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Senet

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Re: Senet

#81

Post by mod »

tialaramex wrote: post #64
mod wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

You've picked two of the easier games to solve--heads up games. More specifically, heads up games with specific stack depth

There is no AI that can play well, for instance, in a 9-handed game with varying stack sizes, while itself and some competent players are 600BB deep and some other players are 40bb deep.

It takes a specific, narrow ruleset to tailor an AI to be able to play it at such a high level. Or more compute than we currently have in real-time.

Pluribus' matches against pros had each hand reset to 100BB.

Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. Additionally, no human can realistically implement an AI strategy, meaning the AI is not a big detriment to the actual game of poker, as it's currently played.

Re: Senet

#82

Post by jcmeyrignac »

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.

Some researchers try to rebuild the original rules from these old games, using AI: https://ludii.games

About Senet, a few rules have been suggested: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet

Re: Senet

#83

Post by colordrops »

joemi wrote: post #77
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 highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough. Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have differe…

It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.

Re: Senet

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

colordrops wrote: post #83
joemi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough. Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have differe…

It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.

> It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess

Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.

Re: Senet

#85

Post by da_chicken »

legitster wrote: post #47
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.

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…

You can see his lecture on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/dSg408i-eKw

You can tell he's going a little from memory, but the points are all still there. His arguments that skill and luck are not opposite sides of the same spectrum is quite good.

Re: Senet

#86

Post by simonh »

satchlj wrote: post #68
primus202 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

It may be they were mimicking the shape of knuckle bones.

Re: Senet

#87

Post by failrate »

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 enjoy thr Royal Game of Ur and even made my own board. One recommendation I'm trying to propagate is to use 4 "2-sided" randomizers instead of a 4-sided randomized for purposes of more strategic play (normal distribution versus flat). I usually play with a reroll 0s option or my ultimate house rule: 0s get you maximum 1 free reroll token.

Re: Senet

#88

Post by btilly »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #79
btilly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450. The game has since been stable for about 500. And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.

What did the queen do before then?

The queen was called a fers, and could only move one space diagonally according to most descriptions.

Re: Senet

#89

Post by peter303 »

In the Ten Commandment movie Nefertiti plays a different actual Egyptian game called Hounds and Jackals.

Re: Senet

#90

Post by mcguire »

legitster wrote: post #47
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.

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…

Greg Costikyan's book Uncertainty in Games is another good source.

And this topic frequently comes up in wargaming circles (frequently enough to be annoying :-)). Some feel that nondeterminism is a crutch for the low-skilled while others feel that it is the only reasonable way to handle a low-fidelity model of reality or that it teaches the valuable skill of how to deal with the bag of rotten lemons that the universe periodically hands you.

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