[figure]style=plain,subcapbesideposition=top 11affiliationtext: Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA $\dagger$$\dagger$affiliationtext: Email: [email protected]
Cultural transmission of move choice in chess
Abstract. The study of cultural evolution benefits from detailed analysis of cultural transmission in specific human domains. Chess provides a platform for understanding the transmission of knowledge due to its active community of players, precise behaviors, and long-term records of high-quality data. In this paper, we perform an analysis of chess in the context of cultural evolution, describing multiple cultural factors that affect move choice. We then build a population-level statistical model of move choice in chess, based on the Dirichlet-multinomial likelihood, to analyze cultural transmission over decades of recorded games played by leading players. For moves made in specific positions, we evaluate the relative effects of frequency-dependent bias, success bias, and prestige bias on the dynamics of move frequencies. We observe that negative frequency-dependent bias plays a role in the dynamics of certain moves, and that other moves are compatible with transmission under prestige bias or success bias. These apparent biases may reflect recent changes, namely the introduction of computer chess engines and online tournament broadcasts. Our analysis of chess provides insights into broader questions concerning how social learning biases affect cultural evolution.
Keywords. Chess, cultural evolution, Dirichlet-multinomial, social learning, transmission biases.
1 Introduction
Chess has existed in its current form for hundreds of years; it is beloved as an established sport, a hobby, and also as a source of inspiration for scientists across disciplines. Since the 1950s, playing chess well has served as a goal in the development of artificial intelligence, as a task that a ‘‘thinking agent’’ would be able to accomplish