[FOM] Re: Doron Zeilberger's Opinion 57

[Timothy Y. Chow]

Olivier Gerard <ogerard at ext.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> A) the possibility of answering a class of similar chess problems
> relatively easily with predictable physical and human resources,
> whereas previous knowledge and methods would not allow that.

Combinatorial game theory succeeded in doing this for the game of go; see
the book "Mathematical Go" by Berlekamp and Wolfe.  Efforts to apply
combinatorial game theory to chess have been less successful, partly
because it's difficult to separate chess into a "sum" of smaller pieces.
However, Noam Elkies has made some stabs at applying CGT to chess (he
has a paper in "Games of No Chance" [math.CO/9905198] and a sequel in
"More Games of No Chance" [math.CO/0011253]).

Tim