[PEN-L:6664] Wizard Fable

[David Laibman <DLaibman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear PEN,
     In re Bill Moore's transmission of the fable about the wizard
who invented a simplified 700-page treatise on chess, and the king
who banished him back to the schoolroom:
     I think the fable is quite wrongheaded.  It is an attack on
theory as such, and an adminition to leave (e.g.) chess to its
practitioners rather than to "wizards" who try to formulate its
rules.  Like saying, leave the capitalist economy to the capitalists.
More to the point would be a rule book that reveals the rules the
players actually use, rather than the ones they claim to follow.
Nothing new here.
     But I really must register a little protest against one implica-
tion of the "Moral for would-be economics professors: an education
in checkers does not prepare your students for a life of chess."  I
learned about the game of checkers (draughts) at Ruskin College,
Oxford in 1962-63, where the African exchange students were partic-
ularly good at it (they called it "the game of our forefathers").
Adult (tournament) checkers is not a children's game; it is enormously
complex.  The fact that the pieces are much less differentiated than
those of chess, and that they move in far fewer ways, only means that
strategic thinking in the game must project much further forward, and
that rigorous anticipations must be developed many more moves farther
ahead.  I never became a very good player, but I am good enough to
show anyone across a board how much is truly involved.  On
an imaginary scale of complexity, with (say) tic-tac-toe at the simple
extreme, and some hypothetical ultra-complex game at the other, there
is a range within which games are open-ended challenges to the human
intellect.  Within that range, checkers would be closer to the "simple"
end, and chess further along toward the "complex" one.  But both games
are serious challenges to human intelligence, never completely mastered.

      o/^^^^^)            o     !
      /     / /^^) /\  /^^!  /^^)
    o(_____/_(_ /(/  \/   !_(_ /!_
     David Laibman       dlaibman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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