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April 2011

On the Evolution of Draughts Variants

Submitted by christian freeling on Monday, 25 April 2011

The mindsports update is progressing nicely. In the process we’ve also published a work in progress called On the Evolution of Draughts Variants. Since I need 600 characters minimum in a message here (who runs this site, a woman? ;-), I’ll paste the provisional into:

"This is a work in progress, so don’t shoot the workers. Comments and suggestions are welcome, nitpicking is not.
The authors are Benedikt Rosenau and Christian Freeling, both of whom believe that Draughts is in a constant state of evolution, and that the current state is one where the main variants – Checkers and International Draughts – got stuck.

Draughts players are largely in denial of this. They wallow in ‘corrective measures’ such additional rules, different counting, blitzgames and the like. As if band-aids would help. Most in denial are those who would have the problem arise from the ‘mentality of the players’ rather than from the structure of the game. It does not."