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Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

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Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#21

Post by ivanbakel »

CydeWeys wrote: post #14
beojan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My gut response would be yes I'd guess no, since there doesn't seem to be another human culture / civilization that independently invented it.

Go is a pretty generic game that leans heavily on basic mathematics and geometry (which are universal). You really think it could only be invented by humans? Why?

"It could only be invented by humans" is a very different statement to "no aliens will have invented it". That's making an ought out of an is.

The intention of the GP was - given that Go was not invented again on Earth, there's no real indication that it would be invented again at all. That doesn't imply that it cannot be invented again because it is too complex.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#22

Post by Tomte »

CydeWeys wrote: post #20
Tomte wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he points out that even other humans haven't done so.

I'm not following. The universe is unbelievably vast, and likely has many, many more magnitudes of intelligent species out there than we have had cultures down here on this one planet. I don't want to get into arguing Drake's equation here, but if you accept that aliens exist, then you're granting that there's a lot of them; it makes no sense why we would be, e.g., one of only two intelligent species in the entire un…

It's an argument against the "naturalness" or inevitability of the discovery.

It may be wrong, but "aliens" is not a response to it.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#23

Post by mcbuilder »

Would not Alpha Go Zero and related algorithms give us a good insight into the question about what openings alien's might play? Isn't it really tackling the game from first (or zeroth if you will) principles, just simulated games without the historical baggage coming from human study. It has also considerably changed our own knowledge of the opening.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#25

Post by CydeWeys »

alanfalcon wrote: post #18
CydeWeys wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's not a game on its own, it's just a part of a game. I'm wondering about which game exists in essentially the same form elsewhere. Once you start looking into the rules for specific games that only use dice, the rules are many and pretty specific (e.g. street dice), and it's the Chess problem again. I guess a dice game that probably exists pretty widely in the universe would be the simple children's di…

The rules for Go are also actually pretty specific. Would you consider any territory capturing game played with simple tokens on a board to be Go? Is Reversi/Othello also Go?

Are they pretty specific? It seems to me the concept is pretty general (and yes I'm familiar with the game): two players alternate placing stones on a square-tesselated board, with surrounded stones being removed from the board, and when the board is full the player with more stones wins. The no board state repetitions rules are just a natural evolution of the basic rules in order to prevent stalemates so that games actually end (and plenty of other human games have similar rules to prevent stalemates; it seems to be a generic, widely-applicable solution). Yes, there's some nuance in how scoring works (and we have multiple different scoring rules just here on Earth right now, more if you include the historical ones), and we don't actually play to the end but instead stop early once the result is clear and then calculate what the end score would've been, but those don't change the game that much and all would be considered Go.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#26

Post by treve »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #9

That was fun. My favorite two questions are: Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance there? What openings do aliens play? Our Universe is a huge place. I think it was Nature Magazine that had an article estimating 20,000 worlds with earth like conditions and life. My formal education is in physics and personally I subscribe to the multiverse hypothesis so with a potential infinite…

20,000 seems a little low. I imagine this needs at least 10 more zeroes

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#27

Post by CydeWeys »

ivanbakel wrote: post #21
CydeWeys wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is a pretty generic game that leans heavily on basic mathematics and geometry (which are universal). You really think it could only be invented by humans? Why?

"It could only be invented by humans" is a very different statement to "no aliens will have invented it". That's making an ought out of an is. The intention of the GP was - given that Go was not invented again on Earth, there's no real indication that it would be invented again at all. That doesn't imply that it cannot be invented again because it is too complex.

I'm not following how this logically follows at all. It was invented here, so if anything, its invention here is a great data point that it could easily be invented elsewhere too (take a Bayesian approach to it). I don't see how its invention here somehow counts as evidence against it being invented elsewhere! There are an infinite number of games that haven't been invented here; all of those would seem to be much less likely to exist elsewhere than ones that actually were invented here.

Also, it's kind of silly to count something not have being reinvented against it, because things almost by definition cannot be reinvented. Look at how popular board games are right now; if Go hadn't yet been invented, it's quite possible that it would be invented now. But instead it has already been invented, so people already know about it, and any would-be inventors end up not being inventors; they either already know about it or are told that what they've come up with already exists.

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#29

Post by CydeWeys »

GrumpyNl wrote: post #11
SamPatt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine dice, or some other physical object that introduces randomness, is a sure thing if intelligent life exists elsewhere.

That implies that they think and behave like us.

Does it? A lot of concepts in board games are pretty natural results of universal mathematics. There's only three regular polygons that will tesselate a board (we have plenty of board games that use all three of them), and there's only three dimensions that games can work in (and we have plenty of games of all three types; Candyland, for instance, is played along a 1D path, and the first player to reach the end wins).

Even if some aliens think so differently from us that the concept of a square is unknown to them, surely there are plenty of aliens that would think similarly enough?

Re: Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

#30

Post by Sharlin »

mcbuilder wrote: post #23

Would not Alpha Go Zero and related algorithms give us a good insight into the question about what openings alien's might play? Isn't it really tackling the game from first (or zeroth if you will) principles, just simulated games without the historical baggage coming from human study. It has also considerably changed our own knowledge of the opening.

I don’t think so. The go that AlphaGo plays is one very specific type of ”alien go” that exploits the strengths of the computing substrate it thinks on. Alien entities that are still evolved via natural selection would probably play go differently from humans based on their own biological and cultural idiosyncracies, but I doubt it would on average be closer to how a Monte Carlo tree search running on transistors plays rather than in another direction entirely.
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