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It seems that chess moves arising from precise long-term planning -- detected by looking at the game tree -- only seem to account for a subset of chess moves perceived to be brilliant.

I find that certain "brilliant" chess moves are actually mathematically mediocre, but becomes brilliant when the metagame (e.g. psychology, timing, time control, player history) is taken account of. These aren't necessarily reflected in the game tree.

In general, there seems to be different levels of perceivability of creativity. In other words, some creative actions are easier to detect than others.

In poker, 99% of the players will call a hand "brilliant" if a lot of money is involved. In other words, for them, the brilliance of a poker hand is simply a function of the pot amount. Obviously, better poker players will have a much more nuanced understanding of brilliance in poker actions, but, again, this is very hard to calculate.

Similarly, a "brilliance" of a comedy show is probably just a number of lines after which an average viewer laughs. "Brilliance" is much harder to quantify for shows like documentaries, cable news, etc.

Personally, I think creativity is much simpler than precise long-term planning. It just comes down to detecting deviation from nature and seeing whether this deviation aligns with the aesthetic value system of the judge.

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Interesting.

There's unquestionably a *lot* of talk in chess about the psychological component of the game. I think you'd never get a brilliancy prize in a tournament for psyching out your opponent particularly well. But I'd like to do an actual textual analysis of chess books (hopefully in the fall) to see how people actually use the language.

I think a big difference is that in poker you just mathematically can't have the one right move (since if it's deterministic it's mathematically a bad strategy) but in chess you theoretically can, so the meta-game in poker is a bigger component.

I think it's debatable in comedy too :-). There is a both a notion of nothing succeeding like success and a notion of "hack" comics getting "cheap laughs"

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