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Senet

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Re: Senet

#61

Post by toxik »

shusaku wrote: post #52
zests wrote: post #4

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

It seems like an AI can now be trained just by encoding the rules and having it play itself (no database required to bootstrap). This should be great for variants (assuming enough processing power) since you will always be able to find a partner.

I think paying an AI won’t be very satisfying, though. You can’t do sneaky things to a player that is essentially statistics on steroids - even if you pull it off, it’s likely not that you were sneaky that gave you the win, you just found a pattern it didn’t know. It’s dead, cold, calculating. Beating a human will always be more interesting, because you can talk about it, “ha, you could’ve mated me then in two moves,” etc.

Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.

Re: Senet

#63

Post by primus202 »

zests wrote: post #4

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules.

I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!

So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.

Re: Senet

#64

Post by tialaramex »

mod wrote: post #50
legitster wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games. He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game. But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictabili…

In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree. Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it. Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps…

The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines.

Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette.

In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine.

Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.

Re: Senet

#65

Post by guard-of-terra »

andrepd wrote: post #49
zests wrote: post #4

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.

...especially when played with ruleset where different tiles have specific rules.

Re: Senet

#66

Post by lllllll0 »

primus202 wrote: post #63
zests wrote: post #4

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules. I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the re…

> I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin

Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.

Re: Senet

#67

Post by guard-of-terra »

mabub24 wrote: post #36
wanda wrote: post #27

> Senet is the oldest known board game. I was always under the impression that a form of backgammon was on the ancient Mesopotamian/Sumerian scene around the same time -- though, now that I actually come to look for a good source to support that notion, I'm struggling to find one. Wikipedia and other sources just say "backgammon can be traced back nearly 5000 years" [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgammon

You might be thinking of Ur, which is roughly 4,500 years old. This is an interesting video from Dr. Irving Finkel on it and its playing rules.[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

There are quite a few rulesets for the board. It's hard to say how exactly the inventors has played it. In this video the basic ruleset is shown. More advanced sets make use of more tile types, of pieces being two-sided - so that pieces have to return where they have started from, after being flipped at the opposite side of the board.

Re: Senet

#68

Post by satchlj »

primus202 wrote: post #63
zests wrote: post #4

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules. I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the re…

Thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out.

In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of square ones.

I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.

Re: Senet

#69

Post by satchlj »

primus202 wrote: post #63
zests wrote: post #4

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules. I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the re…

Just bought "It's All a Game" - looking forward to reading it!
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