Is chess a science?

I need help. I go to my Highschool everyday and spend my lunches at the Chess club. For a Quarterly project in my science class, my teacher wants us to spend time in a science club. We get 6 points for every hour we spend in the club. I asked if the chess club will do and he said "No. That isn't science.". I asked him why and he said it just simply wasn't. I was outraged. He is letting my try to convince him that chess is a science but I do not know where to start. I was hoping the chess community can help me with some ideas on how I can convince this dude. What makes me more angry is when I asked what they do in his "Enviromental Science Club" he said they're going skiing afterschool.

Science can be defined as the systematic study of a particular field through practical testing and observation. I suggest that you present to your teacher a history of the development of chess understanding, citing masters of the past and key figures in the evolution of thinking. Begin at the start and prove to him that each generation has used the teachings of the past and infused their own new ideas. Cite Morphy, Steinitz, Reti and Nimzowitch for hypermodernism, Russian dynamism of the 1950's, all the way through to today. Also interesting to note is the superiority of modern computer programs to human players, despite said programs being a human creation. This is interesting from a scientific standpoint. Do this with passion and any teacher worth his salt will see that you have a valid point. It may simply be that your teacher has only a passing knowledge of chess.

You could try to convince him that it's a type of mechanical engineering, only on a higher level. You gotta make things work.

Yes, chess is definitely a science! Maybe it's not directly useful for the real world (although its methods and deeper implications are), and maybe it doesn't have a name yet ("Chess Science"? "Chessology"? "Caissology"?), but it is a complex system where various analytical methods, especially mathematical/statistical, can be used to understand its behavior. Message me if you need more information for your defense. I'm overflowing with ideas on this, involving statistics, databases, representations, new types of flowcharts, artificial intelligence, and more, many of which could be used in important, real-world, non-game applications. Whether just sitting and playing games in a chess club for ego purposes is productive however, is one point on which I might agree with your teacher. Otherwise, if your teacher is saying only that chess is not science, then he is wrong.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/anybody-want-to-do-a-science-project-on-chess

 

Chess is not a science as it produces no new knowledge. It does not proceed by proposing hypotheses and testing them by observation or experiment. Just because something can be analysed does not make it a science.

Chess is not a science, nor is it an art or sport - some seem to want it to be all three. It is a board game. It is enthralling and noble in its own right and does not need to be classified as something it is not to give it status.

 

On the contrary, chess produces new knowledge all the time, especially opening moves that are refuted or opening moves that are found to be sound. This is called "opening theory," and is done by making predictions and conducting experiments that test hypotheses.

From a quick look at Wikipedia for "science" and "computer science" I found the following statements:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
"Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics
"Applied mathematics has led to entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, and practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are often discovered."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
"Computer science is the study of the theory, experimentation, and engineering that form the basis for the design and use of computers."
"Its fields can be divided into a variety of theoretical and practical disciplines."

 

Chess fully qualifies as part of the physical universe, even more so than mathematics or computer algorithms, both of which qualify as science even if theoretical in nature, and chess study certainly builds and organizes knowledge by experimentation.

 

 

actually no but the answer varies

Chess is a part of the arbitrary and changing human universe rather than containing objective physical properties in and of itself. Nothing can be learned except what the best moves are, which is essentially pointless for all reasons other than amusement. For this reason I might have to side with your teacher.

If chess rules officially change (a variant becomes the main form of chess) then all the research behind classical chess is utterly pointless. You can never say this about physical properties of the universe.

The process by which chess is analyzed can teach important skills I suppose, but the end result is basically meaningless and inapplicable to any non-chess player.

That doesn't matter at all.

 

Maybe you didn't read or understand the Wikipedia quotes I posted above. There is nothing of which I'm aware in science that says that the system being studied needs to have practical application. One example is the study of transfinite numbers in mathematics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_number), another is game theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory), also considered part of mathematics, and another example is cellular automata. Here's what Wikipedia says about cellular automata, which by the way is a serious study whose interest started as a result of a game! (Conway's Game of Life)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton

"A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling."
"While studied by some throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the 1970s and Conway's Game of Life, a two-dimensional cellular automaton, that interest in the subject expanded beyond academia."
"Also in 1969 computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith completed a Stanford PhD dissertation on Cellular Automata Theory, the first mathematical treatment of CA as a general class of computers."

 

Also, you are wrong making claims of scientific status based on the permanence of a system. Nothing in science of which I'm aware says that longevity of a system has any bearing on its status as a science. Even if permanence did have a bearing, chess is not changing anyway. The basic rules of chess have not changed since the 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess), which compares favorably to the science of quantum mechanics, for example, which didn't even exist until the 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_quantum_mechanics).

Also, your claim that chess has no use beyond chess is also wrong. There have been a number of books on how chess relates to business and politics, for example, such as How Life Imitates Chess (Kasparov), The Tao of Chess (Kurzdorfer), and Chess for Success (Ashley).

I'll begin my reply by simply saying that defining anything as a science or not is arbitrary. The merit of the work that it takes to analyze chess should be at the discretion of the teacher.

I did read the Wikipedia quotes.
"Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."

What I take issue with is the word "universe." It doesn't say "system." I take this to mean physical, innate properties of the universe. But we can agree to disagree about that since its arbitrary and likely to be defined in several different ways by different sources.

Your information about cellular automata is interesting but I'm not sure how applicable it is to this. Chess is studied for chess itself, not for some other practical application, as far as I know.

>>>>>
"Even if permanence did have a bearing, chess is not changing anyway. The rules of chess have not changed since the 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess), which compares favorably to the science of quantum mechanics, which didn't even exist until the 1900s "
>>>>>

On the contrary, the STUDY of quantum mechanics is newer than modern chess, but the LAWS of quantum mechanics are permanent and have always been here. In comparison a 200- year run for chess is nothing, and is bound to end at some point.

I can't comment on the longevity of a system making it a "science" or not, other than my personal experience says that I've never learned about a science that aimed to study something impermanent/subject to arbitrary change.

Mathematical models are not arbitrary. They are purely logical. Chess is not pure logic. The rules can be changed at any time and essentially don't meant anything.


>>>>>>
Also, your claim that chess has no use beyond chess is also wrong. There have been a number of books on how chess relates to business and politics, for example, such as How Life Imitates Chess (Kasparov), The Tao of Chess (Kurzdorfer), and Chess for Success (Ashley).
>>>>>>>

I don't claim that chess has no use beyond chess. I simply claim that the deep analytical nature of studying chess is not what leads to greater real-life understanding. I could write about how life imitates chess without achieving a master understanding of the game. This is purely philosophical in nature and doesn't depend on chess strength. I'm just not pretentious enough to do it when I'm a patzer lol.


Also, simply playing chess without spending time deeply analyzing a position with a scientific method, is not science. I get the impression that a high school club would be mostly based on playing and not studying.

^ the last paragraph is the main point we should be looking at here, as it's the strongest argument.

 

Agreed. His teachers are just being teachers: they're trying to steer him into academics instead of recreation, which after all is what school is (supposed to be) for. Chess is both a game and a science, so it's just a matter of how you approach it. Why not do both approaches at the same time? Maybe get the teacher to agree that you can play in the chess club if you write a scientifically based report by the end of the semester, based on some scientific problem you're researching that involves chess.

 

That was my point: Conway's Game of Life was originally played only for fun, largely by high school students on dial-up modems, students who'd never even heard of cellular automata, until its widespread fascination also pulled a lot of academic people into the field because it was also a fascinatingly deep system with major practical implications, which motivated those people to study it seriously. Chess has surprisingly similar attributes.

 

 

Walking, Raising an arm, playing soccer, everything is a complex part to be analyzed and checked before and while doing this ... mostly intuitiv ... Is is therefore a science? Yes and no, you can study it, develope things around, but at first sight its no science.

Slap them in the face and tell them this quote from Botvinnik.

Chess is the art which expresses the science of logic.

I think Chess is a science. You study your opening lines, find improvements, and then test them on the board, if you get crushed your hypothesis failed, if you win then you were right! 

Science is something that has a scientific method in it. To suceed in chess you have to use a scientific method.

Dont forget to call your teacher a clown after slapping him! I used to do that and never got banned from school!

 

LOL. Or this one:

 

(p. 3)
The game of chess is not merely an idle
amusement; several very valuable qualities of
the mind are to be acquired and strengthened
by it, so as to become habits ready on all occa-
sions; for life is a kind of chess.
--Benjamin Franklin, 1779

 

Alburt, Lev, and Al Lawrence. 2008. Chess Training Pocket Book II: How to spot tactics and how far ahead to calculate. New York, New York: Chess Information and Research Center.

I agree with those who say you should not confuse chess and learning how to play it with the study of chess as a phenomenon. When two people sit down and play chess they are not doing science - they are pitting their wits against each other.

Chess is not about logic either, unless by logic you mean something different from the study of arguments.

I am dubious about claims for the benefits of chess. I do not see why it needs to justify itself. It should be taught in schools because it is a Good Thing.

 

 

The meaning of logic with respect to chess is a very deep topic that was briefly discussed in this forum a couple years ago. I claim this is one of many valuable academic chess topics that is worthy of research, and I believe GuudFuurYuu should consider this exact topic for a paper or project to please his teacher, if GuudFuurYuu finds it interesting and if GuudFuurYuu decides to take the both-routes-at-once approach.

 

I think chess is a science, and there's scientists using supercomputers to solve chess problems just like in any other science. In this thread scientist used supercomputers to solve a chess game that was unsolved for 122 years!