ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Cultural transmission of move choice in chess.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Computers and chess masters: The role of AI in transforming elite human performance.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Emergent complexity in the decision-making process of chess players.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Opening strategies in the game of go from feudalism to superhuman AI.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- The cultural macroevolution of arcade video games: innovation, collaboration, and collapse.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission of move choice in chess.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The study of cultural evolution benefits from detailed analysis of cultural transmission in specific human domains. Chess provides a platform for understanding the transmission of knowledge due to its active community of players, precise behaviours and long-term records of high-quality data. In this paper, we perform an analysis of chess in the context of cultural evolution, describing multiple cultural factors that affect move choice. We then build a population-level statistical model of move choice in chess, based on the Dirichlet-multinomial likelihood, to analyse cultural transmission over decades of recorded games played by leading players. For moves made in specific positions, we evaluate the relative effects of frequency-dependent bias, success bias and prestige bias on the dynamics of move frequencies. We observe that negative frequency-dependent bias plays a role in the dynamics of certain moves, and that other moves are compatible with transmission under prestige bias or success bias. These apparent biases may reflect recent changes, namely the introduction of computer chess engines and online tournament broadcasts. Our analysis of chess provides insights into broader questions concerning how social learning biases affect cultural evolution.
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Registered trials
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