[leto_ii]

I suspect the metaphor is inspired by Feynman's one about gods playing chess [1]. As it's almost always the case, Feynman manages to immediately inspire and illuminate.

On the other hand, the present article seems to me to get some important things wrong. For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each. More importantly though, if somebody is interested in investigating chess, they will supposedly understand that it's some activity that other (somewhat) intelligent beings are undertaking.

Even if everything seems like a blur, an alien scientist should not be content with dismissing it as uninteresting randomness. More so, if somebody actually starts investigating seriously, they will immediately obtain useful results about the game, results that should almost certainly provide useful predictions about the game outcome (at least better than "it's all random").

I might find, however, some agreement with the spirit of the article. It seems to me that, even though the author doesn't articulate it properly, the idea is that scientists should pursue more fringe theories even if immediate confirmation is lacking. I think there's quite a bit of value in this, as long as your predictions are always checked against reality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4

[goodcanadian]

I might find, however, some agreement with the spirit of the article. It seems to me that, even though the author doesn't articulate it properly, the idea is that scientists should pursue more fringe theories even if immediate confirmation is lacking. I think there's quite a bit of value in this, as long as your predictions are always checked against reality.

I have seen notable academics say the same thing. The problem is that the incentives set up in modern academia are strongly against doing anything outside of the mainstream.

[seisvelas]

>For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each.

He addresses that (first-move advantage from white moving first) in the parenthesis after that same sentence:

"After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example). "

[mannykannot]

It is also the case that if you take into account which pair of players are competing, the random hypothesis is not even close.

The author cannot have it both ways: either the aliens cannot distinguish the game from an equal-odds random process, or they can.

[seanhunter]

When I look at a master database, White wins about 33% of the time, black wins about 25% and the rest of the games are draws. The aliens would have to be pretty terrible at statistics to ignore draws and first mover advantage when they are clearly extremely important.

It is difficult to relate to an analogy which is so divergent from the basic facts.

[jjk166]

So instead of a coin toss it's a 12 sided dice where 4 sides are white wins, 3 sides are black wins, and 5 sides are draw.

Changing the weights of your random number generator doesn't lead to a better understanding of how chess works.

[seanhunter]

That was one example of how the author proposes an extremely inadequate analogy. The fact that you can propose an improvement so easily demonstrates this.

It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes.

[jjk166]

> It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes.

This was exactly the point the author was trying to convey. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that it is just a random number generator with no dependence on any factors, but this is a bad model, and the "fringe" alien who assumes there is some deeper, hidden structure to the game is correct to do so.

If it helps, consider the alien's sport of glorfball. We've never seen a game played, but we know that approximately 50% of the time the Aberdorfs win, and approximately 50% of the time the Gloophbahorps win. Based on this data, is it reasonable to conclude that glorfball is nothing but a game of chance?

[lmm]

It's reasonable to model glorfball as a game of chance for now, and aim to develop a more detailed understanding either by gathering more data (Can we correlate the occasions when the Aberdorfs win and the occasions when the Gloophbahorps win with anything else? If we can't observe glorfball games directly, we look for ways to find out about them indirectly, or outside conditions that might possibly affect glorfball). It's not reasonable to posit that glorfball results must be driven by cross-referencing the Da Vinci Code against a message written on the back of the Declaration of Independence, which seems to be what the article is advocating for.

[seanhunter]

That's not the simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that white always wins. It's also a terrible model but is significantly better than what the author proposes. It seems very strange that you seem compelled to defend this point.

The author proposes a deliberately terrible model presumably in the hope that he is illuminating a wider point. Sadly I don't think he's doing that.

[edgarvaldes]

>50% of the time, the white player wins... we'll ignore... any first-move advantage for the example

Really hard to parse the meaning. ¿White wins 50% of the time if we ignore that occasions where white wins because it has the first move? But white always has the first move.

[praestigiare]

Acknowledging is not addressing, and in this case the statement amounts to "they realize this: ... (they would not realize this)." It is either too flawed to make the point intended, or illustrates a flaw in the underlying argument.

[tpoacher]

Effectively what you're saying is that you cannot possibly entertain the larger point of the article, because you find faults with the specific analogy he chose to illustrate it. Right?

Fair enough. His fault for trying to argue using an analogy I guess. It never works.

[leto_ii]

That's precisely the opposite of what I was saying. I tend to agree with what (I understood as) the larger point of the article, I just see the chess analogy as muddled and inaccurate.

[mannykannot]

My impression is that the author is taking aim at a rather simple, outdated and largely superseded philosophical notion of what science is. While there are probably cases of social and institutional pressure being applied to discourage fringe theories, there seems to be a lively opposition to each of string theory, dark matter and dark energy.

[leto_ii]

> a rather simple, outdated and largely superseded philosophical notion of what science is

To me the idea of treating the chess game as a random process somehow felt like an anti-realist position [1]. I'm not sure how this kind of thinking is currently perceived by philosophers of science, it's possible it's an outdated view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism

[mannykannot]

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but if that is the intent of the parable, it is being rather equivocal about it. As I pointed out in another reply, unless the amount of information the aliens can possibly get about chess games is severely limited (excluding, for example, information that would allow them to see that games between specific pairs of players are rarely even-odds) then chess does not actually look like a random process - but if they are limited to that extent, then they are not going to determine that it is a game of rules, no matter what their philosophy and no matter how much they suspect that it is.

There is nothing unrealistic about random processes, and if the aliens take chess to be one, they are simply mistaken on account of their inability to get sufficient information to falsify this view.

There is a pretty well-known historical example in the opposition by Ernst Mach and the logical positivists to Boltzmann's work. I hope it is safe to say that the simplistic philosophical notions behind that opposition are now outdated and superseded.

[leto_ii]

I fully agree with your points. I think I may have been sloppy in expressing my criticism of the original article. At a certain level I think my comment was 'sociological' - the aliens, as intelligent creatures, should have a strong intuition that humans as other (somewhat) intelligent creatures can't be spending so much time and attention on something that is nothing more than a coin toss.

This sociological intuition should drive further inquiry into the mechanics of the game.

> if they are limited to that extent, then they are not going to determine that it is a game of rules, no matter what their philosophy and no matter how much they suspect that it is

Indeed, in that case the aliens are forever stuck. However, IRL you probably can't be absolutely sure that you're forever stuck, so in this case the 'philosophical' attitude might matter. An anti-realist might say - to hell with it, no worth trying, we'll never get better predictions out of more complex theories. A realist however, might pursue a theory not because it makes more accurate predictions, but because he/she has an idea that the theory is truly closer to the truth than the idea of a random coin toss. This intuition might take you through a dark period towards a higher reward (see moving from a local maximum to a valley, towards a yet unforeseeable global maximum).

PS:

flubert has a nice excerpt from Jaynes' Probability Theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648965

[mannykannot]

Thanks for bringing that to my attention - I have posted a reply there.

I think you are probably on to something when you suggest this article was influenced by Feynmann's analogy, but I am pretty sure that Feynmann was not suggesting the straw man that this article attacks.

[flubert]

I figured this was a riff on Jayes. From Chapter 10, section 8 of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" (starting on page 329).

     10.8  Mechanics under the clouds

"We are fortunate that the principles of Newtonian mechanics could be developed and verified to great accuracy by studying astronomical phenomena, where friction and turbulence do not complicate what we see. But suppose the Earth were, like Venus, enclosed perpetually in thick clouds. The very existence of an external universe would be unknown for a longtime, and to develop the laws of mechanics we would be dependent on the observations we could make locally.

Since tossing of small objects is nearly the first activity of every child, it would be observed very early that they do not always fall with the same side up, and that all one’s efforts to control the outcome are in vain. The natural hypothesis would be that it is the volition of the object tossed, not the volition of the tosser, that determines the outcome;indeed, that is the hypothesis that small children make when questioned about this.

Then it would be a major discovery, once coins had been fabricated, that they tend to show both sides about equally often; and the equality appears to get better as the number of tosses increases. The equality of heads and tails would be seen as a fundamental law of physics; symmetric objects have a symmetric volition in falling (as, indeed, Cramer and Feller seem to have thought). Of course, physicists continued discovering new particles and calculation techniques – just as an astronomer can discover a new planet and a new algorithm to calculate its orbit, without any advance in his basic understanding of celestial mechanics.

With this beginning, we could develop the mathematical theory of object tossing, dis-covering the binomial distribution, the absence of time correlations, the limit theorems, the combinatorial frequency laws for tossing of several coins at once, the extension to more complicated symmetric objects like dice, etc. All the experimental confirmations of the theory would consist of more and more tossing experiments, measuring the frequencies in more and more elaborate scenarios. From such experiments, nothing would ever be found that called into question the existence of that volition of the object tossed; they only enable one to confirm that volition and measure it more and more accurately.

Then, suppose that someone was so foolish as to suggest that the motion of a tossed object is determined, not by its own volition, but by laws like those of Newtonian mechanics,governed by its initial position and velocity. He would be met with scorn and derision; for in all the existing experiments there is not the slightest evidence for any such influence. The Establishment would proclaim that, since all the observable facts are accounted for by the volition theory, it is philosophically naıve and a sign of professional incompetence to assume or search for anything deeper. In this respect, the elementary physics textbooks would read just like our present quantum theory textbooks.

Indeed, anyone trying to test the mechanical theory would have no success; however carefully he tossed the coin (not knowing what we know) it would persist in showing head and tails about equally often. To find any evidence for a causal instead of a statistical theory would require control over the initial conditions of launching, orders of magnitude more precise than anyone can achieve by hand tossing. We would continue almost indefinitely,satisfied with laws of physical probability and denying the existence of causes for individual tosses external to the object tossed – just as quantum theory does today – because those probability laws account correctly for everything that we can observe reproducibly with the technology we are using.

After thousands of years of triumph of the statistical theory, someone finally makes a machine which tosses coins in absolutely still air, with very precise control of the exact initial conditions. Magically, the coin starts giving unequal numbers of heads and tails; the frequency of heads is being controlled partially by the machine. With development of more and more precise machines, one finally reaches a degree of control where the outcome of the toss can be predicted with 100% accuracy. Belief in ‘physical probabilities’ expressing a volition of the coin is recognized finally as an unfounded superstition. The existence of an underlying mechanical theory is proved beyond question; and the long success of the previous statistical theory is seen as due only to the lack of control over the initial conditions of the tossing.

Because of recent spectacular advances in the technology of experimentation, with increasingly detailed control over the initial states of individual atoms (see, for example,Rempe, Walter and Klein, 1987), we think that the stage is going to be set, before very many more years have passed, for the same thing to happen in quantum theory; a century from now the true causes of microphenomena will be known to every schoolboy and, to paraphrase Seneca, they will be incredulous that such clear truths could have escaped usthroughout the 20th (and into the 21st) century"

http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...

[mannykannot]

It is an amusing story, but the Venusian-Newtons could show that their principles would allow one to calculate the behavior of non-symmetric objects, and that the statistics of both symmetric and non-symmetric projectiles can be predicted by their theory - and it also explains gyroscopic precession!

[leto_ii]

Great passage!

You may be closer to the source of inspiration, although I feel that Feynman may have been part of it too. Maybe it was a combination of the two :)

I like that Jaynes' alegory highlights really how difficult it may be IRL to move from a simplistic theory to the next level of depth.