Friday 7 February 2020

Has Basketball been solved?

If you were allowed to, would you play chess without a Queen, but with some extra pieces for compensation? For example, instead of a queen, you have two extra knights (on f3 and c3)? Or 2 extra bishops? Or is this not enough?
The reason for this question has more to do with Basketball than Chess. The Houston Rockets NBA Team has decided to play there most recent games with the traditional 7+ foot centre, instead trading height for speed. Despite criticism for this choice, they did beat the LA Lakers today in what is seen as a significant upset.
I suspect one of the reason for this approach is that their General Manager, Daryl Morey,  has a graduate degree from MIT, and a background in Computer Science and Statistics. It looks as though he has crunched the numbers (points per cm?) and decided that more value can be achieved with less resources.
So if you had the choice, instead of the traditional arrangement of pieces, what would you spend your 39 points on? All Queens? All Smalls? or something in between?

2 comments:

Xoyepa said...

Probably minor pieces would be too dominant. For example, get rid of the h pawn and a1 rook for two bishops, or get rid of the queen for three pieces. Maybe bishops should be nerfed to 3.5?

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