On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Don Dailey <[email protected]> wrote: > I kind of like to think of games (of perfect information) in terms of what > chance does a top human (or future human) player have a beating or drawing a > player who is omniscient in the game. If that chance is very close to > zero, it's a good game and it doesn't make it a "better game" to make the > chances even lower.
I completely disagree with this point of view (to which you are entitled of course). If this was the only measure, then we could all just as well play the same game. No need for the differential between chess, checkers, draughts, go, or any other game of perfect information. They'd all be equally good. Sure, it may well be subjective to prefer one game over the other, but that doesn't mean the differential doesn't exist. If an omniscient player can win with 100% certainty against the best player in say checkers, does it make the game equivalent to Go on 19x19? Personally I don't think so. It's the diversity of intellectual challenges that 19x19 Go poses that make it attractive to me. A diversity I don't find in checkers. But you can probably narrow Go down by reducing the size. Maybe 7x7 or 9x9 would approach checkers in complexity and diversity. Even though we might not be able to beat an omniscient player in either, to me checkers is a lesser game. And so is 9x9 Go. I don't know if at 17x17 the game is much different than on 19x19. Maybe not to me. But it may be to a 9-dan pro. But even if 17x17 isn't all that different to a pro, 9x9 surely is. Even to me it is, and I don't enjoy playing 9x9 nearly as much as 19x19. Even though I'd have zero chance against an omniscient player on 9x9. Do you know the (kids) game that is played with a matrix of random numbers? One player picks (and removes) a number from a row, the other picks a number from any column in the row of the previous player. The player with the largest total in the end wins. It's a stupid game, played badly by humans and very well by computers because it's very easy to make a program do the search way beyond a human can. Make the matrix big enough and no player will be perfect, whereas a computer easily can be made to beat any human 100% of the time. Is this game just as 'good' as Chess or Go? Mark _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
