How Relevant Are Chess Composition Conventions?
Azlan Iqbal

TL;DR
This study investigates whether adherence to chess composition conventions enhances aesthetic appeal, finding limited positive effects for computer-generated problems and no correlation with human judges' scores, suggesting differing aesthetic criteria.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence on the impact of composition conventions on aesthetics and highlights discrepancies between computational and human aesthetic judgments.
Findings
More conventions slightly improve computational aesthetic scores.
Human judge scores do not correlate with computational aesthetic scores.
Human judges may prioritize different or personal criteria over conventions.
Abstract
Composition conventions are guidelines used by human composers in composing chess problems. They are particularly significant in composition tournaments. Examples include, not having any check in the first move of the solution and not dressing up the board with unnecessary pieces. Conventions are often associated or even directly conflated with the overall aesthetics or beauty of a composition. Using an existing experimentally-validated computational aesthetics model for three-move mate problems, we analyzed sets of computer-generated compositions adhering to at least 2, 3 and 4 comparable conventions to test if simply conforming to more conventions had a positive effect on their aesthetics, as is generally believed by human composers. We found slight but statistically significant evidence that it does, but only to a point. We also analyzed human judge scores of 145 three-move mate…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSport Psychology and Performance · Sports Analytics and Performance · Artificial Intelligence in Games
