It has been played and loved for centuries, but in recent years it's surged in popularity with scores of new players looking to learn the chess rules. To ensure the relevance and validity of these results from a chess theory perspective, the researchers sought the expertise of a chess grandmaster who wishes to remain anonymous.Chess is one of the oldest board games ever. "On the one hand, this underlines the significance of our two newly introduced measures, but also the accuracy of our analysis," explains Servedio. Matching these with the players' rating on the chess platform itself showed a significant correlation. This gave the researchers a measure of how difficult an opening game is (= complexity) and a measure of how good a player is (= fitness). So, they examined which opening games were played the most and who played them. The basic assumption: if a particular opening game is played by many people, it is likely to be rather easy. In addition, their method also allowed the researchers to determine how good a player and how difficult a particular opening game is. That would be like trying to exchange words in a language," adds De Marzo. After all, something that grows historically cannot be reordered from scratch. Our clustering represents a new order that is close to the used one and can add to it by showing players how similar openings actually are to each other," Servedio explains. "Since this has evolved historically, it contains very useful information.
#CHESS OPENINGS CODE#
The standard classification, the so-called ECO Code (Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings), divides them into five main groups: A, B, C, D and E. Depending on which pieces are moved first, one speaks of an open, half-open, closed or irregular opening. The opening phase in chess is usually less than 20 moves. Moreover, the method of classification that the researchers have developed here can be applied not only to chess, but to similar games such as Go or Stratego.
Each cluster thus represents a certain style of play - for example, rather defensive or very offensive. Therefore, although these strategies are classified in different classes, they must have some similarity. For example, certain opening games from different classes were played repeatedly by the same players. "And these clusters don't necessarily coincide with the common classification of chess openings," says De Marzo.
Ten different clusters clearly stood out according to actual similarities in playing behavior. In this way, the researchers found that certain opening games group together. Total novices could randomly play any opening games, which would skew our analyses," explains Vito D.P.
"We also only included players in our analyses that had a rating above 2,000 on the platform Lichess. Opening games that are so popular that they occur together with most others were excluded. If several players choose two specific opening games over and over again, it stands to reason that they will be similar. The researchers analyzed 3,746,135 chess games, 18,253 players and 988 different openings from the chess platform Lichess and observed who plays which opening games. "To find out how similar chess openings actually are to each other - meaning in real game behavior - we drew on the wisdom of the crowd," Giordano De Marzo of the Complexity Science Hub and the Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi (CREF) explains.
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