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.
Various 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 Tönjes of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo analysed the first 40 moves of more than a million chess games recorded in an online database. They found that the frequency of the most common moves followed the law. They add that board games could help physicists to develop new statistical tools.
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Statistical physics: Chess obeys the law. Nature 462, 546 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462546a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/462546a
