Based on my rating on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) in 2015, I estimate I would currently have a rating of about 1270 on Chess.com (on the assumption that the average player on FICS in 2015 is slightly better than the average today on Chess.com) which is regrettable because it is probably too high to make a good advisee, but probably too low to make a good advisor. Still, I am willing to participate.
(I still play, but these years I play as a guest, not as a registered user, which means I don’t have a rating.)
I would have thought that giving the players 24 hours to make each move would approximate scientific research better than giving 4 hours for all the moves (or 40 moves like they tend to do in competition).
24 hours per move would make the experiment a lot more accurate, but I expect a lot of players might not be willing to play a game that could last several months. I’ll ask everyone how long they can handle.
If the chess players (and advisors) in this experiment were receiving approximately the same monetary compensation as scientific researchers receive, *then* giving the players 24 hours to make each move would approximate scientific research better than giving 4 hours for all the moves, but if the experiment lasts for months, it is unrealistic to expect *volunteers* to expend about the same level of mental effort on this experiment as they would expend on a salaried research job. Some volunteers might in fact expend that amount of effort at this due to their being very young and not yet having any model of the scarcity and the physiological costs of extended mental efforts, but that would be a bad thing because it would introduce variation into the experiment along a dimension other than the dimensions we want to measure.
So, I take back the final paragraph of my previous comment, and I note that in the future, I should spend more time “playing out” things in my imagination before making a suggestion.
Based on my rating on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) in 2015, I estimate I would currently have a rating of about 1270 on Chess.com (on the assumption that the average player on FICS in 2015 is slightly better than the average today on Chess.com) which is regrettable because it is probably too high to make a good advisee, but probably too low to make a good advisor. Still, I am willing to participate.
(I still play, but these years I play as a guest, not as a registered user, which means I don’t have a rating.)
I would have thought that giving the players 24 hours to make each move would approximate scientific research better than giving 4 hours for all the moves (or 40 moves like they tend to do in competition).
24 hours per move would make the experiment a lot more accurate, but I expect a lot of players might not be willing to play a game that could last several months. I’ll ask everyone how long they can handle.
If the chess players (and advisors) in this experiment were receiving approximately the same monetary compensation as scientific researchers receive, *then* giving the players 24 hours to make each move would approximate scientific research better than giving 4 hours for all the moves, but if the experiment lasts for months, it is unrealistic to expect *volunteers* to expend about the same level of mental effort on this experiment as they would expend on a salaried research job. Some volunteers might in fact expend that amount of effort at this due to their being very young and not yet having any model of the scarcity and the physiological costs of extended mental efforts, but that would be a bad thing because it would introduce variation into the experiment along a dimension other than the dimensions we want to measure.
So, I take back the final paragraph of my previous comment, and I note that in the future, I should spend more time “playing out” things in my imagination before making a suggestion.