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The Science of Game Strategy
First time accepted submitter JacobAlexander writes "Writing in PNAS, a University of Manchester physicist has discovered that some games are simply impossible to fully learn, or too complex for the human mind to understand. Dr Tobias Galla from The University of Manchester and Professor Doyne Farmer from Oxford University and the Santa Fe Institute, ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behavior affects their decision-making. From the article: 'In simple games with a small number of moves, such as Noughts and Crosses the optimal strategy is easy to guess, and the game quickly becomes uninteresting. However, when games became more complex and when there are a lot of moves, such as in chess, the board game Go or complex card games, the academics argue that players' actions become less rational and that it is hard to find optimal strategies.'"
They found out about QWOP.
Isn't that the whole point?
As in Magic the Gathering? The card game with 12,000+ individual cards? In my honest opinion, it's the greatest game ever made. It's incredibly complex, and yet still understandable.
It's always amazing to be playing at a multiplayer table with a bunch of other folks, each player with a field full of cards, sometimes hundreds of cards on the table (in complex games) and sometimes I have to step back from the table, stare at the board position, and pinch myself that I'm playing a game where yes, everything on the table makes sense.
The more complex and hard to understand a game becomes, the more fun it is because there isn't an optimal strategy to win.
Not being able to "solve" games like chess like you can with Tic-Tac-Toe (http://xkcd.com/832/) is what makes them fun and playable. Otherwise it quickly gets boring. It's also why it isn't always as fun to play against the computer on really high levels. They can cheat and solve the next bajillion moves.
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This is why we bundled things into layers of thought. By treating a system of behavior as a singular entity we can utilize. We then update what occurs in the entity (say opening moves in chess) when new information is found; but otherwise act on the heuristics we have built.
Just another proof of why the assumption of perfect knowledge of the market, in micro OB, is fundamentally flawed and simply can't exist in any real way.
Even for computers it is really hard to find an optimal strategy for Go. To my knowledge it's still a research topic. No surprise it's even harder for humans. Concerning how much effort was needed to research and program software, that beats a human in chess, I thought it would have been well known, that humans can't find an optimal strategy in this game either.
The point of a two player game, like Go, is to beat the opponent. If you know your opponent doesn't like a certain kind of opening, or is likely to feel overconfident in certain positions, thus creating weaknesses for you to exploit - this is a viable strategy, provided it works.
However, the better the players the more they look down upon such things - and rightfully so - because they learned the hard way that weak moves will be punished by good players.
That's why they're fun. With a solvable game, you play the game. With an unsolvable game, you play the player.
Of course, it's a lot less fun once you're playing the stock market or global thermonuclear war, but no less rewarding.
And of course of course, they're neglecting that any attempt at predicting the behavior of a market will affect the behavior of that market such that the predictions no longer hold true.
Kudos to anyone who can pull off the ultimate hack: invest your money based on your -unpublished- theory of how the market will respond the theory that you ARE about to publish.
I'm guessing "noughts and crosses" is "tic tac toe".
So the more complex the game, the harder it is to find optimal strategies...\ Better break out the Nobel prizes early this year.
However, when games became more complex ... such as in chess ... academics argue that players' actions become less rational and that it is hard to find optimal strategies.'"
Reminds me when Edward played Chessmaster Hex, and he commented that his opponent was either "Brilliant or a complete idiot"
In Real-Time "esport" games like Starcraft 2 or Warcraft 3 (still the best balanced, entertaining multiplayer RTS around IMO) _Time_ also makes a huge impact on the overall player skill. Being able to choose the _right_ decision a few milliseconds earlier than your enemy can be game-changing in very high, pro-skilled games.
Needless to say, this makes the complexity of such games almost infinite.
[after playing out all possible outcomes for Global Thermonuclear War]
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
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No one insults a baseball player because he only hit a triple, rather than a home run. But in their definition of game play, they expect every single move to be the best one possible. That is how COMPUTERS play games, not how people do. Computers make calculations based on all possible moves. That is not how people play at all.
Instead, people play the odds. We work in the murky world of probably rather than optimal. Which is why humans will always beat a computer playing Go, even if we lose in Chess.
Games are not about picking the optimal move. Instead they are either about:
Having fun
LEARNING which moves are better and which moves are worse
Both. That is what all play is about. Having fun, learning how to do things, or both. Knowing the optimal moves ahead of time means you can't learn and you can't really have fun.
What they are talking about is trying to win the game for ever and ever. When we do that, we move on to another game.
Just like when I learned how to always win at tic tac toe.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Maybe you'll enjoy this:
https://www.coursera.org/course/gametheory
It has barely started and it's supposed to be introductory.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I felt stupid when I saw what it was.
:-(
At the risk of seeming like a shill, I have to say that most of the top 10 games on Board Game Geek are worth playing, and definitely hard to master.
Generally speaking, Agricola, and Puerto Rico are considered to be the best board games currently available. If you haven't played them, you should really try to find them, because they're very dynamic, and require a lot of strategizing, while demanding that you be able to react to both your opponents and the game.
The research didn't study humans and has nothing to do with humans. It studied learning computer algorithms, which are now sometimes used in economics. The researchers claim that their work suggests something about human behaviour without having studied a single human. They should have their science licence revoked.
One of the best parts about Magic is playing with multiple players, and trying to figure out the best way to deal with so many different players/approaches. You _can't_ win by beating your opponents, you need the right strategy.
On that note, Race for the Galaxy is definitely an excellent game to explore. If you're familiar with game theory, try expanding it to three, four, or five people.
Harder games are harder.
Wow slow down there bob-o do you have any data to back such a bold claim ?
From TFA:
We assume that the players learn their strategies x via a form of reinforcement learning called experience weighted attraction. This has been extensively studied by experimental economists who have shown that it provides a reasonable approximation for how real people learn in games.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
I'll join those nipping this in the bud later ...
A *properly* trained oppenent knows the key fundamental point of all "new moves" to be suspicious" and not trust them. It's quite hard to inject yourself into new chess theory. Most players need advice.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Gaia is a thing (read the book by James Lovelock). Gaia is a -result- of complexity.
Look at the chemical operations occurring in a single cell. A cell is the -result- of a soup of chemical reactions. The cell does not initiate basic chemistry anymore than Gaia can create a new species. When a new species is created, it is within and because of all the other complexities of Gaia.
Same with games (and anything). Add a few non-dependent rulesets and suddenly there is an amazing complexity.
If gaia is too conceptual for you, then cogitate on the differences between Rational and Irrational numbers, something independent of reality.
Like many of the 'findings' out of the Santa Fe Institute, this is not a discovery; it is merely an articulation of complexity theory. (Note: 1/t is the inverse of the basic Gaussian Distribution (basic statistics) which is why it is found at all unstable places of reality the same way the bell curve is found at stable ones).
If you want to explain basic complexity, talk about the differences between Rational and Irrational, or the differences between Integers and Fractions.
If you want to talk about games, start by reading The Art of Game Design.
This 'news' does not appear to be anything more than a simple application of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. What's the point, then?
FCKGW 09F9 42
they also change the rules on cards due loopholes that some people have used / tried to use.
They become less predictable because of the large number variables behaving in increasingly less predictable ways? You mean you've never heard of tertiary and quaternary derivatives?
Saw this video on game design and balancing for player skill. They also mention "truly balanced" games like Chess and Checkers and why they can be bad. Balancing for Skill
From my reading of the article, the point seems to be that people apply game theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) modeling to real world problems using the assumption that everyone understand the system. This is one of two of the most problematic tenants with economic modeling. The other is that people behave in their rational best interest. The emerging idea of behavioral economics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics) is one way people are looking to address that. I think the article is try to push home that that people can't and don't behave rationally if the system is too complex. So they are saying this needs to be accounted for in predictive modeling.
What you are seeing is objectivity and subjectivity getting blurred. When it comes to games, what move is most likely to make you win is a subjective subject when you bring in the factors of skill ( I may be more likely to win if I try this, but am I skilled enough to pull it off rightly?) or other players making choices. The idea that there is one "rational" moveset to measure against after these factors are brought in is false.
...But not for the stock market. The only way anyone is going to crack the market is by pulling a Bradley Cooper in Limitless. Last call for super drugs.