de Sousa, J. D. (2003). A
Reply to Dowd's Commentary on My Paper.
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission, 7.
http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2003/vol7/de_sousa_jd_reply.html
João Dinis de Sousa
Rua Actor Vale 49 4º Esq
1900-024 Lisboa Portugal
j.d.sousa@oninet.pt, j.d.sousa@netc.pt
I will start my response by focusing on Dowd's first minor critique
(section
1.1 of his commentary).
He remarks that I put too much emphasis on moves rather than on positions
in the evolutionary process of chess openings. He says: "First
of all, all opening sequences result in positions (...). Thus positions (opening
or middlegame) are as evolutionary as are openings". Of course,
I agree that positions are intertwined with moves in every chess game. I also
agree that, during the evolutionary process of a given opening, both its
underlying moves and its underlying positions evolve too. Finally, both positions
and moves are memetic replicators (they spread from one player's mind to
another, are written in books, etc). I agree with all that. If I considered
moves, rather than positions, to be the main replicators in my framework,
it was because moves are informationally simpler than positions. Like genes,
they are discrete, particulate entities, and easy to represent. Moves are
instructive replicators that entirely codify the phenotypic properties of
chess games. The recipe-cake analogy (Dawkins 1986)
applies to the relationship between moves and games (see section
1.2 of my
article; in the literature, a game is described by the sequence of its
moves, exactly like a biological organism is described by its genes). In each
position, several moves can be played, so positions function as loci. This
makes possible the framework that I depicted in section
5 of my article: moves as replicators, positions as loci, games as interactors,
openings as memomes, branches of the theory of openings as species. My framework
doesn't parallel biology exactly (I grant this in section
5.1) and it is not the only framework possible, but it enables one to
visualise what happens in the evolution of chess openings in the light of
replicator-based selectionism.
Dowd could reply that positions, like moves, are also replicators and can
also be used to describe games entirely (for example, one could depict a game
in written form, by drawing diagrams of all positions composing it). However,
that would be an inefficient way to describe a game, since the representation
of each position requires much more information than the representation of
each move. That's why everywhere games are represented by their underlying
moves, not by their positions. As they are simpler, moves approach the ideal
of particulate, discrete entities better than positions.
Summarizing my response to Dowd's first minor critique, I agree with him that
both positions and moves evolve in the process of evolution of openings, but
I consider a memetic framework based on moves as their instructive replicators
more illuminating and elegant than a framework based on positions as instructive
replicators.
Next, I will comment on some minor points raised by Dowd in section 1.1 of
his commentary.
In the third paragraph of section 1.1, Dowd says (taking about me) "he
intermixes the use of position and combination" in the article.
But positions and combinations are quite different things: a position is the
representation of the situation of the chessboard at a given moment, and
a combination is a sequence of moves. No possible confusion between the two.
So, when the title of figure 2 in my article is "Figure
2. A brilliant combination", and the figure itself shows a chess position,
obviously what I meant was not that the shown position was a combination
but instead that the shown position was the starting point for the combination
that followed. This should be obvious to Dowd and to any reader acquainted
with chess, so it should not be interpreted, as Dowd did, as an instance
of 'intermixing the use of position and combination'.
Later
in section 1.1, Dowd considers my description of positions as both memes
and loci to be inconsistent. Certainly, when one speaks of genes and
genetic loci in biology, the two things are quite distinct. However, memetics
doesn't parallel genetics in every detail. In particular, memetics deals with
ideas, and ideas may exist on a wide range of things, including loci where
other ideas compete (for example, a philosophical question is itself a meme
and an operational locus to other memes - the possible answers to the question).
Returning to chess positions, insofar as they can be remembered, transmitted,
and written by humans (for example chess diagrams in books represent positions),
they are clearly memes. And, insofar as, in each position, several moves
can be played, and hence compete memetically in player's minds, positions
may be conceptualized as loci. So, I don't agree that there is an inconsistency
in considering positions as both memes and loci. They display both aspects.
In
paragraph 6 of section 1.1, Dowd writes: "Also,
the choice of the Evergreen game was a poor one, even thought it may be a
striking position. The game was played in an era when chess play was best
described as 'swashbuckling', and razor-sharp, although often unsound, attacks
predominated." Yes, XIX century attacks were often unsound, and this
may be the case of the Evergreen game too, but how is this relevant to the
point I was making? I was just giving an example of a highly prolific chess
meme not associated with an opening move and, for this purpose, the combination
played in the Evergreen game certainly qualifies.
Now turning to another minor critique from Dowd, still in section
1.1. In paragraph
8, he goes on to criticize my emphasis on the fecundity of opening moves,
and my downplaying of the fecundity of middlegame moves: "Openings
certainly are followed closely by chessplayers and thus exhibit fecundity
perhaps to a greater extent than middlegames; but this does not mean that
middlegames lack fecundity" (in this context, I assume that he is
using the expression "middlegames" to mean "moves and positions in the middlegame").
I would just drop the "perhaps": it is clear that opening moves exhibit much
higher fecundity than middlegame moves (some brilliant middlegame moves, like
the ones of the Evergreen combination I presented, achieve high proliferation
in chess literature and in players' minds, but they are never repeated in
new games; and proliferation in new games is the most interesting type of
proliferation from the evolutionary point of view).
The earlier a move occurs in the opening the more often it is played in real
games. Some of the earlier middlegame moves and positions probably manage
to find themselves replicated in other games, but the more one advances into
the middlegame the more unlikely this replication becomes. For example, of
the millions of moves played at the 40th move in a given year worldwide, almost
all are unique. Dowd discusses two similar combinations (figures 1 and 2, referring to
the Kavalek-Marovic and Marovic-Petrossian games respectively) to show that
middlegame moves and positions also have fecundity in the sense of proliferating
to new games. Now, what these two diagrams show is somewhat similar combinations
(the move Nxe4) being played in two different games. The two moves
are not equal (despite a white knight being sacrificed in both against two
black pawns in e4, and some additional similarities, the starting
positions are different). So, if there exists any replication here (and I'm
ready to admit that it does at the memetic level) it is not like the perfect
replication enjoyed by popular opening moves and positions. Each popular opening
move (for example, the move 6.Re1 after the opening sequence1.e4
e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0-0 Be7 (any example would do) replicates
with perfect fidelity to other games. The same cannot be said about the move
Nxe4 played in the two combinations referred by Dowd because they
belong to different positions. Still, I admit that replication of a pattern
occurred, in an imprecise way, via Marovic's mind, as Dowd says (in the second
game, Marovic played Nxe4 inspired by the similar move played by
Kavalek against him some years before, figures 1
and 2).
The problem is when Dowd says: "This
would seem to provide some proof that combinations also evolve, albeit in
an imprecise way with the human host as a carrier of the meme...".
I strongly disagree. Where is the evolutionary process here? How often does
this replication happen? Is the "quality" exhibited by combinations the outcome
of a recursive evolutionary process? Certainly not. Even though there is some
replication of patterns, the patterns lack copying fidelity and, moreover,
their proliferation to new games is too low, to allow for complex evolution.
Patterns of combinations in the middlegame, even though they can replicate
to other games, do not fit into what Dawkins (1982)
called the active germ-line replicator, that is, a replicator that is potentially
the ancestor of an indefinitely long line of descendant replicators and whose
nature can influence its own replication. Unlike middlegame combination moves,
opening moves are clearly active germ-line replicators: they last long in
evolutionary time. Moreover, they sometimes have very high fecundity (and
they proliferate, not only in the literature, as happens usually with combinations,
but in thousands of new real games). That's why, as I argue in my article
(sections
7 and 8),
there are complex evolutionary processes going on (including arms races, and
the onset of adaptive quality) in chess openings, and that's the reason for
my focus on opening moves.
Now turning to Dowd's second minor critique (section 1.2 of
his commentary),
what he says is that quasi-extinction of opening variations is often not definitive,
because new analyses and novelties resurrect forgotten variations, making
the underlying memes proliferate again. This is, of course, true. However,
it doesn't apply to all cases of quasi-extinction, but only to those in which
the evaluations (in Encyclopaedias of Chess Openings (ECOs)
and other chess literature) that classified the variation as being too bad
to one side were faulty. In many instances, these evaluations are correct,
the disadvantage of one side is considerable, and the evolutionary decay
of the variation is definitive (chess analysis has "scientific" features:
objective, demonstrable, conclusions often arise). In these cases, where an
objective analysis can prove the illness of a position to one side, quasi-extinction
usually follows. Even in such cases, it is better to use the word "quasi-extinction"
rather than "extinction", because the variation doesn't become totally extinct:
many players who are unaware of bad evaluations in the ECOs
continue playing it.
Finally, Dowd's major critique (his section 2) is
that in my article I ignored recipemes (Langrish 1999)
about how to think in chess and how to play the middlegame. Dowd discusses
in his section
2 the works of de Groot, Aagard, and Watson about the relative importance
of rules, pattern recognition, and calculus. If I didn't include a discussion
of these themes, it was not because I don't respect them. On the contrary,
I find them of the utmost importance to the study of chess, especially for
players wanting to perfect their middlegame techniques. But these matters,
interesting as they are, are beyond the scope of my article, the main goal
of which was to apply a replicator selectionist approach to the explanation
of the evolutionary processes occurring in the theory of chess openings.
I would like also to add that, other than Aagard, and Watson, hundreds if
not thousands of other prominent chessplayers and writers have contributed
to the theory of chess with books full of recipemes about how to play the
middlegame. For example, Karpov published many of his games in books annotated
with analyses and suggestions of middlegame plans (for example, Karpov 1979,1988). The
same applies to hundreds of other grandmasters. Capablanca, in his classic
Chess Fundamentals (1952) explores many middlegame
techniques, including, for example, the description of many kinds of weaknesses
in the pawn structure, along with techniques to exploit them. Kotov's books
Think Like a Grandmaster (1976) and Train Like a
Grandmaster (1981) are also full of specific middlegame-related
recipemes, including recommendations about the relative reflection time allocation
between strategic planning and calculation. The world of chess ideas
is very rich indeed, is abundantly expressed in books, and is worth writing
about, but, as I said, the scope of my article was not to discuss a wide range
of these ideas, but rather to investigate the evolution of chess openings
in the light of the selective processes operating on their elementary instructive
replicators (moves).
References
Capablanca, J. R. (1952) Ajedrez Fundamental,
Madrid: Marsiega.
Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker,
New York: W. W. Norton.
Karpov, A. (1979) Partidas Selectas, Madrid:
Editorial Aguilera.
Karpov, A. (1988) The Semi-Open Game in Action,
London: B. T. Batsford.
Kotov, A. (1976) Think Like a Grandmaster, London:
B. T. Batsford.
Kotov, A. (1981) Train Like a Grandmaster, London:
B. T. Batsford.
Langrish, J. Z. (1999) Different Types of Memes:
Recipemes, Selectemes and Explanemes, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary
Models of Information Transmission 3, <http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1999/vol3/langrish_jz.html>
© JoM-EMIT 2003
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