Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

In my last comment, I liken the scientific community and chess variant community (chess can be seen as a specialized science so really there is no need to differentiate them, per se - Steinitz regarded by many as the first chess scientist laying out principles of the game that still apply not only to the FIDE army but to most variants) as being international at their best.

There is, however, a way in which the ("pure" / "theoretical" / "hard") scientific community differs very much from the professional community in that scientists are encouraged to share their results and submit them for peer review. Chess athletes too are encouraged to do the same and the universal consensus about advice grandmasters have for chess athletes as the number one way to improve themselves is this: Play over your own games and annotate them in as detailed a way as possible, drawing on the most pertinent resources (AI, opening theory, tablebases, etc.)

Yet, the professional chessplayer will want to keep his most important innovations (mostly I speak here of TN "theoretical novelties" or opening innovations - relatively easy for computers to find but surprisingly difficult for humans) secret to unleash as weapons. The model for this is obvious: Warfare. This is the most genesis metaphor I failed to mention in posts of today. Yes, this chessplayer is similar to teams of scientists who compete to patent in the marketplace and don't rush to publish until they've acquired intellectual property.

There was an innovation by a great variant player on PBM that involved one's opponent selecting possible moves for choice on each successive move. This conversational way of engaging during ongoing games of chess is a nascent field of variant theory I wish to develop further, adding another metaphor, chess as a rigid way of exploring logical communication, exposing hypocrisy (cf. Em. Lasker again). For me, it's a chief appeal of rule-based games. People can and do argue endlessly about abstractions (regardless of whether they are right or wrong) but only a poor sport will argue with a fairly executed, concrete winning game experience.