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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.'"
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.
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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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.
Wrong. There is an optimal strategy, but most likely you will find it only by chance.
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".
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.
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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.
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