Questions I would ask God about the game of Go

The prohibition on matching any earlier state of the board makes playing the game significantly more complex in reality, but not in terms of how many bits it takes to describe the rules.

Have you considered defining the complexity in terms of the number of bits required to implement the game, and not just the ruleset? Go requires a potentially very large list of past board states.

Your guess is as good as mine. My guess is that all intelligent life in the universe would be "soooo unique", not just the one on Earth. So it would be very improbable any life form would be similar to that on Earth.

However, it could be probable that there are two life forms in the universe which are similar. But then they would probably be too far apart from each other to ever be able to communicate.

It did, though. Go, I mean.

Korea had Sunjang Baduk: https://senseis.xmp.net/?SunjangBaduk

Tibet had its own variant: https://senseis.xmp.net/?TibetanGo

I didn't meant to imply that chess didn't mutate as it travelled around. It's still striking to me that Go was unknown anywhere which didn't use Hanzi to write.

If the universe is truly infinite, I would be incredibly surprised if any given thing happened a non-zero finite number of times.

Every NxNxN cube of space has a finite state space. Assuming an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of such spaces. If a state is likely enough to occur once, it ought to occur an infinite number of times.

This supposes not only a game functionally (if not superficially) identical to chess, possibly with differently shaped or colored pieces. It also supposes a world identical to Earth, called Earth by the English speaking humans who live there, who play a game called chess which functions exactly like chess, with knights that are called knights and bishops that are called bishops.

Which leaves us in an interesting conundrum. We can't ask which game is the most common, because many games occur infinitely many times: infinity doesn't let us make comparisons like that.[1]

Then we start asking questions like which games occur finitely many times? Of the finitely numbered games, which was the most common? Least? What does the probability curve look like? (This is honestly the most interesting to me. Is the peak at 1 unique copy which then exponentially decreases, or are there very few unique games which grow to a peak and then rapidly drop to zero, or is it a uniform distribution that just... Keeps going, or is it a boring normal distribution?) Which game had the most variations but still recognizable to a player of a middle of the road variation? Are there any ring species [2] of games, and if so, which has the largest ring? Is Star Trek 3D chess played unironically?

Other questions we can't ask: are there infinitely many games? There are not. Life is almost certainly bounded in size, which means there are a finite number of states. This gives us a finite number of creatures, and therefore a finite number of unique ideas.

Infinity is a fickle mistress.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Gra...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

Any number is a bad guess because we don’t have any sense of the likelihood of life emerging, even in the “optimal conditions”. It could be so unlikely that it’s probable there is no other life, it could be so likely that almost every “viable” planet has life, anywhere in between, or it could be that God created exactly as much life as he wanted, which could be, again, any number.

We have a sample size of one and what must be, in the grand scheme, a primitive understanding of physics and chemistry and biology. Throwing around numbers and probabilities for the existence of other life is frankly ridiculous. The best we can intelligently talk about is what the number is given some guess about other numbers. But remember, we have no good numbers for the emergence of life, the survival of life, the likelihood of evolution into intelligent life, etc. Any number multiplied by a totally unknown factor can be literally anything.

And before someone throws the infinite universe argument at me, of course. Any probability above zero times infinity is infinity. (Though it’s also possible that there is still no extraterrestrial life even in that case, that outcome always has a non-zero probability!) If we accept a probabilistic emergence of life, then we need to talk about useful things like “in our solar system”, “in our galaxy”, “in the visible universe”, and such. Though it is theoretically possible that the conditions for the emergence of intelligent life are so narrow that only planets exactly like ours, so exactly like it that someone else on that planet has or will typed out this exact comment, have it. In a truly infinite, random (hmm, another bad assumption perhaps?) universe, there would be infinitely many such exact replicas of Earth and its entire visible universe. This isn’t a very useful concept.