Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
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Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
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Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#2It's also a game of instant information, unlike war where generals hear about events with some delay. Or at least used to.
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#3I wonder what chess would be like if it incorporated a fog of war mechanic where you could only see some tiles around each piece, and perhaps rooks could see a straight line all the way down the board.
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#4It's also a game of instant information, unlike war where generals hear about events with some delay. Or at least used to.
Even with modern technologies and the surfeit of information, it's still not a perfect-information situation. If the cosmos is a computational engine, only the cosmos has the possibility of perfect-information. Everything else is a representational model.
Messing with that information is one of the ways one side can gain an unfair advantage, and why such concepts like OODA was developed.
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#5I wonder what chess would be like if it incorporated a fog of war mechanic where you could only see some tiles around each piece, and perhaps rooks could see a straight line all the way down the board.
You can try this on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/terms/fog-of-war-chess
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#6I wonder what chess would be like if it incorporated a fog of war mechanic where you could only see some tiles around each piece, and perhaps rooks could see a straight line all the way down the board.
You mean like Strategos?
I experimented with building in something like that into RPG mechanic. It's not so simple as modelling "fog of war" as uncovering terrain like in real-time strategy games, but rather, perception roll checks and modeling morale, discipline, and simulating things like tunnel-vision.
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#7I wonder what chess would be like if it incorporated a fog of war mechanic where you could only see some tiles around each piece, and perhaps rooks could see a straight line all the way down the board.
You might like Reconnaissance Blind Chess [0]. It incorporates imperfect information into Chess and was developed for AI research at the Applied Physics Lab.
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#8In practice, Chess is not a game of perfect information, since you generally don't know which lines your opponent has prepared beforehand.
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#9In practice, Chess is not a game of perfect information, since you generally don't know which lines your opponent has prepared beforehand.
that doesn't matter, you have every bit of information from the board to in theory know every possible outcome. It's not like the opponent can't sneak an extra piece in behind your line. Or randomly turn your rook into their queen...
Re: Chess, unlike war, is a game of perfect information
#10The article doesn't touch on this, but Sun Tzu famously wrote about the importance of spycraft in his The Art of War. It actually completely changed my outlook on what it's like to truly go at war (from a macro standpoint). The salient advantage often lies not by knowing what's on the battlefield, but rather what's behind enemy lines. Being able to sow dissent, for example, can be way more of a force multiplier than outnumbering the opponent on the field. And, in this regard, Chess (where number of pieces is vitally relevant) is absolutely nothing like war.