Single Comment

Doug Chatham mentions Nomic Chess in new 'Big Outer Chess' Comment, where I rate as progressively more purely self-modifying the following: B.O.C., Ralph Betza's Turning Chess; Fourriere's Pocket Polypiece, Betza's Polypiece; Betza's Many Rules in One Game; Howe's Megachess, the latter's pieces being recursively a game of chess. The ideal would be a fully self-modifying chess that does not even anticipate its own sets of rules. How could such a game be played strategically? To be brief, probabilistically; for there would still be an environment in which an embodiment is more or less likely to arise. I do not know whether the term for Peter Suber's Nomic 'self-modifying game' originates in Douglas Hofstadter's 'Metamagical Themas'; but that is where I first saw it. Nomic Chess substantially applies Suber's method to chess rules and armies. Yet there is a difference between putative random selection of rules and deliberate self-amendment.