[Retros] 50-moves draw revisited

[pastmaker at aol.com]

An interesting idea.  Is it your view, Guus, that any move that has the potential to deprive the players of the opportunity to reach any particular position should interrupt the counting?  For example, an early Ke1-d1 might later prevent the WKR from getting to the other side of the WK.
 
That seems reasonable enough to me.  After all, although a capture prevents the players from thereafter reaching any positions having the total number of units that were on the board immediately prior to the capture, it nevertheless allows them to reach quite a few other postions. 
 
What would we think about a move that reaches a given position for the second time?  Would we incorporate here the notion that the third repetition would terminate the game as a draw, and that, therefore, a move that causes a position to occur twice is a sequence-interrupting move for purposes of the 50-move draw rule?  (Of course every move causes a position to occur the first time, so presumably we would factor that out altogether even if we would accept the second-occurrence as an interruption.)  By the way, as I am not at all familiar with the 3-repitition rule, does it matter who is on the move when a position recurs?
 
Regards,
Tom Volet
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: G.A.Rol at umcutrecht.nl
To: retros at janko.at
Sent: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 6:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Retros] 50-moves draw revisited


Hi Tom, Joost,
 
Irreversible change never was the idea behind article 5, whatever we may have been told. The move Ke1-d2 causes as much irreversible change as 0-0 - loss of future castling right - and yet it was not included in the rule. The reason for this, as I set out in my comment, is that every effort was directed at including or excluding "moves with certain properties" instead of looking at the properties of the overall board position.
 
The idea of irreversible change is untenable anyway. There are ways in which black and white can get themselves into irreversible knots without involving pawn moves or captures. And that is only the practical side of it. (Ir)reversability as a useful concept has nothing to do with a 50-moves rule though it might have something to do with a 539103004971646-moves rule. For one, the reversibility of singular moves bears no relation to the progress of the complete game, whereas the reversibility of positions could only become relevant if it somehow indicated that much of the terrain had been been covered. We've tried it all, so now we sadly return to the point of origin. We definitely need a lot more than 50 moves before we can enter that brand of "reversibility" into our considerations.
 
The 50-moves concept and the 50-moves rule always were highly superficial entities based on "appearances". The position looks like "nothing much has changed"; yes, your bishop is on h8 now, but did you need 50 moves for that? The use of "irreversible moves" was only a handy tool for codifying the idea. Quite successful until someone lost the plot when he added "castling". The rest is in my original comment.
 
The most remarkable side of this issue is that the correct approach was already available in the FIDE/Codex, the repetion rule. >From the insightful understanding that "essential progress" should be read from positions and not from reversible or reversed moves, it was decided to base the rule on the repetition of positions and not of moves! From this highly commendable example I now rate article 5 in the same category as I rate chess players who still believe in "move repetitions".
 
Guus Rol.
 
It is the case that after a capture or a pawn move the board array can never be restored by valid chess moves to any position that existed prior to that capture or pawn move, which seems to be a perfectly reasonable way to measure "progress" in an over-the-board game. 

It is also the case that in certain positions if a player castles the board arrary can never be restored by valid chess moves to any position that existed prior to the castling. However unlike pawn moves and captures, the irreversibility is not necessarily the case after every instance of castling.

Whatever we like ....

Tom Volet  
 
It was decided that "something  about castling" needed to be conceived as "essential progress" in the game and therefore should be incorporated in the 50-moves rule.   I doubt it was the 'essential progress' that caused this to be added to the 50 move rule. It has more to do with 'irreversible change of the position'.
Joost
_______________________________________________
Retros mailing list
Retros at janko.at
http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/retros
________________________________________________________________________
Check out the new AOL.  Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/retros/attachments/20070105/b4194720/attachment.htm>