Talk:Hostage chess

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Excised passage

The following passage is so vacuous I can only regard the grandiose philosophy as unwarranted puff.

The variant's inventor, John Leslie, is also a philosopher. He mentions in his book Infinite Minds that the prevalence of chess variant inventions such as hostage chess has led to speculation that there could be infinite possible variations of chess. He contends these will necessarily exceed the capacity of the human mind.

References

This is computer science 101. The set of all possible games is determined by the set of all possible rules, and so long as you don't run out of space to jot these down, that's an unbounded set (hence infinite).

But that's not even interesting, because the central nature of chess is the exploration of complex interactions derived from a relatively simple rule set, with a fairly uniform spacial logic underneath (e.g. most of the piece movements are highly symmetric, most are connected, and most can be blocked in geometric ways).

Even there, given just a few hundred binary knobs, you end up with a largish set of chess variants, most of which can be inscribed on a single sheet of paper—but already the size of the set exceeds 2^200, which is particles in universe territory. All combinatorial processes are like this. It's what 'exponential' actually means, when exponential refers to exponential (by far in the minority of casual usage).

The problem is not space, but time. Life is too short to study opening theory for 2^200 different chess variants.

From string theory landscape:

In string theory the number of flux vacua is commonly thought to be roughly $10^{500}$, but could be $10^{272,000}$ or higher. The large number of possibilities arises from choices of Calabi–Yau manifolds and choices of generalized magnetic fluxes over various homology cycles, found in F-theory.

Hey, once you find the fountain, you could work through 2^200 opening theories for chess-like games before breakfast, and then after lunch you could crunch through the 10^500 different vacua landscapes, to see whether any of these mathematical descriptions matches our own universe in an interesting way.

With numbers like these, who needs a real infinity? This philosophy is so completely unwarranted. — MaxEnt 01:13, 11 August 2022 (UTC)