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Parable of Alien Chess

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Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#161

Post by derbOac »

micouay wrote: post #148

I think many comments here miss the point. I’ll try to summarise them and defend the article: * “Chess results are not 50-50” - I don’t think the exact numbers are that important. What’s important is that in the 50-50 model or x-y model the Aliens assume these values to be just a consistent result of an RNG. * “Chess is not random / the players are intelligent / the aliens could investigate who plays against who” - I…

One important thing the author seems to miss at some level is the context of the data being modeled.

If all you have is data on whether black or white won, then, assuming the 50-50 outcome probabilities, this is a fine model. There is nothing to be gained by anything else.

Where I disagree with the author I guess is to suggest that some other statistically inferior model would be better because, if you had a richer set of observations, it would be shown to be true. To me that scenario is irrelevant at some level, because it's a different scenario (I don't agree with the author's assertion that first move information would somehow decrease predictive information -- it might not improve it, but I doubt it would decrease it).

If you had information on player identities even, you might be able to model ability or something like that, and use that to improve your predictions. But then that relies on the bit of information about which players are which, beyond black and white.

The philosopher Quine argued that models cannot be decontextualized from the observations they are explaining, and I think that is particularly relevant in this case. At some level it doesn't matter whether the Aliens' models are true or not, because they have no information in the scenario that they could use to do anything with.

The 50-50 model (per the author) isn't incorrect, it's just a (assumedly) correct model for the game of chess when all you know is which color won the game. If you were playing chess, and your pairings were random and you couldn't see the board or what pieces were available or where they could go, etc the game would seem very similar to what the aliens were observing. A more "truthful" model is only relevant or useful in the context where there is more data to make it useful.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#162

Post by flubert »

micouay wrote: post #148

I think many comments here miss the point. I’ll try to summarise them and defend the article: * “Chess results are not 50-50” - I don’t think the exact numbers are that important. What’s important is that in the 50-50 model or x-y model the Aliens assume these values to be just a consistent result of an RNG. * “Chess is not random / the players are intelligent / the aliens could investigate who plays against who” - I…

>I think many comments here miss the point.

Is there an area of study that looks at how people discuss things? Including, but not limited to misunderstanding/miscommunication dealing with things analogies, thought experiments, and the like? So that you could make predictions. For example, since "story A" used analogies "B and C", then we'd expect ~50% of the commentators on said article will fixate on B, since that is their favorite topic, and they never tire of discussing B, even if it is purely incidental the point of the article. So you could potentially tailor your article help minimize misunderstandings. Micro-sociology or maybe some sort of specific behavioral psychology?

>I’d be grateful for any references to articles on this topic that can be understood by non-experts.

I liked:

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf

"...From his reply to EPR, we find that Bohr's position was like this: 'You may decide of you own free will, which experiment to do. If you do experiment E1 you will get Result R1. If you do E2 you will get R2. Since it is fundamentally impossible to do both on the same system, and the present theory correctly predicts the results of either, how can you say that the theory is incomplete? What more can one ask of a theory?'

While it is easy to understand and agree with this on the epistemological level, the answer that I and many others would give is that we expect a physical theory to do more than merely predict experimental results in the manner of an empirical equation; we want to come down to Einstein's ontological level and understand what is happening when an atom emits light, when a spin enters a Stern-Gerlach magnet, etc. The Copenhagen theory, having no answer to any question of the form: 'What is really happening when - - -?', forbids us to ask such questions and tries to persuade us that it is philosophically naive to want to know what is happening. But I do want to know, and I do not think this is naive; and so for me QM is not a physical theory at all, only and empty mathematical shell in which a future theory may, perhaps, be built."

...and...

"The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments"

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9611037

...but that probably only raises more questions, rather than providing answers.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#163

Post by lmm »

jjk166 wrote: post #153
lmm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong. And discovering that relationship between players and winning is important and valuable! But trying to understand how the pieces move before you've even understood that this is a game of skill is putting the cart before the horse, and gives yo…

But how can you propose that chess is a game of skill unless you first propose that there are players doing something at which they could be skilled?

You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reason about how.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#164

Post by jjk166 »

lmm wrote: post #163
jjk166 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can you propose that chess is a game of skill unless you first propose that there are players doing something at which they could be skilled?

You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reas…

No, you would observe blobs of water and carbon jiggling and perhaps making some noises. You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results. Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#165

Post by lmm »

jjk166 wrote: post #164
lmm wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reas…

No, you would observe blobs of water and carbon jiggling and perhaps making some noises. You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results. Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

> You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results.

Sure. But again, trying to understand chess without having that understanding would be putting the cart before the horse.

> Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

That would be a reasonable starting assumption, but they'd eventually notice contradictions: the fact that some players consistently had advantages over others, more experienced players generally beat less experienced players, commentary and analysis of board positions is considered worthwhile...

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#166

Post by lmm »

jjk166 wrote: post #150
seanhunter wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one example of how the author proposes an extremely inadequate analogy. The fact that you can propose an improvement so easily demonstrates this. It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes.

> It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes. This was exactly the point the author was trying to convey. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that it is just a random number generator with no dependence on any factors, but this is a bad mod…

It's reasonable to model glorfball as a game of chance for now, and aim to develop a more detailed understanding either by gathering more data (Can we correlate the occasions when the Aberdorfs win and the occasions when the Gloophbahorps win with anything else? If we can't observe glorfball games directly, we look for ways to find out about them indirectly, or outside conditions that might possibly affect glorfball). It's not reasonable to posit that glorfball results must be driven by cross-referencing the Da Vinci Code against a message written on the back of the Declaration of Independence, which seems to be what the article is advocating for.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#167

Post by seanhunter »

jjk166 wrote: post #150
seanhunter wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one example of how the author proposes an extremely inadequate analogy. The fact that you can propose an improvement so easily demonstrates this. It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes.

> It's also very clearly a problem that it ignores player skill, time control and all sorts of other factors that would be basic to any kind of model claiming to have power in predicting chess outcomes. This was exactly the point the author was trying to convey. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that it is just a random number generator with no dependence on any factors, but this is a bad mod…

That's not the simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions. The simplest model of chess with the fewest assumptions is that white always wins. It's also a terrible model but is significantly better than what the author proposes. It seems very strange that you seem compelled to defend this point.

The author proposes a deliberately terrible model presumably in the hope that he is illuminating a wider point. Sadly I don't think he's doing that.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#168

Post by jjk166 »

praestigiare wrote: post #156
jjk166 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop some heavy objects and some light objects you have lying around. You will see that the heavier ones tend to fall faster than the light objects. If all you care about is predicting which object will fall faster, you could simply say gravity pulls the heavier one faster and call it a day. But if you were to forego predictive power and seek understanding, you'd eventually see that objects fundamentally fall at the…

You are imagining this situation from the perspective of already having a more powerful / general model and looking backwards, so it seems obvious. But that is not how things work. Without data to support it, you can imagine all kinds of possible theories - that is not science, and it certainly gets you no closer to understanding.

Yes, the entire point is that what was obviously correct in hindsight was not clearly advantageous to begin with, the author's thesis is that exploring models which may seem worse than what we currently have can ultimately lead to better overall results. The author is specifically criticizing the narrow definition of science which says every incremental step no matter how small must improve your models' predictive power rather than exploring the possibility space.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#169

Post by jjk166 »

lmm wrote: post #165
jjk166 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you would observe blobs of water and carbon jiggling and perhaps making some noises. You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results. Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is.

> You'd have to develop quite a sophisticated model of human behavior to infer that they are treating it as a contest and care about the results. Sure. But again, trying to understand chess without having that understanding would be putting the cart before the horse. > Even then, if they've previously seen humans at a casino, they might reasonably deduce that chess is no more a game of skill than craps is. That would…

You are deliberately misinterpreting the analogy to the point of absurdity. The aliens are only observing a black box system that spits out "white wins" or "black wins," they are trying to determine if there's any reason to develop the means of probing the contents of the black box. Regardless of whether you start by modelling the players or the board, you are still assuming the winner is determined by some complicated model with numerous hidden variables which you would have no reason to believe unless you start with the assumption that this is not a random number generator - an assumption for which you have no evidence. The author's thesis is that assuming a complex explanation for a black box's behavior is reasonable because that's the only way that leads to experiments to probe the contents of the box.

Re: Parable of Alien Chess

#170

Post by a-nikolaev »

jjk166 wrote: post #143
a-nikolaev wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they can observe that Alice always wins when playing against Bob. (If they somehow can determine that one player is black and the other is white, they probably can also distinguish the players as well?)

They can't see a chess piece but they can see humans well enough to tell them apart? Analogies don't work if you deliberately make assumptions that are inconsistent with what they are trying to convey. We could rephrase the analogy such that the aliens are listening to a specific broadcast from earth from 1000 light years away. Some percentage of the time the broadcast is "White won", the rest of the time the broadca…

Yeah yeah, I agree. But, I think, the thing is that once you start making so many carefully made assumptions what is and isn't happening, then the nice parable format falls apart quickly.
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