Empirically validate the hybridization taxonomy

Establish the empirical prevalence, discriminant value, and reproducibility of the proposed distinctions among computational, multi-agent, and Centaurian hybridization, including synchronic and diachronic coupling, by applying them as formal coding dimensions across the chess literature.

Background

The paper proposes extending the single HYB category by distinguishing the structural locus and temporal coupling of heterogeneous capabilities. These distinctions separate computational hybrids, multi-agent coordination, and tighter Centaurian integration, as well as simultaneous decision-time coupling from knowledge transfer across successive learning and decision phases.

Because the distinctions were developed post hoc and were not applied to the corpus used in the mapping, their empirical scope and usefulness have not yet been established. The authors explicitly identify empirical prevalence, discriminant value, and reproducibility as unresolved evaluation targets.

References

The distinctions introduced in Sections \ref{sec:discussion-hybridization} and \ref{sec:discussion-synergy} were developed as post-hoc interpretive extensions of the mapping and were not applied as coding dimensions across the present corpus. Their empirical prevalence, discriminant value, and reproducibility as coding categories therefore remain to be evaluated in future work.

— What Counts as Strategic Reasoning? A Systematic Mapping of Chess Research on Humans, Engines, and Language Models  (2609.18286 - Ciancarini et al., 16 Sep 2026) in Section 7, “Threats to Validity,” paragraph “Coding and construct validity”