Re: Am I stupid, or what?

Patrick wrote:

That might actually be a more pleasant experience for me, FWIW. I'm
reminded of the game of go, compared to chess. I've been into both at
various times (though I'm still a novice at both), and I noticed that
go was somehow more enjoyable.

One reason is that in go, if you're not a rank beginner, you're certain
to carve out and defend *some* territory on the board for yourself.
Sure, your opponent may get the lion's share of territory and win, but
once you've got a solid two-eyed group, no power in the universe can
ever take it away from you.


One thing go can teach is humility. It's when you try to expand on a territory before you actually have it locked in that a skillful player can get you to overextend without solidifying a position, which can then look solid (it appears to have two eyes), but can still be attacked because the two eyes do not have solid corners. So many descriptions of the game have been offered. Mine, beyond "make territory, don't fight", is that tactically, it is a matter of balancing offense vs defense, in just this way, knowing just how many stones to place, and just when, so that "solid" position does not melt away while you try to grab more territory.

That is how go differs from chess, in that chess allows the detailed examination of relatively few lines of attack (a stack of rooks & queen, maybe a fork or pin) instead of everywhere at once. In go, with few exceptions, a play almost anywhere is a threat at almost any time. Thus the greatest chess master may totally fail to understand go, and vice versa.

Which brings up another point: points. Anytime a game is scored on
points, as opposed to win-lose-draw, the loser can take some
consolation in having earned a respectable number of points. So, a
semi-serious player can say, "I'm not expecting to win, because that'd
be too much work; but I hope to get my highest score so far." In
contrast, going into a win-lose game with that attitude is kinda like
going into the boxing ring with the world champion, thinking, "I'll
just see if I can survive the first round"; that's too painful to
contemplate.



I've had this problem. Hang on, this gets almost funny, if it weren't so tragic.

Call it a lack of life or whatever, but I've always been very good at games, pvp (surprisingly, not that great at single-player stuff, but that may be just not wanting to be, so they will continue to challenge me). Most of the games I have played, tabletop miniatures of every kind, board games, cards (other than gambling), stuff other than chess, shogi and go, I just win win win win, and usually get better so fast that I totally beat the life out of it. Because of this, I tend to run other players off, scare them away, with absolutely no intention to do so, and then repeatedly I find myself with no one to play, and obviously simply because they are looking at getting beat again.

Which is not brag, just an explanation for this: SO MANY just do not see past the win/lose scenario, to the possibility of learning from me. If my mastery of games included chess and go, I would be treated as a guru, mentor, great wondrous sainted spirit to whom the world would turn for guidance and inspiration (try not to gag). But because my expertise lies in other types of games, Kingmaker, Panzer Leader, Axis & Allies, Shogun, etc, I'm treated as an eccentric with no life, and a cruel tyrant with no sense of decency. Instead of people wanting to learn how I did it, they all pretend it was the wind or the noise, or they weren't in Game Mode, or the spirits spoke to them, whatever.

John Campbell (one of the fathers of Science Fiction) once editorialized about this, that someone who memorizes the entire periodic table of elements is considered gifted, intelligent, brilliant, worthy of respect, yet a kid who memorizes the batting averages of the entire National League (even more data) is treated as an egg-headed brat, too focused on useless games, with no sense of what matters in the world.

Go and chess do tend to attract a better class of player than so many other games, though often that is not apparent (there is always the noisey loudmouth, dominating every club meet). And with Go you may indeed be able to measure your improvement, especially against the same player. But to do so you have to believe that the other player is worthy of respect, and not excuses for having lost to them.

However, I wonder about something you say above: "Then, no matter how
powerful the computer gets, you can never be entirely defeated and will
inevitably defeat the computer by dint of your higher power curve." Is
that necessarily true? Doesn't the "higher power curve" depend on
expansion *beyond* one's "core sanctuary base"? I can see myself
perpetually besieged in my home base by computer forces I'd never dare
confront.


I used to program chess. It started in the 70s on a big mainframe, and it took a while (this was really the first big project I ever undertook, so it was a learning experience). Point is, I studied all the theory about how to do it, implemented the standard routines of the day, tried to improve on ways to make the computer play chess like a human plays it, instinctively knowing which lines of inquiry deserve more attention and which less, considering fewer possible moves, but those more in depth, and I achieved, over several years, mediocre success, just like everyone else.

By the time Big Blue and other chess machines were beating world champs, we had come to recognize that the computer might somehow one day simulate human play, but it could definitely right now (then) play a much better game by ignoring human play and just cranking up the power at what computers are really good at: the shear massive busting of tremendous amounts of data. When a machine can consider billions of possible chess positions per second, that is when it can beat a chess master who can in the same time look at only one.

That which developers have the nerve to call Artificial Intelligence in their games (the decision-making code) has as much to do with real AI as I have to do with chess mastery (I can dream about it, that's about it). And they quickly found that trying to program as if they really understood AI was eating up programming time, and their financiers were demanding Product NOW! so they spend their time on what the suits believe sells - graphics and sound - and the "AI" suffers. They make up for the program's lack of ability by simply cranking up the power, giving the computer player more resources, more information, more time (or less wasted), whatever it takes to be more powerful. The result, almost invariably, especially in a strategic game, is a game in which the player starts out weak, has to win the first few battles, then struggles for a time with the issue still in doubt, and finally has a long tedious campaign to overcome the massive forces of the advantaged computer players.

All the Civs are like that. And the C&C stuff I have played. And MOO, GalCiv, you name it. Even RRT, in which an early crash can wipe out the best of starts, but later it's all about bulk. In fact, nearly everything has this three-phase process. When I create my own scenarios, I work hardest on trying to flatten out this curve, so the beginning is not a crapshoot, and the end is not a long and boring slog.

--
Godwin is a net-nazi
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