This diary is frivolous. If you don't like frivolousness (even when it has a chance of becoming frivolity), then I'm sorry for yanking your chain. Get out while you can!
For the past few days, the front page feature box has shown a graphic linking to a story on the 4/26 DKos/SEIC PPP poll dealing with the intensity gap. It looks like this:
The first things I noticed about it was that (1) someone is going to win and (2) you can't figure out who it is without knowing who moved first. (The third thing I noticed is that the colors are reversed. Weird. Why?) Something about that second point nagged at me. I thought that it might be possible to figure out who went first by seeing what moves could have led to that position. Easy, right? Some protracted time later, I came to a tentative conclusion: I don't think that this is an end game that you can reach in tic-tac-toe with two rational players, meaning players who will take the win as soon as they can get it.
I write this diary to see if anyone else can solve this puzzle more appealingly.