[bruce511]

It's not _players_ here that matter, just the color. If I play a grand master (or indeed just any moderately competent player) 10 times, I will lose all 10. But assuming we share who starts, white will win 5 times and black will win 5 times.

Further, for some random chess tournament, I'm guessing the win ratio for black/white is close to 50/50 (perhaps white is a bit ahead for having first mover advantage - which is stipulated as ignored in the article)

It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong.

[lmm]

> It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong.

And discovering that relationship between players and winning is important and valuable! But trying to understand how the pieces move before you've even understood that this is a game of skill is putting the cart before the horse, and gives you a model that really is less useful than the coin-flip model.

[jjk166]

But how can you propose that chess is a game of skill unless you first propose that there are players doing something at which they could be skilled?

[lmm]

You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reason about how.

[jjk166]

No, you would observe blobs of water and carbon jiggling and perhaps making some noises. You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results. Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

[lmm]

> You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results.

Sure. But again, trying to understand chess without having that understanding would be putting the cart before the horse.

> Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

That would be a reasonable starting assumption, but they'd eventually notice contradictions: the fact that some players consistently had advantages over others, more experienced players generally beat less experienced players, commentary and analysis of board positions is considered worthwhile...

[jjk166]

You are deliberately misinterpreting the analogy to the point of absurdity. The aliens are only observing a black box system that spits out "white wins" or "black wins," they are trying to determine if there's any reason to develop the means of probing the contents of the black box. Regardless of whether you start by modelling the players or the board, you are still assuming the winner is determined by some complicated model with numerous hidden variables which you would have no reason to believe unless you start with the assumption that this is not a random number generator - an assumption for which you have no evidence. The author's thesis is that assuming a complex explanation for a black box's behavior is reasonable because that's the only way that leads to experiments to probe the contents of the box.