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by vecter 1995 days ago
There are so many unreasonable assumptions baked into this parable that make it difficult to take seriously. Any amount of meaningful investigation by the aliens would yield more insights into the fact that the game is in fact not a random coin flip. Even recognizing that white has a slightly higher win rate [0] would demonstrate some asymmetry that suggests the existence of a deeper structure or symmetry-breaking.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
2 comments
ALittleLight 1995 days ago
The article is not a treatise on how aliens might investigate chess though. That's just a symbolic example to illustrate the idea that you could have a simple model with good predictive power that is somehow less correct than a complicated model with worse predictive power.
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lmm 1995 days ago
But the whole point of the article is to claim that its example are possible, and yet it fails to demonstrate that. We can posit a world in which God declares that logical positivists may not enter heaven, and in such a world logical positivism would be a poor choice, but there's no evidence that that's actually the world we live in.
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8note 1995 days ago
The pieces that it does predict some things better:

Is one player happier than the other right now?

How long will it take to make the next move?

How long will the game last?

There's lots and lots of observable things other than who wins that the coin flip model does a worse job at. Thus, the example makes just as good an argument that making better predictions is still what makes a model better.

The missing question is "what are you using the model for?"

Are you trying to learn chess? Understand human psychology? Predict the outcomes of chess games? The same model isn't going to be the best for all of them. Like, the super GM level stockfish is going to suck at predicting beginner chess games

Whether one model is better than another is all about the purpose it's trying to serve, and how well it does that.

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est31 1995 days ago
Have they had individuals play the game enough times so that they can see this first mover advantage with a good p value?

Maybe they only know that the win chance for white is between 0.4 and 0.6.

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