Ironically the starting position that I've found to be the most balanced for black and white is just swapping the starting square of the bishops and knights.
It turns normally-sound opening moves like 1.d4 and 1.e4 into liabilities and emphasizes the knights as blocking material to occupy squares like d2 and e2 , but the tradeoff is that a early-developed bishop can get a lot more active centrally via an open wing.
Such a layout makes for a very cautious opening phase where neither side really feels comfortable giving up much material. Really a fascinating setup.
They’ve defined memorization complexity as having to memorize the best out of almost equally good moves (as opposed to being able to play the best move without memorization because it is so obvious.
In reality it’s almost the other way around. Because white usually has several good moves at every point, they can just memorize one of them, while black needs to memorize how they’ll respond to every good move white could make.
> indicates a slight tendency for White to face harder opening decisions
supporting the quip "the hardest game is to win is a won game"
Not surprised at end re classical position not being the most even configuration. In that configuration bishops & knights practically start aimed at controlling center, so there's little awkward properties to dampen White's initiative. One of the rooks even get to castle out of the corner
Chess960 would be better if they just got rid of castling in it, tho wouldn't be surprised if that makes for certain positions getting even worse for Black
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26066844 for thought on game theory of strategy when playing perfect is computationally infeasible
Chess960 would also be better if both sides were asymmetrical and there were novel positions for both players in every game.
I go to a chess event 2-3 times a month in the city where I live, and there are a few of us that are big into variants and play a lot of Bughouse, Crazyhouse, Racing Kings, etc. 960 is a bunch of fun but asymmetrical 960 is a blast, and asymmetrical Bughouse 960 / Crazyhouse 960 is the most fun and hard version of chess I've ever played. There is no theory, just pure tactics and reaction.
I can't say for 960 specifically, but for standard chess getting rid of castling usually results in the players just manually castling their kings. I believe that is why the move was introduced in the first place. So it really doesn't accomplish much except make the opening a bit more limited, since they have to leave themselves a way to manually run the king over one of the rooks. Usually to the short side, since that's quicker. Basically makes queen side much less viable to leave the king at. And queen side castling was already the rarer of the two options. I imagine it would be a similar story for a lot of 960 positions. I'm not sure how getting rid of castling would benefit anything. In 960 you already get a lot of super crazy aggressive positions with exposed kings even with castling.
interesting that the most balanced one is extremely similar to the default, which is not so:
> \#198 (\texttt{QNBRKBNR})is the most balanced, with both evaluation and asymmetry near zero... Remarkably, the classical starting position-despite centuries of cultural selection-lies far from the most balanced configuration.
That formation is pretty close to the standard position though. Just swaps a Queen and Rook. It puts the Queen in the corner, a less aggressive position with less options to develop. I've only played a little 960, but these queen in the corner positions seem to often lead into more closed positions.