31–40 of 176 posts
I find the article great. His only mistake is to think that chess is a balanced game. White has clearly an advantage and in a long amount of random games, like he did propose, see a 50% winrate for black.
This text mainly shows that author either misunderstands chess, probability and science, likely at the same time, or just wants to critique for critique’s sake. Of course while it’s good to search for alternative models/theories/explanations, unless you can provide something with better with more predictive power than the existing/widely accepted ones, it’s a good idea to hold the critique. EDIT: To clarify: by less…
Think on it in a different way, most of the very revolutionary theories, those that changed how we see the world, were relatively more simple, they were generally simple enough that one fringe could develop them to a point where they shined so brightly as to be next to irrefutable. Things like how the earth might be round, and circle the sun.
We can't expect the same to be true for more advanced fields, we can't say "yeah, this "new/underdeveloped" idea does seem reasonable, but it does not solve everything as well as our existing theory that we've been iterating on for decades, so let's not waste time on that".
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 wi…
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). "
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The aliens can’t see the players, other than that one is playing as “white” and the other “black”. They don’t have access to information about a particular player going from game to game.
That's not how I read the article's introduction. But under that interpretation, it would be meaningless for the aliens to try to understand the game in any more detail until they understood that kind of basic information.
It‘s an interesting way of being “wrong”.
> 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). But this is empirically false. It fails to explain that, for example, some players consistently beat other players, or at least have a much higher than 50% winrate. If chess really did consistently just have a 50% out…
He could have referred to the NFL or something, maybe that would have helped. The point was to set up the aliens to have a gross approximation of outcome determination that is both accurate and wrong.
The aliens could have decided to use home vs. away teams as their "coin flip" and stopped investigating once they found out that home teams win a bit more, for example, and the "crazy" alien in the parable could suggest that examining only the first play of the game is a better answer. The "crazy" alien would be told to stop because the first play isn't more predictive, but the fact that the alien is looking at gameplay is more "right".
I suspect that the real breakthrough would come when the alien physicist designs a very sensitive instrument that can observe exotic wavelengths of light at high resolution, and thereby show that the board is not uniform, but is divided into regions that have 1 of 2 states: i.e. black and white squares.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. […
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.
This text mainly shows that author either misunderstands chess, probability and science, likely at the same time, or just wants to critique for critique’s sake. Of course while it’s good to search for alternative models/theories/explanations, unless you can provide something with better with more predictive power than the existing/widely accepted ones, it’s a good idea to hold the critique. EDIT: To clarify: by less…
The so-called "wave function collapse" isn't really part of QM, it's duct tape that we have applied to stick together the QM with "Classical Physics" and our pre-existing assumptions about human consciousness. I don't think we should consider it "real" or "true".
Without the wave function collapse, there is no randomness in QM.
This text mainly shows that author either misunderstands chess, probability and science, likely at the same time, or just wants to critique for critique’s sake. Of course while it’s good to search for alternative models/theories/explanations, unless you can provide something with better with more predictive power than the existing/widely accepted ones, it’s a good idea to hold the critique. EDIT: To clarify: by less…
"Physicists are “stuck” with existing theories not because they like them, but because they work so well it’s hard to invent something that even works equally well" Yes, but hundred years ago we were "stuck" with another worldview that was explaining everything fine, and i assume ther was a big resistance from estabilishment to addopt new ideas. But then old scientist died, and resistance got weaker. So we might look…
Likewise quantum mechanics doesn’t replace General Relativity. It compliments it.