Winning at chess as group effort

Wouter de Bolle & Jozef Jankaj

"Wisdom of the crowd" is a phenomenon observed in statistics and forms the basis of our democratic system. When making decisions that impact millions of people, we do not rely on a single individual or a group of experts making the correct decision: indeed, we take a vote.

The idea is simple: no one person has all knowledge and perfect perspective on any issue. By averaging out individual preferences, biases and opinions (aka. the noise), we reach a consensus that is, more often than not, the best option.

Moves explorer

In this document, we explore an application of this phenomenon in terms of chess games. We have taken a dataset of chess games from Lichess July 2016 (~2.5M games) and analyzed it for the most favourite first 10 moves: 5 white moves and 5 black moves. By clicking on different pieces, you can explore how chess players in July 2016 approached this age-old game of wits.