Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Jeremy Lennert wrote on Wed, Aug 8, 2012 10:26 PM UTC:

The first event in a causal chain can be important. I completely fail to follow the "always" part. Perhaps you can find a hurricane that wouldn't have formed if a particular butterfly hadn't flapped its wings, but not every flap of a butterfly's wing causes a hurricane.

But you seem to have missed the thrust of my last post, which was that, even if you were right, that would contradict your earlier suggestion that we can learn something about Chess based on the importance of its first move. If the first move is always the most important, then we cannot learn anything at all from the fact that the first move is most important in this particular case. (See also: Bayes' Theorem.)

But you are also wrong about the first move being the most important, for reasons I have already explained. If we ask how important X is to the outcome of some system, we are comparing two hypothetical situations, one where X obtains and one where it does not, and exploring the difference in the evolution of these two hypothetical systems. So if we ask how valuable a move is in a Chess game, hypothetical examples where we break the normal turn sequence are not only relevant, they're mandatory.

Or, here's a completely unrelated point: ever heard of zugzwang? It's important in, among other situations, the KRvK endgame. The fact that zugzwang exists proves that a move can have negative value, and from that it seems fairly safe to assume that some move after that point has a value higher than it. So that alone shoots down your theory that move-value is strictly decreasing.

In other words, it is possible (fairly easy, in fact) to devise a chesslike board game where black (that is, player two) has a forced win. Therefore, the first move cannot always be the most valuable.


Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.