[rvr_]

For the "play chess" example a state machine is the perfect place to begin modeling. Games, as a rule, are event-driven and are commonly coupled to a event-loop that triggers the transitions of the state machine. I think top-down decomposition has it's place, but the examples used to describe it should be given a little more thought.

[mkehrt]

I think the advantage of chess for something other than top down programming is that you're pretty much 100% what the API you want for the chess state machine is before you start. But how common is this?