EDIT: now fully resolved - see answer
Just now a moderator has randomly and I think incorrectly shifted a perfectly decent chess question to computer science. Where is the moderator voting which took place prior to this shift? Where is the preliminary vote that it was off-topic in chess?
Migrated from:
chess may-chess-be-considered-a-finite-state-machine
Migrated to:
CS may-chess-be-considered-a-finite-state-machine
Reason given: "because it can be answered on Computer Science Stack Exchange"
This justification is insufficient, given the official migration policy (see below).
It is certain that some questions can span two Stack Exchanges, A & B. Often it requires judgment to determine which is the appropriate site. But in many cases (as here I think) the decision is at best very narrow - the question might have been posed in either A or B and if the discussion has thrived in its starting location there is no need for fiddly moderation to interfere.
In fact though, I argue that chess is the better home for this discussion. Modelling requires selection and judgment. If the target formalism is complex or obscure, then it is perhaps in the purview of computer science, but here the formalism is simple and well-known to a numerate community such as chess.stackexchange, or easy to find.
So we focus on selection and judgment. The modelling decisions how to represent are all about chess. The response that I provided is all about what can usefully be incorporated in the FSM for chess problems and what should be left out.
In summary, this question no more belongs in cs than a tinned tomato soup discussion belongs in a base metals stackexchange. Please present your counter-arguments or reverse the migration.
Thanks for your time.
EDIT: Still no response here. I have looked at the post What is migration and how does it work?. This indicates that if the question already has good answers (which this one certainly did):
Exercise Extreme Caution. Don't vote to migrate unless the question is already at threat of deletion.
Further:
Avoid migrating answered questions. The point of migration is to send the question to a place where it is on-topic and can get answered. If the OP already has an answer, then we've already defeated the purpose of migration and the destination site won't have anything to do with the question. Avoid migrating these questions unless they are of extremely good quality and risk deletion on their current site.
Don't migrate for the sake of migration. We only migrate questions because they are off-topic on the original site. It is perfectly possible for a question to be on-topic on multiple sites, but that is not a reason to migrate it elsewhere, unless the OP requests migration. As a general rule, if someone asks a question here, and it's on-topic here, it should stay here.
If you're not sure, don't vote to migrate it. Let someone else who is sure do that, just vote to close it as off-topic, or ask for opinions from the community in a relevant chat room.
