Single Comment

I rather doubt that we're going to address the problem of the future of chess. It will either evolve into something new and worthy without anyone's planning it, or it will go softly into the night as checkers and bridge seem to be doing.

The chief problem chess faces, in my opinion, is Scrabblization. By this I mean that chess has become a game like Scrabble, in which an enormous amount of rote memorization has become almost as important, or perhaps even more important, as strategic and tactical intuition -- and this is especially so for one making the move from casual amateur to serious tournament player. Like lovers of checkers and bridge, experts who have invested that effort are emphatic that they're glad they did. But that doesn't attract others to follow after when there are plenty of other strategy games without so much 'book' where they can hope to excel just by having a knack. 

This is just my partly-informed opinion based on remarks I've heard from better players, so I readily admit I could be completely off-base -- I'm no expert at chess. But if I'm right, then chess has gone so far down the road  toward Scrabble that, at this point, I'm suspicious that those who are experts have acquired a distorted view of the game during their years of study. Reading whole books devoted to variations on a single line of play, memorizing openings out to twenty moves, is certainly not what the inventor of Chess had in mind.

This is why I think something like the random-array or (better still) the player-selected-army variants are the likeliest future for chess, if it's to have one at all.