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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

#101

Post by baq »

jefftk wrote: post #81
CydeWeys wrote: post #6

> Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance there? > What openings do aliens play? I love these questions about if anyone else in the universe is playing Go. My gut response would be yes -- it's a simple enough game (regular game grid of any size roughly 5x5 on up, one type of piece, two players take turns alternating placing pieces, and any that are surrounded are removed). I suspec…

I looked into the complexity of games a few years ago, approximating this as the number of bytes needed to implement the rules as a program: https://www.jefftk.com/p/simplest-interesting-game Bottom line numbers: 280 gomoku 356 hex 483 dots and boxes 572 go 622 checkers

Kolmogorov complexity for games. Neat.

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

#102

Post by DavidSJ »

jefftk wrote: post #96
CydeWeys wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. I wonder, would it make sense to encode the idea of a square and hex grid with pieces of two different colors as a library of sorts, such that this basic grid implementation doesn't count against each game individually? The boards are very widely reused, generic, mathematical concepts. This would give something like Go or Connect-N a fairer shot of competing against something like a Nim, which only needs a sing…

The compressed Go program gets only 2.3% smaller post-gzip (13 bytes) if you remove the definition of the board: b=[[' ']*19 for x in range(19)] Most of the complexity is in what changes players are allowed to make to the board.

Note that there are some rule sets in which suicide is legal, so long as it doesn’t violate a generalized ko rule (no repeated board positions, considering whose turn it is as part of the position).

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

#103

Post by tslocum »

darkkindness wrote: post #100
dkarras wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird thought I admit but as a computer game, I believe "Tetris" could have been independently "discovered". Board size - gravity rules - scoring etc. are arbitrary but there is some fundamental elegance about all possible tetrominos creating a game that is that fun. At the very least non tetris (so no creating and destroying lines) but a game with all possible tetrominos probably would exist.

After tetrominos, purely mathematical games with pentomino tiling at its core are definitely discovered games. It's doable but not always simple to build a given shape of size 5n with n pentominos. Ever seen the "fill an n by m rectangle with pentominoes" problem? As an aside, my favorite variant of this is from an old game Puzzle Pirates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRQIHyC__kc

I published a tutorial on procedurally generating pentominos:

https://rocketnine.space/post/tetris-1/

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

#104

Post by jefftk »

DavidSJ wrote: post #102
jefftk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compressed Go program gets only 2.3% smaller post-gzip (13 bytes) if you remove the definition of the board: b=[[' ']*19 for x in range(19)] Most of the complexity is in what changes players are allowed to make to the board.

Note that there are some rule sets in which suicide is legal, so long as it doesn’t violate a generalized ko rule (no repeated board positions, considering whose turn it is as part of the position).

I implemented the Tromp-Taylor rules (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computer_Go/Tromp-Taylor_Rules) which have "A turn is either a pass; or a move that doesn't repeat an earlier grid coloring." Since it doesn't consider whose turn it is to move in whether a grid coloring is repeated, it won't allow suicide.

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

#105

Post by jhbadger »

samatman wrote: post #88
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.

The thing I find fascinating, is not that Go was invented only once, but that it didn't spread to the West until 1880. Chess, by contrast, propagated rapidly throughout the Old World. I don't have an explanation for this. It seems curious.

Well, sort of. Chess spread from India, but in many different forms. The form we call "chess" today is only around 500 years old, although the original game is over 2000 years old. And even today, the Chinese and Japanese have chess games distinct from Western chess (Xiangqi and Shogi respectively). It's interesting that Go didn't similarly "speciate". Perhaps because unlike chess, there wasn't the multitude of pieces and movements that seemed arbitrary.

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

#106

Post by tunesmith »

One question I never found an answer for was what AlphaGo thought komi should be. Since Black goes first, it has an advantage of x stones. But if Black is given a handicap of 2 stones (placed on the board before play), white then goes first.

Since AlphaGo plays itself, it could have been set to play itself with a handicap, such that the win rate was 50%. I want to know what that handicap would have been, because wouldn't that indicate a pretty accurate measurement of what komi should be?

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

majos wrote: post #78
CydeWeys wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some birds that are better at tool use than you might think, too. It's worth pointing out that Go is a purely mathematical game. You don't need a board at all to play it, especially not if your memory is good enough. Chess Grandmasters don't need boards to play Chess, for example; they can simply say the moves to each other and both will have the same image of the board in their mind. So you could have inte…

> It's worth pointing out that Go is a purely mathematical game. You don't need a board at all to play it, especially not if your memory is good enough. Chess Grandmasters don't need boards to play Chess, for example; they can simply say the moves to each other and both will have the same image of the board in their mind. Is it common to be able to play Go without a board? That seems to require storing 361 bits in yo…

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by pdpi »

coldtea wrote: post #51
dkarras wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird thought I admit but as a computer game, I believe "Tetris" could have been independently "discovered". Board size - gravity rules - scoring etc. are arbitrary but there is some fundamental elegance about all possible tetrominos creating a game that is that fun. At the very least non tetris (so no creating and destroying lines) but a game with all possible tetrominos probably would exist.

There's no actual gravity rules in Tetris. Pieces move downwards, but that's about it.

Is there a lock delay? What's the drop speed? How fast are soft drops?

There's dozens of Tetris variants, all with tiny little differences at this level, and they all contribute to different strategies.

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

#109

Post by jerf »

zeebeecee wrote: post #98
CydeWeys wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so quick to assume that every single other alien species would be completely unfathomable to us? We all share the same physics, chemistry, and mathematics of our common universe. For example, there's only three dimensions, and there's only three regular polygons that can tessellate a grid. Unless you're going to posit that there's no alien species whatsoever that will even come up with the concept of a…

Even assuming that the concept of "game" would exist elsewhere seems like a ridiculous assumption. All of the things you are saying, even "purely mathematical" are just reflections of the way humans sense the world. Any alien species you are imagining here is just a reflection of mankind. Anyway, since probably won't know anytime soon, and perhaps never, this kind of speculation is a bit useless. But if we ever found…

"Playfulness" is fairly widespread among the intelligent animals of Earth. Mammals, birds, and cetaceans all seem to "play". From there it isn't that hard a guess that they might also "game", and for similar evolutionary reasons.

Unless we're going to argue that Earth has some sort of unique concept of "playfulness" built into the original single cell, it's not that hard a guess that a good chunk of aliens out there might recognizably "game".

Is everyone who thinks we stand no chance of communication really comfortable claiming that we're just soooo unique that we won't be able to communicate with anything? Because it's the exact same claim, just from a different viewpoint. Personally I think it's just fashionable misanthropy that will dissolve the instant you spin it in a direction where it might perhaps look like one is claiming it in a way that makes humanity look special.

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

#110

Post by jerf »

H8crilA wrote: post #37

Funny that God is just a PSPACE oracle. At least in the sense that the oracle can answer essentially all of those questions.

I don't think that's a characteristic of "God" here (which I mean in the sense that you are using it), I think it's the characteristic of asking about a game that "fits" into PSPACE.
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