I don't know any principles in ludology or game theory that states that the side that makes the first move is at an advantage/disadvantage but I can tell you this: in chess each side gets an equal opportunity to play either black or white. So if there's a tournament with 4 matches between two players, each side plays white twice out of these 4 matches. Shouldn't that level the playing field?

In chess, it is statistically verified that the first move advantage in chess contributes to an increased likelihood of winning the game by about 2-6%. It's slight but the edge is with white.

Yes, it levels the playing field between the players. But not the colours. Overall, white is the statistical favourite to take the tournament with a better win to loss ratio than everyone else in the tournament.

But, that's not what I asked you. I asked you who won? We aren't talking about which colour won.

I asked you who won? — MSC

Well, you framed the question in a way that suggested you were under the impression that the player playing white had an unfair advantage. No, s/he doesn't.

Well, you framed the question in a way that suggested you were under the impression that the player playing white had an unfair advantage. No, s/he doesn't. — TheMadFool

I don't believe that at all. I said White statistically wins more often. The meaning of the OP is more nuanced than that. If you you go back and reread it I'm not talking about the rules of chess between two different competitors. I'm talking about the rules of playing chess with yourself and the entire thing is supposed to tell a story.

For some reason, you've always felt it was unfair that white always gets to move first. How can that be a rule? Why is it a rule? Nevermind — MSC

I am not suggesting anything about the players here at all. I'm suggesting something about preference.

To be clear, not suggesting what you think I am.

Can you answer the question or not? I framed it creatively in order to be engaging. Your interpretation of the language used was the problem.

This post isn't about race either.

No paradox here. The complexity and unpredictacility of the human brain is enough for conversations or games with oneself. Chess is boring though. Writing novels and depicting combattants is no problem. You never know who’s gonna win. This sounds more like a ultra extrovert with no inner life.

I don't believe that [white has an advantage] at all. I said White statistically wins more often. — MSC

Isn't that a contradiction?

The meaning of the OP is more nuanced than that — MSC

Highly likely as I'm a total failure when it comes to nuances.

I'm talking about the rules of playing chess with yourself and the entire thing is supposed to tell a story. — MSC

To be honest, it doesn't make sense to play with yourself although I do recommend masturbation as an occasional fun activity. You know your own intentions and the scenario reduces to a game between "two" omniscient players viz. you and yourself. There can be no real winner in the sense of one outwitting the other and that is the sense in which winners are defined.

If a winner emerges then there are two possibilities:

1. It has to do with game mechanics like the advantage you mentioned white has.

2. You making a mistake when playing one side and noticing it when you play the other side.

don't believe that [white has an advantage] at all. I said White statistically wins more often.
— MSC

Isn't that a contradiction? — TheMadFool

No, this is just the advantage of first move start. It's essentially saying the likelihood of white winning is at it's highest before the first move is ever made. After that, player skill, luck, consistency and things like that take over and the odds change with every move. If you have two computers play at the same skill level over and over again a pattern does emerge the more games you play. If you were able to play the game with yourself honestly, 1000s of times without pulling any punches and really thinking of your other self as your opponent, White would win between 52 to 56% of the time. The problem isn't to do with the rules of chess. That isn't where the variance is. The problem lies in the rules of people and the little language games they play.

There are the rules of chess, then their are the rules of psychology. It's why playing chess face to face with someone feels like a different game than playing a faceless person on the internet through a screen.

Ultimately the only way to make a game with yourself a real challenge is to play reactively, to not think multiple steps ahead but just focus on the next move.

The problem lies in the rules of people and the little language games they play. — MSC

I'm thoroughly confused here. Do you mind explaining?

Ultimately the only way to make a game with yourself a real challenge is to play reactively, to not think multiple steps ahead but just focus on the next move. — MSC

This is like asking someone to satisfy their hunger without eating Isn't stratregizing the whole point of chess? Thinking multiple steps ahead of your opponent is the essence of chess. To not do that would be to not understand the spirit of the game.

Thinking multiple steps ahead of your opponent is the essence of chess. To not do that would be to court defeat. — TheMadFool

When your opponent is you, thinking ahead courts defeat because you've likely already decided which colour is going to win and which will lose. Meaning if you have decided that black is going to lose, you are going to lose as black. You will also win as white. You will have effectively won and lost the same game of chess. Is this even still winning?

So is it possible to play yourself at chess and still have it be called a game? Or can a game only happen between two players each with one colour, not one player with two?

When your opponent is you, thinking ahead courts defeat because you've likely already decided which colour is going to win and which will lose. Meaning if you have decided that black is going to lose, you are going to lose as black. You will also win as white. You will have effectively won and lost the same game of chess. Is this even still winning?

So is it possible to play yourself at chess and still have it be called a game? Or can a game only happen between two players each with one colour, not one player with two? — MSC

Aah! I had an inkling that's what you were driving at. Let's analyze this logically shall we? First things first, there are three possible outcomes in a game (of chess):

1) Win
2) Lose
3) Draw

The three outcomes are mutually exclusive and and jointly exhaustive. It isn't possible for more than one of them to be true and at least one of them has to be true. In these few words lie the answer to your question. Given what I said, it's logically impossible that the same person both win and lose and this is exactly what happens when you play with yourself.

Either

1. You're not playing [a game] at all, as implied by the contradiction (reductio ad absurdum)

Or

2. Playing with yourself must be considered an exception to the rule that the same person can't both win and lose

1 is clearly not the case since you are playing albeit with yourself. So, 2 must be the correct choice here. The idea that winning and losing are contraries must be abandoned but only when you have yourself as an opponent. In other words, it's possible for the same person to win and lose. A dull as ditchwater solution to a seemingly interesting problem.

They are both good responses though. Not dull to me. There is a third option however, that the person playing with themselves are not just them self but also someone else too. The more you think about identity the more you start to wonder who really won the game. Which part of you won, which part of you lost? If the answer is, a part of you wanted to win and a part of you wanted to lose, you end up with a paradox of belief where we are forced to accept that a person can believe and desire two things at once, even though those two things are in complete opposition to each other.

Lets expand on the problem a bit and not focus on the creative side of it too much, as I did put some detail into the problem that is more so just to be entertaining and it draws your attention away from the content of the problem.

Thank you for engaging with this by the way. I'm trying to test this paradox to see if it is worth putting into the start of my book.

Now, the game ended on the 27th move and white won. Which means between both players, there was a total of 53 moves made.

Let's say the match started on a Monday, and only one of the 53 moves was made each day. Which means the match took 54 days to complete. The game didn't end until black looked at the board to find out they had lost on the 54th day. This means that every second day you tried to win as black and every odd numbered day you played to win as white.

Who won now?

Chess player here so I gotta jump in.

If you're playing against yourself and one side wins then you're both the winner and the loser. You can think of chess kind of like walking in a very dark forest - a bad player can only see very, very little ahead of them, maybe just a few inches past their feet, while a good player has a much better flashlight or vision (whichever you want to call it) and is able not just to see further ahead, but with much greater precision and detail.

So if you're playing against yourself it's basically like you're trying to find or capture yourself in a dark forest with only a flashlight. You can make the moves that seem good to you, but you're likely gonna screw up at some point and now it's just a matter of whether you - on the other side of the board - can capitalize on that. If you capitalize on your opponent's mistake you should mostly just be winning, that's how chess is.

They are both good responses though. Not dull to me. There is a third option however, that the person playing with themselves are not just them self but also someone else too. The more you think about identity the more you start to wonder who really won the game. Which part of you won, which part of you lost? If the answer is, a part of you wanted to win and a part of you wanted to lose, you end up with a paradox of belief where we are forced to accept that a person can believe and desire two things at once, even though those two things are in complete opposition to each other.

Lets expand on the problem a bit and not focus on the creative side of it too much, as I did put some detail into the problem that is more so just to be entertaining and it draws your attention away from the content of the problem.

Thank you for engaging with this by the way. I'm trying to test this paradox to see if it is worth putting into the start of my book.

Now, the game ended on the 27th move and white won. Which means between both players, there was a total of 53 moves made.

Let's say the match started on a Monday, and only one of the 53 moves was made each day. Which means the match took 54 days to complete. The game didn't end until black looked at the board to find out they had lost on the 54th day. This means that every second day you tried to win as black and every odd numbered day you played to win as white. — MSC

You've hit upon a very intriguing fact. We're all accustomed to, in philosophy especially, consistency as a necessary feature of the rational mind. If I were to say god exists and then deny it, whether explicitly or in some implicatory sense, people would immediately call me out on it. I daresay most of us subscribe to a worldview with contradictions, obvious and not so obvious. One way of making sense of this would be to say that two different personalities are involved - one of them believes in, say, X and the other doesn't.

Watch this video:

You've hit upon a very intriguing fact. We're all accustomed to, in philosophy especially, consistency as a necessary feature of the rational mind. If I were to say god exists and then deny it, whether explicitly or in some implicatory sense, people would immediately call me out on it. I daresay most of us subscribe to a worldview with contradictions, obvious and not so obvious. One way of making sense of this would be to say that two different personalities are involved - one of them believes in, say, X and the other doesn't. — TheMadFool

This is an extremely intriguing answer! Give me a second, going to send some thoughts on this to someone else from a different forum.

Here is the thing that boggles my mind the most about this problem. Engaging with the problem, puts you into the problem.

At face value, is there something philosophical to be written about it?
I've thought of a lot of reasonable answers to it, but none of them seem to come close to the real issue, by engaging with the problem, you enter into a language game where the same rules apply. You are effectively deciding for yourself if you have answered correctly or not. And the entire game of who wins and loses is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, your answer says more about you than it does about what the objectively true answer might be. If the answer is that; the person playing themselves decides what the answer is, but I watch you engaging with the same problem then what can I say about your answer? Did you win and lose at the same time? Did you already decide the outcome before the match started?
What if we had changed a rule? If the rule had been that black moves first and the same moves had been made out of a 53 move total, would black have won? If I say that a part of me wanted to win, and a part of me wanted to lose then aren't I saying I held two contradictory beliefs at once? Is it even possible to consider it a game if the winner is also the loser? What if the game takes 53 days and you make a move as black on even numbers and as white on odd numbers?

If we say the game was a stalemate, then we are changing the rules of chess. A checkmate is only possible if someone wins and loses, so how could the game be a stalemate?
Is the game actually between the writer of the problem and the problem solver? Or am I just as unable to provide an answer we can be reasonably certain is true, as you are?
My own answer is just to say "I am reasonably sure that I think there is a paradox here.". Its the closest I can get to an objectively true answer. But I too am under the spell of being in a language game with myself by answering it. I can choose to believe I solved something, even though for the purpose of the game I had to have also pretend I didn't know what the answer was in order to play the game. A part of me had a conclusion that had to be correct and another part that had concluded incorrectly in order to play the game instead of rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise.

Rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise, is also still an attempt to answer it. So is still a part of the game of playing against ourselves.

If we say the game was a stalemate, then we are changing the rules of chess. A checkmate is only possible if someone wins and loses, so how could the game be a stalemate? — MSC

I feel like you might be a bit confused here. There are only two ways anyone wins a game of chess: 1) Checkmate or 2) Resignation. A stalemate occurs if checkmate is no longer possible or the two players agree to a stalemate.

I play chess too. I am reasonably certain that I know what I am talking about and don't need you to explain chess to me, and also that you've missed the point of the exercise completely.

It doesn't really matter what stalemate is because the wording of the problem makes very clear that checkmate happened, not resignation or stalemate.

At face value, is there something philosophical to be written about it?
I've thought of a lot of reasonable answers to it, but none of them seem to come close to the real issue, by engaging with the problem, you enter into a language game where the same rules apply. You are effectively deciding for yourself if you have answered correctly or not. And the entire game of who wins and loses is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, your answer says more about you than it does about what the objectively true answer might be. If the answer is that; the person playing themselves decides what the answer is, but I watch you engaging with the same problem then what can I say about your answer? Did you win and lose at the same time? Did you already decide the outcome before the match started?
What if we had changed a rule? If the rule had been that black moves first and the same moves had been made out of a 53 move total, would black have won? If I say that a part of me wanted to win, and a part of me wanted to lose then aren't I saying I held two contradictory beliefs at once? Is it even possible to consider it a game if the winner is also the loser? What if the game takes 53 days and you make a move as black on even numbers and as white on odd numbers?

If we say the game was a stalemate, then we are changing the rules of chess. A checkmate is only possible if someone wins and loses, so how could the game be a stalemate?
Is the game actually between the writer of the problem and the problem solver? Or am I just as unable to provide an answer we can be reasonably certain is true, as you are?
My own answer is just to say "I am reasonably sure that I think there is a paradox here.". Its the closest I can get to an objectively true answer. But I too am under the spell of being in a language game with myself by answering it. I can choose to believe I solved something, even though for the purpose of the game I had to have also pretend I didn't know what the answer was in order to play the game. A part of me had a conclusion that had to be correct and another part that had concluded incorrectly in order to play the game instead of rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise.

Rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise, is also still an attempt to answer it. So is still a part of the game of playing against ourselves. — MSC

All I'm doing is working with you and your intuition on the subject at hand. It is quite clear that if I utter an obvious contradiction such as "I am here and I am not here" alarm bells go off inside my head but when the contradiction is buried under a mass of ideas as is usually the case, it slips through our inconsistency/contradiction, or if you prefer, bullshit, detector and gets incorporated into what then becomes a self-refuting worldview or belief system.

Notice however that once an inconsistency is discovered, the one holding it becomes embarrassed and immediately kicks off a campaign to remove the inconsistency. Does this mean that the ubiquitous presence of inconsistencies in our beliefs means only that the volume of ideas we have to deal with make it nigh impossible to detect them and that it isn't true that there are two or more personalities involved?

Possibly but how does one explain internal conflicts - contradictory desires - which your chess enthusiast who's playing against himself represents? It looks like there are two things to consider here - emotion and reason. These two aspects of our psyche are not always usually not in agreement. Emotion seems to bypass the rational part of our mind and elicits immediate responses - attraction/repulsion/indifference. Once the rational half of the mind kicks in it, by force of habit, weighs the pros and cons and sometimes, not always, it decides, with good reasons to back it up, that our response (attraction/repulsion/indifference) is totally inappropriate - issues of cost, practicality, etc. crop up. By no means is this final word on the topic though. I'm simply offering an interpretation that's as old as the hills - I believe it goes right back to Socrates and Plato.

All I'm doing is working with you and your intuition on the subject at hand. It is quite clear that if I utter an obvious contradiction such as "I am here and I am not here" alarm bells go off inside my head but when the contradiction is buried under a mass of ideas as is usually the case, it slips through our inconsistency/contradiction, or if you prefer, bullshit, detector and gets incorporated into what then becomes a self-refuting worldview or belief system. — TheMadFool

That's okay, I am being sincere when I say that the problem has me pretty stumped and I'm definitely working on intuition, among other things, in order to try and tackle it.

If I am understanding your criticism correctly, you are also suggesting that my answer to the problem makes it harder for me to consider and trust any other answer charitably. Would this be a fair assessment? Or does this not really reflect what you were saying?

I definitely feel embarrassed by all my attempts to answer the question. As you'd think the writer of the question would have some say.

If we apply the rules of creating riddles, is my interpretation of the answer, the answer? Or am I only saying that to win a game against myself?

That's okay, I am being sincere when I say that the problem has me pretty stumped and I'm definitely working on intuition, among other things, in order to try and tackle it.

If I am understanding your criticism correctly, you are also suggesting that my answer to the problem makes it harder for me to consider and trust any other answer charitably. Would this be a fair assessment? Or does this not really reflect what you were saying?

I definitely feel embarrassed by all my attempts to answer the question. As you'd think the writer of the question would have some say.

If we apply the rules of creating riddles, is my interpretation of the answer, the answer? Or am I only saying that to win a game? — MSC

:point: In Defense Of The Defenders Of Reason

All I'm saying is your view on the issue - the possibility that there could be more than one personality inhabiting an individual - needs to be taken seriously or, at the very least, can't be laughed off the stage.

Agreed. We haven't even gotten to the point of taking about if the only personality playing is the part of me that knows how to play chess and that all the other composite parts of my psyche are just spectating one personality play chess, where the spectators have already voted on who will win while the chess player is confined to playing out the game in response to a vote to either win or lose, based on the colour he is moving, black or white.

Agreed. We haven't even gotten to the point of taking about if the only personality playing is the part of me that knows how to play chess and that all the other composite parts of my psyche are just spectating one personality play chess, where the spectators have already voted on who will win while the chess player is confined to playing out the game in response to a vote to either win or lose, based on the colour he is moving, black or white. — MSC

I suppose you're right.

First off, you have seen Geri's Game, right?

Second, white absolutely has an advantage. The initiative is a real thing and white has it. The question that remains is whether it is enough to win, and there's not enough evidence either way, might never be. If I had to guess, I'd say most players don't believe it's quite enough to win.

Now, playing against yourself. My tournament days were before the ubiquity of computer chess, so this is what we used to do. The main worry when playing against yourself is that you're cheating, by which I mean favoring one side.

There are two main reasons I would play against myself: one is just the practice of having positions on the board to analyze, any position. More often the real goal is analysis: you play through an opening you're learning up to a point -- or just set it up (I think there's an Indian or Hindi term for a position set up like this) -- and then try to play from there, get a feel for the kind of positions you can expect to play in tournaments. Sometimes it is the opening itself you're analyzing -- looking for a theoretical novelty. But there's also just the playing through typical middlegames and endgames. Analysis doesn't mean really playing against yourself -- you take back moves and try different things. I think after a certain point in my development, that's all I ever did and I never actually played against myself again. But I certainly did when I was younger and developing.

The cheating thing -- that's really only a worry for analysis. You need not to coddle your preconceptions. In really playing against yourself, you might not defend against your own attack in the best way, and then you could certainly form the wrong impression about how awesomely you were playing the attack. But for me playing against myself was mainly a matter of practice, having stuff to analyze, not proving anything, and even if an idea that seemed brilliant and "won" is actually unsound, the whole point was just to practice finding ideas at all. Properly evaluating them takes work work work.

Some of this absolutely applies to doing philosophy! When you look for objections to your position, are you cheating? Are you really finding the strongest objections? Or are you favoring the side you want to win?

Yes, I saw it many years ago, probably when toy story two first came out, as I was still a kid at this time. I had actually forgotten about it up until now. Part of what put this into my mind recently was watching Elliot Alderson play against himself as Mr Robot. Due to the nature of that mind fuck of a show I wasn't even sure if I made the playing with yourself problem or if I plagiarised dialogue from the show. I was writing with Elliott's voice going through my head so I'm still not sure. I think there might be a few lines of his in the problem, but I'm not sure.

Due to reasons, I had to learn how to play chess in a very strange way. I basically had to learn how to lose and not win, in order to avoid the violence of my opponent when they lost. The irony there being they eventually stopped playing and lost interest in the game altogether. I kept on playing and still play. Only been in one tournament though, which was online.

At least now you know why I hate doing philosophy by myself. I never know if I'm cheating or not! Although, I suppose part of the problem as I've written it is also inferring I might never be playing with myself and that a person is more than one personality. That's just basic dialogical self theory though and it only implies that my single personality is the sum of personal constructs.