Chess obeys the law

摘要

In a large sample of texts, 'the' is the most frequently used word. Coming in second is 'of, which is used about half as often. 'And' - in third place - is used about one-third as often, and so on. This curious relationship is known as Zipf's law after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf.rnVarious phenomena follow formulations of Zipf's law, and chess can now be added to the list. Bernd Blasius of the University of Oldenburg in Germany and Ralf Tonjes of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo analysed the first 40 moves of more than arnmillion chess games recorded in an online database.