Move #14 (Nxc6) does not make sense. Why did Magnus do that?
Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
251–258 of 258 posts
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 4 pool isn't a sucker punch. It is a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly. If your opponent does not scout it quickly, he is very likely to lose. If he does, you are very likely to lose. The existence of this early all-in option does much to "keep players honest" during the opening phases of the game and greatly expands the strategic depth of the beginning minutes. Without thi…
> a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly In other words, a sucker punch?
Like girvo said, I meant that it's not unfair. If you think surprise attacks and imperfect information don't add strategic depth to a game, then we have nothing left to discuss.
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha, thanks! Glad you like it. I recently got back into toying around with Pharen, the goal being to get accepted to the next Strange Loop.
Nice one! I'm still working on a better web dev framework for it, basically a really nice, functional wrapper for Slim + ORM's -- taking a leaf out of Haskell's book, keeping it all pure except for where IO operations have to happen (and making sure that that is demarcated in the code itself!). It's so much fun to hack on (although I do crash the REPL constantly. I might have to hack around on that actually, see if I…
I've been putting some thought into how I might implement some sort of type system that might at least partially help with separating IO and other side-effects. It's probably impossible to guarantee 100% purity, but I was thinking at the very lease I could use reflection to see if any functions called in a piece of code had arguments of or returned values of PHP's 'Resource' type.
What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that...
Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that.
If you ever want to discuss this stuff more feel free to shoot an email on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen) or drop by #pharen on Freenode.
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly In other words, a sucker punch?
Like girvo said, I meant that it's not unfair. If you think surprise attacks and imperfect information don't add strategic depth to a game, then we have nothing left to discuss.
It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level.
I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like girvo said, I meant that it's not unfair. If you think surprise attacks and imperfect information don't add strategic depth to a game, then we have nothing left to discuss.
It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level. I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of ga…
Look, I'm not even disagreeing with you. I never said StarCraft is as deep strategically as Chess is. I think Chess is certainly more strategic. I also happen to think StarCraft is a much more interesting game because it has tactical, psychological, and physical aspects totally absent in Chess. These statements are not incompatible.
The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level. I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of ga…
Look, I'm not even disagreeing with you. I never said StarCraft is as deep strategically as Chess is. I think Chess is certainly more strategic. I also happen to think StarCraft is a much more interesting game because it has tactical, psychological, and physical aspects totally absent in Chess. These statements are not incompatible. The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that…
Well certainly individual preference is a matter of taste. For me, "4 pooling" and these kind of largely random rock-paper-scissors choices -- which can often be decisive, as is the case here -- put me off Starcraft and a lot of games in general, at least as anything more than casual entertainment. But I do remember enjoying the game before I yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... perfect balance has yet to be proven. But it's certainly better than Starcraft, at any rate.
How do you know?
Well, actually, I don't. At high levels of play, white does win more often than black, which points to an imbalance of sorts [1]. But if the SC2 patches were frozen right now, and the game enjoyed 500 years of popularity, with reams of books written by top minds throughout the ages about analysis of the game, do you really think that there would not be one race that would come out ahead? I find that to be implausible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice one! I'm still working on a better web dev framework for it, basically a really nice, functional wrapper for Slim + ORM's -- taking a leaf out of Haskell's book, keeping it all pure except for where IO operations have to happen (and making sure that that is demarcated in the code itself!). It's so much fun to hack on (although I do crash the REPL constantly. I might have to hack around on that actually, see if I…
I've been putting some thought into how I might implement some sort of type system that might at least partially help with separating IO and other side-effects. It's probably impossible to guarantee 100% purity, but I was thinking at the very lease I could use reflection to see if any functions called in a piece of code had arguments of or returned values of PHP's 'Resource' type. What kinds of things make the repl c…
Yeah, just various errors make it crash pretty hard. I've attempted to wrap an error handler into it but had no luck, I might try again and send a PR if I can get it to work.
Phake, that's the one. I was curious about it, as I think a nice LISP styled build system that can be bootstrapped with only PHP and the Pharen runtime-lib would be really awesome as a build system for PHP in general. With Composer and a lot of other projects, tooling in PHP is moving forward at a rapid pace, but we're all hacking together shitty build systems from scratch (or using Phing, which is painful in my experience). Phake could be a nice alternative. For now, I'm using Make and calling into Pharen directly :)