111–120 of 134 posts
> 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…
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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…
Also, 400 bits of information is about two sentences.
> 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…
Conway's Life?
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 woul…
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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.
Not quite. It's making a must out of an is. The relevant distinction is "true by necessity" vs "true by coincidence", not "factually correct" vs "morally correct".
Can someone explain this Q/A to me? > Is there a safe way to prevent Mirror Go? > A really sad result of talking to God about go would be that there is a way to just play mirror go and win. If that was all god did, it would be really annoying. If mirror go doesn't actually work, how does God defeat it? Do the variants where W is just not allowed to mirror fix the issue? The first way I was aware of was that the prima…
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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…
So, the smartest animals on earth apart from primates are dolphins, crows and octopuses. But most aliens are portrayed as humanoids. I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know :) I think the body shape part is relevant here because it determines what kinds of games are possible or practical. A species of intelligent octopuses might play…
The little-known Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home centers its plot around the idea that Earth whales are themselves aliens. A crisis occurs when a whale probe comes to check on the Earth whales.
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Connect N type games seem almost certain to exist elsewhere, as are connection games such as Hex. The fundamental concept is very basic, and the there are not a lot of variations. There are a plethora of abstract games that have been invented that are not played very much, but seem to have the potential for extreme depth of play. I would be willing to bet that some of those neglected games are played by Aliens somewh…
This is a great thought. Do you know if anyone is looking at computationally examining these overlooked games and trying to find the ones with truly excellent depth, so that they may get greater attention? That sounds like a fun project.
On your turn you can either move your piece, or place a wall. You have 10 walls to place.
The one non-obvious rule that completely changes the strategy of the game is that you cannot make it impossible for the other player to win (you can't simply box them in).
So a common theme is to try to maximize the amount of paths your opponent has while minimizing the number of paths you have, so that whenever your opponent commits to a path, you block it and force them to backtrack.
But say your opponent has 2 paths, and they begin to commit to one. You are waiting for them to commit further so you can block it and force them to backtrack. But before you do it, they block the other path themselves. Now it is illegal for you to block their only remaining path.
On the face of it, the branching factor is much higher than chess. On each turn one has 100+ possible moves. I have written pretty highly optimized minimax AB-pruning type AIs for it and have never managed to make an AI that can search deeper than 7 moves or so in a reasonable amount of time, and my AI was the strongest (by far) of any I could find online (and better than any human player in my friend group).
It's pretty computationally difficult due to the "cannot make it impossible to win" rule. If you do it naively, that involves an A-star search for each possible move. You'll max out around 4 moves deep with that strategy. A few observations will get you a bit higher. e.g. A wall cannot possibly block a path unless both ends of the wall touch another wall (or edge of board).
There might be some sophisticated graph cutting algorithms I am not aware of that could make this tractable, but I haven't found any that mapped too well onto the problem.
I think Quoridor is actually really ripe for an AlphaZero type approach (due to the high branching factor and expensive compute needed to determine move legality), and I would love to see a superhuman game played.
You can play against someone's javascript AI here: https://danielborowski.github.io/site/quoridor-ai/display.ht...
I think this AI does a depth 2 or 3 search.
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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…
I'm not saying that every alien species would have the same concept of a game, but you really think it's "ridiculous" that any other alien species might have a similar concept of a game? Adversarial games are not even that far removed from the normal competition that is part of natural selection that yields intelligence in the first place. You're making a lot of assumptions about things that you claim are impossible…
I think the variety among the possibilities for other intelligent species (if any) would far outweigh the number of them. Hence it might be probable that there would exist two similar ones, but it would be very improbable that any of them would be similar to humans.
The point about "communicating" with a piece of rock was exactly that we cannot communicate them. Even if we would run into an alien species (which seems unlikely), it seems very improbable that any meaningful communication could happen.
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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…
So, the smartest animals on earth apart from primates are dolphins, crows and octopuses. But most aliens are portrayed as humanoids. I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know :) I think the body shape part is relevant here because it determines what kinds of games are possible or practical. A species of intelligent octopuses might play…
While not exactly movie and not specifically sea creatures/birds, there are plenty of anime series and visual novels with intelligent non-humanoid alien species. Parasite from Parasyte, some forms of BETA from Muv-luv, aliens from Stellvia, (NSFW to Google) Saya from Saya no Uta (real form). Dragons are also often portrayed as intelligent race originating from space (e.g. Final Fantasy XIV & Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?). Many of these usually have a way to appear as humanoid to make conversing with mankind easier though (and likely to make it easier for readers/watchers to relate).