Tuesday 17 November 2009

The return of Zipf's Law

Last year I did a post on Zipf's Law, in terms of popularity of chess clubs. But like any good idea/explanation/system it can turn up in other places.
In this link from the American Physical Society, there is a discussion on the research done in the area of chess openings. Specifically, the popularity of chess openings. It turns out the popularity of opening moves does follow Zipf's Law with a distribution that seems to mirror the distribution of such diverse subjects such as website popularity, city populations and word usage.
The article in the link is only a review of the work btw. Click through to the pdf document for the actual study.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It was certainly interesting for me to read the article. Thanks for it. I like such topics and anything connected to them. I would like to read a bit more soon.