How Relevant Are Chess Composition Conventions?
  Composition conventions are guidelines used by human composers in composing
chess problems. They are particularly significant in composition tournaments.
Examples include, not having any check in the first move of the solution and
not dressing up the board with unnecessary pieces. Conventions are often
associated or even directly conflated with the overall aesthetics or beauty of
a composition. Using an existing experimentally-validated computational
aesthetics model for three-move mate problems, we analyzed sets of
computer-generated compositions adhering to at least 2, 3 and 4 comparable
conventions to test if simply conforming to more conventions had a positive
effect on their aesthetics, as is generally believed by human composers. We
found slight but statistically significant evidence that it does, but only to a
point. We also analyzed human judge scores of 145 three-move mate problems
composed by humans to see if they had any positive correlation with the
computational aesthetic scores of those problems. We found that they did not.
These seemingly conflicting findings suggest two main things. First, the right
amount of adherence to composition conventions in a composition has a positive
effect on its perceived aesthetics. Second, human judges either do not look at
the same conventions related to aesthetics in the model used or emphasize
others that have less to do with beauty as perceived by the majority of
players, even though they may mistakenly consider their judgements beautiful in
the traditional, non-esoteric sense. Human judges may also be relying
significantly on personal tastes as we found no correlation between their
individual scores either.
