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.'"

Comments

Re:Isn't that the whole point?

[smittyoneeach]

The point of doing social science research? Yes. Anybody can "argue that players' actions become less rational and that it is hard to find optimal strategies."
It takes an academic to lay the argument out in a paper so Byzantine that it's hard to find optimal reading strategies.
This triggers the writing of more papers, until an entire academic research field springs from a single seed of "Duh".

Re:Isn't that the whole point?

[Beardo the Bearded]

My Board Game Geek badge says "RANDOM TACTICS".

Confuse, deflate, conquer. It's worked very well for me. Nobody can anticipate your moves if you're not even sure what you're going to do next.

I've actually had one game where everyone else at the table just stopped, stared at the board, and one guy said quietly, "I really wasn't expecting you to do that."

Re:Isn't that the whole point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting naked and dropping the soap is not a typical move when you go to Jail in Monopoly.