it, and it wasn't because of disagreement over content.) That said, getting banned is not impossible: I will oust individuals who are persistently belligerent or seem to deliberately misrepresent others' work. Here are some examples of the sort of thing I insist on avoiding if discussion of these matters is to continue on my site.

Ballard: Since this thread has material inaccuracies, thinly veiled personal attacks and even an example by the moderator with the intentionally derogative acronym of "CRAP", it is clear that there is a lot of animosity and downright hatred toward my BAP system. I doubt that a rational discussion is possible and I am used to that, but I will present FACTS for the unbiased reader to consider and hope it won't get censored. Of course, all the critics will accuse me of being irrational because I won't simply agree with 100% of what they say, even if they are accusing me of being disingenuous, that I am conducting tournaments that should be banned, etc.

First, I engaged in no personal attacks whatsoever; in fact, I (and several others) praised Ballard for putting up a substantial amount of his own money in support of his system. I'm deeply skeptical of that system - no "thin veil" there! - but the man himself was not attacked. As for Jacobs' comment, in which he labeled Ballard's insistence that the BAP system is a new pairing method rather than a rule change "disingenuous", I leave that discussion to the two of them. (But note that Jacobs also praises Ballard for his sincerity, his willingness to invest his time and money and calls him a gentleman.) So it's an extremely thin "attack" - and it's not attacks, plural.

Second, no one called Ballard "irrational" - I and most of the commentators merely disagreed with his proposal and its motivations.

Third, no one called for BAP events to be banned; objectors merely wished that they not be rated.

Another quote:

Also, saying that a white draw is the same as a white loss is also incorrect, though understandable error. BAP is not a zero-sum point system. The effect of white drawing has a 2 BAP change to the overall point pool relative to a white loss. White winning has a 3 BAP difference relative to a white draw. Black winning has a 2 BAP difference relative to Black drawing. Black drawing has a 3 BAP difference relative to black losing. If you are going to comment on BAP math, please use the correct numbers.

Who made that claim? I didn't and neither did any of the commentators; in fact, my argument against BAP based on the attractiveness of last-round bribes rests precisely on the fact that while White's score doesn't change with a loss or a draw, Black's most certainly does. My argument went like this:

Last round pairings:

1. White (17) vs. Black (18)

2. White (18) vs. Black (17)

Given normal tournament prize structures, White on board 1 has good reason to take a dive, especially if he thinks he can't win. Only Black on board 1 has first place in his own hands; no one else can guarantee himself even a tie for first. (Board 1-White can't, because if both he and board 2-Black win, the latter gets it; board 2-White and board 2-Black can't, because Board 1-Black outscores either with a win.) The correct numbers were used.

More Ballard:

"indicating that the draw "problem" is not caused by GMs' nearly perfect understanding of the game" [DM:he's citing me here] This statement makes the implication that GM's have solved chess! Gee, I must have missed that announcement. Was it my imagination that Hydra DEMOLISHED Adams? One of the top 10 players in the world at the time, not prone to losing, got killed. The only draw was by agreement of the operators of Hydra, even though Hydra itself thought it was winning. Since Hydra is better than the GM's, shouldn't we have seen if it could find the win? So, with an actual result of 5.5/6 vs. Adams and maybe it should have been 6 out of 6, it boggles the mind that claims are being made seriously that human GM's have a nearly perfect understanding of the game.

I was summarizing Ballard's position here - I was making a statement that agreed with his! According to Ballard, a big reason why there are so many draws is that players are insufficiently motivated to fight for a win. If the problem was instead that GMs just knew too much, then computers, which play stronger chess than human GMs, would have an even higher percentage of draws. It's just the opposite, however, a point I summarized by saying that the problem is not caused by GMs nearly perfect understanding of the game (the antithesis of Ballard's view), precisely because their understanding isn't nearly perfect, or not close enough! That point could have been made more explicit, but there isn't anything else I could have meant in the original quotation:

Ballard offers a brief historical excursus recalling the days when draws were automatically replayed, notes that there are few draws in computer chess (indicating that the draw "problem" is not caused by GMs' nearly perfect understanding of the game)...

If my point (summarizing Ballard) wasn't to contrast computers with humans, with the presupposition that computers are stronger than we are, then the whole passage is a mystery.

So: If you wish to have a forum for your views here, then read others' objections with the same care you request for your own arguments. A little humor's fine, disagreement is perfectly okay, but misrepresentation isn't.

Among the questions bandied about in our controversy of Clint Ballard's brainchild is this: is the BAP system a "pairing change", a chess variant, or still something else?

Ballard himself has chosen door #1: that it's a pairing system, but I find this wildly implausible. Maybe the system has some implications for swiss system pairings (for example, maybe last round pairings should not match players with the same scores, but set things up so that, where possible, those with White have one point more than their opponents), but it won't have any effect on the pairings for a round-robin event. As far as I can tell, the only effect BAP has on the world of round-robin tournaments is that all such tournaments probably need to have an even number of rounds. Nevertheless, this doesn't make BAP a pairing system, so I think we can reject this thesis.

On the other hand, Jon Jacobs has insisted, in various comments both on this blog and elsewhere, that using BAP produces something that isn't chess as we know it, but a variant. Why? I don't think Jacobs is as clear as he could be, but the essential idea is that the rules of the game have changed because the fundamental goal structure of the game has changed. Traditionally, the primary goal is to win; secondarily, it's not to lose. But as a White draw nets him the same goose egg (no points) a loss achieves, the secondary goal has been (largely?) eliminated when one has White.

I find this account more plausible than Ballard's, but I'm not fully persuaded - there's more work for Jacobs to do. First, we should distinguish between different sorts of rules. A couple of weeks ago, I exchanged a few emails with another chess teacher on USCF's recent decision to mandate recording one's moves only after playing them. My interlocutor thought it was a terrible idea while I was somewhat in its favor, but neither of us thought our dispute was over two forms of chess. USCF did make a change to the rules of the game, broadly construed, but it's what we might call a nonessential change, not an essential change.

It's worth saying a little more about this, as the distinction between the essential and the non-essential is crucial here. A property is essential to a thing if, if a thing loses that property, it ceases to be that thing; that is, it ceases to exist. An example or two might help. It's an essential property of a sphere that, for any two points on its surface, each point is equidistant from the center of the sphere. Should something happen to the object to mar its surface, it ceases to exist as a sphere. (It could continue to exist as a hunk of marble, as a decorative object, etc.) Or suppose we think it's an essential property of a human being, that he have self-consciousness. What this would mean, if true, is that a sleeping human is in fact not a human being at all! Unless one wants to bite the bullet and claim that (non-REM) sleepers are corpses of a special sort, it would be better to rescind this alleged essential property.

Let's contrast this with non-essential properties. When I cut my fingernails, I've undergone a change, but it's not one that affects my essential nature. If I was a human being before, merely changing the length of my fingernails doesn't change that. On the other hand, if I'm flattened by a steamroller, a la good old Warner Brothers cartoons, then I'm not a really short human being; I'm an ex-human being. Or rather, physically speaking, I'm not, period - I've ceased to exist as an embodied human being.

Back to chess: the dispute over when one can record the moves is clearly non-essential: it was chess before the rule change, and it's still chess after the rule change. So not all rule changes affect the essential properties of the game, but others do. If kings start moving like kings in checkers, we've clearly created a variant of the game; it's not longer chess-as-we-know-it.

The really tough question, then, is what the essential rules of the game are, such that if any of them are changed, we're talking about a variant and not the "normal" version. One possibility, which might be Jacobs' view - but it need not be - is this: the essential, non-negotiable rules include the following:

1. The rules for moving the pieces (including captures, castling, en passant and pawn promotion).

2. The rules for checkmate, stalemate and other drawing scenarios.

3. The goal-rules: a win is worth a point, a draw half a point, a loss nothing.

This is a plausible list, and probably at least very close to what we'd all say if asked by relatives to give a 5-10 minute summary of the rules. But there are difficulties under all three headings.

Ad 1: All of these have changed over the years, and castling, pawn promotion and en passant (together with the pawn's double move) in particular are relative newcomers on the scene. Each rule made for a big change, but was it an essential change?

Ad 2: Checkmate is an absolutely ancient part of the game, but stalemate isn't. More to the point, the drawing rules have been in great flux within my lifetime: there have been the Sofia rules and other attempts to delay/deny draws by agreement, but there have been other changes as well. One short-lived change was the revocation of the 50-move rule for certain endings (e.g. 2 Bs vs. N) when computers proved wins taking more than 50 moves to achieve. So rules of type 2 are more flexible than we might initially think.

Ad 3: There have been changes here too, over the years, though the current point system goes back to at least 1867. (That might sound relatively recent, but with London 1851 generally considered the first international event, it's really not.) Yet there are exceptions to this system even in our time. What were the scores of the Karpov-Korchnoi world championship matches? No one says "16.5-15.5 and 11-7, Karpov" but 6-5 and 6-2, Karpov. Karpov-Kasparov I was terminated when the score was 5-3, not 25-23.

So maybe we need to revise the essential heart of our scoring system, and I think this can be done in a way that extends the tradition even before 1851. Here's the revision: a win by either side counts, equally, for a point apiece (but what about the Spassky-Portisch candidates' match? - that's at least a mini-problem), while a draw (a) counts for less than a win, and (b) intrinsically favors neither player. There have been objections to (b) over the years (based largely on anti-stalemate sentiments), but it is a pretty stable tradition.

Is (b) essential? Here's a little argument to suggest that it may not be. The conditions given might be seen as one way of expressing something still more fundamental ideas at the heart of the draw: first, the need to handle non-decisive results; second, to do so in a way that facilitates the overall event. The goal of the game is to win, but that's not always possible. So what do we do? Ideally, replay the games or otherwise disregard the draw in pursuit of decisive results. That was true in London 1851 and New York 1857, and more recently in various candidates' and world championship matches.

Unfortunately, this can easily generate logistics problems, though (recall once more K-K I), so the half-point solution was an economical way to address the two fundamental ideas of the last paragraph. It's a nice way to handle everything, and one that takes into account the near-parity of White and Black. If there's another way to satisfy the fundamental ideas, though, then why not? Why won't it still be chess?

Note that this stops short of endorsing BAP: to suggest that Jacobs' argument at the very least needs supplementation and at worst fails doesn't show that just anything goes. I could continue, but I think this is enough for tonight, and I'll allow Jacobs and others to pick up the ball and run with it where they will.