How to Extract Relevant Knowledge from Grandmaster Games

Subtitle: PART 2: The Notion of Mobility, and the Work of De Groot and Slater

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Hartmann, Dap

Affiliations: Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands

Abstract: The notion of mobility has been recognized as a fundamental issue at least as far back as Euwe’s formalization of the game. This notion, however, is not uniformly defined: it may be counted as the number of legal moves or of pseudo-legal moves, as the number of squares attacked or as the number of distinct squares attacked. All these notions have a high correlation. The present work, based on analysing 60,177 positions from Grandmaster games, has been rescaled in order to make it comparable with De Groot’s 1946 work and, by and large, confirms his results. The same applies to the Average Branching Factor. With due allowance for the different character of games analysed, Slater’s 1950 results are substantiated as well.

DOI: 10.3233/ICG-1987-10204

Journal: ICGA Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 78-90, 1987