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

That's the fun of it...

[DaemonDan]

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.

Re:What about Magic?

[fredprado]

I think it is a matter of taste, but a game that purposely allows for unfair circumstances based on the cards you own or not does not seem to be a good game for me. I am also not very found of the idea that complex (and in Magic's case Encyclopedic) rules are a good thing for a game.

Great games, in my opinion, would be Chess or Go, for example. Games that have incredibly simple rules and still lead to incredibly complex situations and strategies.

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".