To clarify the title, all 50000 people were working as a team in a single game of chess. I originally thought this would be a pointless exercise, sort of like

To clarify the title, all 50000 people were working as a team in a single game of chess. I originally thought this would be a pointless exercise, sort of like 50000 monkeys banging away at typewriters. It appears that was not the case. I found this passage about how one of the players effectively lead the team quite fascinating: "15...Ra8 The results of the vote were a reflection of the increasing coordination of the World Team. Krush was maintaining an analysis tree, and continually updating with all the suggestions and refutations from the bulletin board. Not only did the analysis tree allow the World Team to work with less duplication of effort, it served as a standing, detailed argument for the correctness of the recommended move." It makes sense that some kind of unified document to keep track of everything would help. It is fascinating to me how much like the data structure you would probably see inside a computer chess program this document resembled. Next, in the commentary for move 16: "This sparked loud grumbling on the bulletin board that Krush had "taken over the game". Those who complained were not overstating Krush's influence; her recommendations were selected every single move from the 10th to the 50th." This was really surprising to me, how much influence her recommendations had after that point. I wonder how much of it was: first mover advantage vs form of coordination vs having the best ideas.