Is Chess ripe for foundational exposition/research?
Harvey Friedman wrote: > This is an example where there are massively powerful intellectual > intuitions. Of course they are fallible, and they get mixed together > with tedious special calculations. But the analysis of powerful > intellectual intuition seems to be of fundamental importance. Chess > looks to be a rather attractive place – not the only attractive place by > any means – to perform such an analysis. If all that is required for a subject to be “ripe for foundational exposition” is that there exist powerful intellectual intuitions, then sure, chess is ripe. Chess was ripe four hundred years ago, for that matter; people had powerful intellectual intuitions back then. I personally think that “powerful intellectual intuitions” by themselves aren’t enough. It is my (“mere”) opinion that, at minimum, one needs to be able to *evaluate the correctness* of some of those intuitions in a relatively objective and definitive manner. Otherwise, all we’ll get is a proliferation of mutual
