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Senet

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Re: Senet

#101

Post by dvirsky »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #98
gus_massa wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess#History

Even more details, like how Queen Isabella may have inspired the change and that it was common to declare the queen in "check" for quite some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(chess)#History

> ... the ability of pawns to be queened was restricted while the original queen was still on the board, so as not to cause scandal by providing the king with more than one queen.

This is awesome :)

Re: Senet

#102

Post by getpolarized »

It's super sad that the history of Senet is mostly unknown.

The texture we have of Chess history for example is part of the allure. That the rules have changed, we know how they changed, why they changed, how people played in the past, etc.

Re: Senet

#103

Post by coolguy132435 »

I am so happy to see mention of Senet anywhere - I have been addicted since I saw it featured on an episode of Lost back in highschool. About a decade ago, I found a Windows version that supported online play, that I played heavily with my then long distance girlfriend. I introduced the game to my family, and my mom even sewed together a fabric board for playing during flights. We play as a family any time I visit. A few weeks ago, I started writing up a text based version of it in Java, but put it on hold for the moment.

Re: Senet

#104

Post by anthk »

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…

In Spanish some piece names are different.

Rook = tower. Knight = horse. Bishop = alfil, maybe from Arabic for "elephant".

Re: Senet

#105

Post by alternatetwo »

anthk wrote: post #104
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…

In Spanish some piece names are different. Rook = tower. Knight = horse. Bishop = alfil, maybe from Arabic for "elephant".

For us Germans it's the same, except the bishop is called "runner" or "sprinter", and the knight also "jumper" or maybe "leaper".

Re: Senet

#106

Post by thehappypm »

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…

A rectangular die would basically only have 4 sides, still very useful for rolls. Landing on the square side would be like a coin landing on its edge: possible but would be a re-throw.

Re: Senet

#107

Post by floren »

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…

This is why I really like cribbage. There's a major element of randomness based on the cards you're dealt, but lots of opportunities for strategy in how you play them. New players have a chance but more experienced players tend to make better choices with what they have.

Re: Senet

#108

Post by bskrobisz »

mod wrote: post #81
tialaramex wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compu…

>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.

To be clear about why this might be true for someone who doesn't know much of poker strategy--the AI is (I presume) going to optimize for strategies that can't be beaten by changing one's own distribution of plays (for (simplified) example, if the AI raises a given hand 20% of the time and folds 80%, it's doing so because even if opponent were to call 100%, fold 100%, or something in-between; it wouldn't change the overall expected value of that hand with that distribution of plays). Professional human players, on the other hand, will absolutely cotton onto a player whose distribution of plays is not optimal and can therefore be exploited for profit.

Re: Senet

#110

Post by addingnumbers »

mannerheim wrote: post #33
addingnumbers wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there. If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle. Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing p…

It's funny you should mention chess, because early modern chess was at one time considered just a variant of chess[0]: > The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that, modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65] There was still some variation in the ru…

You're calling on examples of strongly-pedigreed, well-informed. very slight game variations, and claiming they're equivalent with a whole-cloth supposition of the rules based on nothing but an examination of the board and pieces.

The gradual evolution of a well-documented game doesn't really compare with uninformed assumptions about how a game might work based on little more than mere physical artifacts.

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