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Parable of Alien Chess

lukesmith.xyz

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Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#81

Post by a-nikolaev »

gampleman wrote: post #60
boldslogan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue arises, when a player who is not good at chess would lose, literally 100% of the time against anyone even close to a top regional level. In other words, chess is not a 50% chance game, it is a variable chance game depending on who you play, so the analogy is hard to follow because the aliens would not come up with this 50% outcome idea.

I think you misunderstand - you don't always play black in chess. So on average white wins 50% of the time (modulo first move advantage and draws as the article states).

But they can observe that Alice always wins when playing against Bob. (If they somehow can determine that one player is black and the other is white, they probably can also distinguish the players as well?)

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#83

Post by Patient0 »

I thought this was a quite insightful article - and was surprised to find so much criticism in the comments. e.g. those who are attacking his parable on the grounds that "actually the odds aren't actual 50-50 in chess" or "an alien would have to wonder why some people win more than others"... these objections seem like nit-picking to me and miss the opportunity to broaden our perspectives. The example is to help illustrate and illuminate an intriguing idea which does merit consideration: that the scientific method and various aspects of the scientific process are very much a "gradient descent" algorithm which will tend to converge to a local minimum... the large jumps needed to discover the "global minimum" are not sufficiently rewarded... or may not even be within our capabilities!

Here is a more concrete example I have been considering recently: The principal of least action can be derived from Newton's force laws. Alternatively, Newton's force laws can be derived from the principal of least action. Therefore, you could choose to make either "law" the more fundamental one and consider the other to be an emergent phenomena. Might this also apply to, e.g. the principals of thermodynamics? Might it be that all of the laws of physics are actually just an emergent phenomena that can be derived directly from the information theoretic properties of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy?

But then, why even stop there? We choose/discover these examples because our tiny, mediocre brains can only understand the universe from that point of view, whereas the actual universe we live in is unimaginably vast and complex. But might there be a way, for example, of deriving the laws of physics from some narrative principal (e.g. "we live in the best of all possible worlds... therefore by some chain of reasoning: F = ma!"). Maybe that chain of reasoning is only comprehensible to an artificial intelligence which we have yet to invent, involving us inhabiting some element of a vast fractal structure subject to some sort of anthropic principal?

And in general, it is worth considering the concept that not all things which are "true" are objectively measurable - those are just the things that are easiest to prove are true. To give an example of something which you know is true but which is, almost by definition, subjective: the existence of your own consciousness! It is impossible to prove, objectively, that you're not just some simulation that is running in a computer that's about to run out of memory and segfault... that you yourself are "real".

That's not to say that any of the above is actually true... but it might be true. Our recent focus on "provability" and "objectivity" has been used to argue that such things are in fact false, or just not worth considering or thinking about. There is sometimes an arrogance when there should be humility. Just because something might be exponentially difficult to prove, the sheer difficulty in proving it does not mean that it is not true.... There may be things which are true which we will never have the resources to discover. I think it's all worth considering.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#84

Post by konschubert »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #78
TeMPOraL wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but that's in interpretations that also don't have the concept of "wave function collapse" in them. WFC is a feature of interpretations that considers measurement as something ontologically special.

If you don't consider measurement ontologically special, then you need to somehow derive a physically meaningful Born rule without reference to measurement, which so far is something that AFAIK has only been accomplished in theories with large amounts of nonlocality and extra assumptions. The idea that people cling to the obviously false projection postulate out of obstinance is really strange to me, there just aren'…

I would love to consider measurement something ontologically special, but it's not possible because there is no well-defined definition for what a measurement is.

The definitions I have found always invoke the presence of a "classical system"/"observer".

But that just kicks the can down the road, because there is no well-defined definition of a "classical system" either.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#85

Post by Jweb_Guru »

konschubert wrote: post #84
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't consider measurement ontologically special, then you need to somehow derive a physically meaningful Born rule without reference to measurement, which so far is something that AFAIK has only been accomplished in theories with large amounts of nonlocality and extra assumptions. The idea that people cling to the obviously false projection postulate out of obstinance is really strange to me, there just aren'…

I would love to consider measurement something ontologically special, but it's not possible because there is no well-defined definition for what a measurement is. The definitions I have found always invoke the presence of a "classical system"/"observer". But that just kicks the can down the road, because there is no well-defined definition of a "classical system" either.

Sure. Everyone agrees Copenhagen is just kicking the can down the road. I'm just saying, let's not act like we have a ton of viable theories to fill out the rest of the road; in the meanwhile, we still have to perform measurements and make predictions, and the projection postulate is handy for that.

(It would help tremendously if we ever measured quantum states that weren't "collapsed", but as we've never done this so far it makes most of the stochastic collapse stuff hard to justify, even if it seems intuitively like the right approach).

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#86

Post by gxnxcxcx »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #77
keiferski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eternal life would also almost certainly kill any class mobility.

On the other hand, we may develop a society where advancement does not depend on death.

That could prove really difficult without the death of those not in need of any advancement. Power and privilege by their very nature tend to find ways of avoiding being watered down.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#87

Post by Patient0 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72
dusted wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's entirely right to discard comparatively less developed theories based on their relatively weaker predictive power. That does sound like how one reaches a local maximum, to use the term from the article. Think on it in a different way, most of the very revolutionary theories, those that changed how we see the world, were relatively more simple, they were generally simple enough that one fringe could…

> Think on it in a different way, most of the very revolutionary theories, those that changed how we see the world, were relatively more simple, they were generally simple enough that one fringe could develop them to a point where they shined so brightly as to be next to irrefutable. Things like how the earth might be round, and circle the sun. Intresting trivia: heliocentrism didn't show "shining brightly as to be n…

right on thanks for making this point - "Also, IIRC, the predictions made by heliocentric model were less accurate than geocentric ones." - that was my recollection also: the epi-cycles had greater predictive power and accuracy.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#88

Post by 8note »

ALittleLight wrote: post #29
vecter wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many unreasonable assumptions baked into this parable that make it difficult to take seriously. Any amount of meaningful investigation by the aliens would yield more insights into the fact that the game is in fact not a random coin flip. Even recognizing that white has a slightly higher win rate [0] would demonstrate some asymmetry that suggests the existence of a deeper structure or symmetry-breaking. […

The article is not a treatise on how aliens might investigate chess though. That's just a symbolic example to illustrate the idea that you could have a simple model with good predictive power that is somehow less correct than a complicated model with worse predictive power.

The pieces that it does predict some things better:

Is one player happier than the other right now?

How long will it take to make the next move?

How long will the game last?

There's lots and lots of observable things other than who wins that the coin flip model does a worse job at. Thus, the example makes just as good an argument that making better predictions is still what makes a model better.

The missing question is "what are you using the model for?"

Are you trying to learn chess? Understand human psychology? Predict the outcomes of chess games? The same model isn't going to be the best for all of them. Like, the super GM level stockfish is going to suck at predicting beginner chess games

Whether one model is better than another is all about the purpose it's trying to serve, and how well it does that.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#89

Post by choeger »

konschubert wrote: post #49
jackhalford wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have it wrong, QM is the only physical theory that has randomness as an inherent part, as compared to e.g thermodynamics where randomness is due to lack of information. It is proven (see Bell inequalities) that randomness in QM isn't due to lack of information. You can't just wave away the collapse mechanism, what do you make of the double alit experiment? isn't the target "real" enough?

The problem with the double slit experiment is that the target isn't treated as a quantum system. That's why the wave function "collapses": Because it collides with the non-quantum target. It's a useful approximation, but of course in reality, there is no such thing as a non-quantum thing. And if you evolve the target's wave function with the wave function of the particle, then there is no stochastic collapse.

What you are saying is that whenever we, the observer, leave the QM model we use the collapse as a computational trapdoor function? Sounds like an interesting point of view.

But would that not also imply that we should be able to measure the quantum world with quantum devices? Say we have a quantum property that is extremely close to p=0.5. If we could invent a device to replicate that property perfectly and measure it repetitively we could then estimate ever more accurate boundaries for the "true" value of p, no?

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#90

Post by tpoacher »

gandalfgreybeer wrote: post #13

Going through the piece, he builds upon things that make sense but then just completely goes off the rails at the end. I don’t even know what the point of the article is. It comes across as science/intellectual shaming. > Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet might see and bring to attention legitimate theoretical flaws. And if the flaws are legitimate, no matter how much work a scientist has done, then he…

I see where your criticism is coming from, but I think you're mostly nitpicking on the character analogy-breakdowns of the piece rather than the general nature of the argument.

As for "isn't this theoretical framework based on our observations"? Well, yes and no; as Einstein famously once noted, "it's the theory that decides what can be observed.". Obviously the reverse is also partly true and the whole thing is an iterative process, but in a sense Luke's article seems to be about the same thing as Einstein's quote: that it is fruitful to challenge the framework every now and then, rather than accept it as religion.

Specifics aside, I don't think that's an unreasonable mindset to have in science. (or other fields for that matter - a similar mantra exists in medicine: "always dare to challenge the existing diagnosis" -- exactly because people rarely think to do it)

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