Jeremy Good wrote on Sun, Aug 19, 2007 01:34 PM UTC:
Joe, I think you and I do share a 'maximalist' aesthetic, me to a much greater extent than you. I make an expression of this in my profile for yamorezu, where I liken inventing a new variant to making a single chess move on a single chess board. Yes, there are trillions of possible variants, but there are also trillions of moves within single variants. It is unoriginal and tedious merely to confine ourselves to a few boards that quickly acquire a heritage of rote knowledge. Inventing new variants and playing new variants is a much more organic process reflecting the diversity of nature and, to my mind, the wonder of the universe. I'm persuaded that some of the best variants have not even been conceived.
When someone dismisses a large chess variant simply because it is large and doesn't seem to have popular appeal, it reminds me that at one time, arithmetic and basic geometry were considered very sophisticated functions only the most intelligent adults could perform, never children. Chess gives us the opposite model where child prodigies are common. Before people even guessed that algebra and the calculus were possible. It is misleading to use historical eras a way of measuring achievement in any field. The scientific advances of the last 100 years have dwarfed the scientific advances of the previous thousand years and the scientific advances of just the last 10 years have dwarfed the scientific advances of the previous 100 years. Just compare a brand new computer to one that is 10 years old. That is the way we should be thinking about our chess variants, as reflecting the diversity of nature and the pace of change wrought by technological innovation. Not just chess prodigies but computer whiz kids are common for the same reason.
Proliferation of chess variants represents an aspect of the future into which we are moving, if we don't fall into obscurantist traps like denying the aspect of evolution that is a fact (every bit as much a fact as that 2 + 2 = 4) and pretending that any era in history was truly golden, which falls prey to what Walter Lippmann calls the 'pathetic fallacy' in his Preface to Morals, a spirited critique of the history of moral authority and its clash with modernism.
People sometimes compare what I do to what Charles Gilman does. I consider that a compliment and it's not an accident. What's surprising to me is not that there are so many chess variants and so many people inventing them, but that there are not a lot more people like Charles Gilman, who is a great inspiration to me. There are not too many chess variants and too many chess variant inventors. There are far too few of both, in my opinion.
Let me put that in context. I live near the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress and I have spent much time studying there. Yet I don't believe there are 'so many books, so little time' -- I believe there are 'far too few really good books' and 'way too much time.' Just as the best computers are yet to come, computers with abilities that exceed human intelligence by many orders of magnitude, the best chess variants have yet to come (though there are many, many good ones) and the best books, even the best histories, have yet to be written. That's my bias.
When someone dismisses a large chess variant simply because it is large and doesn't seem to have popular appeal, it reminds me that at one time, arithmetic and basic geometry were considered very sophisticated functions only the most intelligent adults could perform, never children. Chess gives us the opposite model where child prodigies are common. Before people even guessed that algebra and the calculus were possible. It is misleading to use historical eras a way of measuring achievement in any field. The scientific advances of the last 100 years have dwarfed the scientific advances of the previous thousand years and the scientific advances of just the last 10 years have dwarfed the scientific advances of the previous 100 years. Just compare a brand new computer to one that is 10 years old. That is the way we should be thinking about our chess variants, as reflecting the diversity of nature and the pace of change wrought by technological innovation. Not just chess prodigies but computer whiz kids are common for the same reason.
Proliferation of chess variants represents an aspect of the future into which we are moving, if we don't fall into obscurantist traps like denying the aspect of evolution that is a fact (every bit as much a fact as that 2 + 2 = 4) and pretending that any era in history was truly golden, which falls prey to what Walter Lippmann calls the 'pathetic fallacy' in his Preface to Morals, a spirited critique of the history of moral authority and its clash with modernism.
People sometimes compare what I do to what Charles Gilman does. I consider that a compliment and it's not an accident. What's surprising to me is not that there are so many chess variants and so many people inventing them, but that there are not a lot more people like Charles Gilman, who is a great inspiration to me. There are not too many chess variants and too many chess variant inventors. There are far too few of both, in my opinion.
Let me put that in context. I live near the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress and I have spent much time studying there. Yet I don't believe there are 'so many books, so little time' -- I believe there are 'far too few really good books' and 'way too much time.' Just as the best computers are yet to come, computers with abilities that exceed human intelligence by many orders of magnitude, the best chess variants have yet to come (though there are many, many good ones) and the best books, even the best histories, have yet to be written. That's my bias.
I'm going to close by quoting Betza from his interview he did here. It reflects an aspect of my design philosophy and why it's important to me that we try to learn from what others have done and keep on trying, trying, trying: First, you should realize that it's easy to invent a chess variant, and it's even easy to invent an interesting one, and even easy (with a bit of luck) to invent a pretty good one. In order to come up with something really new, you have to know what's been done before, and in order to come up with something really good, you have to try -- and then perhaps learn from what you did -- and then try another one.