Twelve Dimensional Chess is Stupid (2018)
6 hours ago
- #high-dimensional games
- #chess metaphor
- #curse of dimensionality
- The metaphor of 'Twelve Dimensional Chess' is critiqued as flawed for representing strategic foresight, because high-dimensional chess becomes uninteresting due to the curse of dimensionality.
- In high-dimensional chess, a queen attacks a very small proportion of squares around a king; for d=12, only about 1.54% of the king's adjacent squares are covered.
- A non-losing strategy involves moving the king away from the boundary, as it would require an impractically large number of queens (e.g., 65) to achieve checkmate.
- Even with many queens, each attacks only a tiny fraction of the board's total squares (e.g., billions), making random king movement feasible without significant threat.
- Thus, twelve-dimensional chess better symbolizes a lonely random walk with rare, easily avoidable interactions, rather than complex strategic depth.