
DFS, poker, basketball, Starcraft and strong opinions, weakly held - dtran
https://www.davidtran.me/strong-opinions-weakly-held/
======
gautamcgoel
The principle the author is describing is very similar to the Optimism in the
Face of Uncertainty (OFU) principle in online learning, which was proposed by
Auer et Al in the context of the multi-armed bandit problem. The basic idea is
that when you are sequentially making decisions in the presence of
uncertainty, you should make decisions which interpret the data you have in
the most optimistic light. The intuition here is that if your optimism turns
out to be correct, you can capture most of the upside, but if your optimism is
misguided, you can quickly gather information and reassess.

~~~
dtran
OP here. Thanks for making this connection! I hadn't heard of OFU before, but
it sounds interesting. I'm actually working on another post about "optimizing
around the optimal" and use multi-armed bandit as an example =). As Jeff
Atwood mentions in his post on SOWH, writing about this has been a great way
for me to think about the topic. If it turns out that smarter/more experienced
people have already thought about/written about this subject at length, I'm
not at all disappointed that I'm retracing their steps. In fact, it means that
I independently found the right path!

I see this Coursera course on OFU:
[https://www.coursera.org/lecture/practical-rl/optimism-in-
fa...](https://www.coursera.org/lecture/practical-rl/optimism-in-face-of-
uncertainty-4Ggk0) and what looks like Auer's original UCRL paper
[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3052-logarithmic-online-
regret-b...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3052-logarithmic-online-regret-
bounds-for-undiscounted-reinforcement-learning.pdf) Do you have a preferred
source for learning about this? Thanks and Merry Christmas!

~~~
gwern
Another one you might like is the Amazonism 'disagree and commit':
[https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t](https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t)

I ( [https://www.gwern.net/Timing#try-try-again-but-less-
less](https://www.gwern.net/Timing#try-try-again-but-less-less) ) see it as a
kind of bandit as well, but specifically, Thompson sampling, because you can
interpret groups of people with strong but inconsistent beliefs individually
as collectively implementing a Bayesian distribution, and then individuals
going off and following what seems to then like the most profitable
opportunity is equivalent to Thompson sampling:
[https://people.csail.mit.edu/pkrafft/papers/krafft-thesis-
fi...](https://people.csail.mit.edu/pkrafft/papers/krafft-thesis-final.pdf)

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sabas123
As somebody who was top ~2% in Starcraft I got heavily triggered until this
part

>The key insight from Starcraft is that you need to be constantly testing and
adjusting your hypothesis by scouting your opponent, all while continually
executing whatever the best strategy you know of at any given point in time.

This is one of actually a good description of what is to be (in part) learned
from Starcraft. However the level to which you can opt to commit to your idea
without accurate information is larger than most people can suspect, and a lot
of work goes into making the unwanted adjustments seem a non-issue.

~~~
dtran
I started this post with the Starcraft campaign example, and then as I kept
writing, was thinking that I might have to backtrack and get rid of SC
completely.

To be fair, the campaign is very contrived, but in most 1v1s, I feel like
strong opinions were the way to go, with the “unwanted adjustments” you talked
about, like waiting a few seconds longer to take your natural after your
opponent’s scout leaves. It’s also why after many thousands of games, I sort
of lost interest in Starcraft. Based on maps and matchups, besides cheese,
most games played out with both players just executing their predetermined
builds until one player made a mistake (the game breaks down to balancing
economy, army size, tech and army positioning, so a miscalculation along any
of those axes). I did enjoy some of the ICCup seasons with new maps before
people figured out optimal builds where it wasn’t as repetitive. But mostly I
stopped playing cuz of all the long drawn out PvTs :)

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artosispylon
Hi David, thanks for the article. Maybe poker, basketball, and Starcraft are
highly correlated hobbies among software engineers in the Bay area, but I find
it incredible that we share such similar interests. Starcraft not as much for
me anymore, despite my HN username (though I still play maybe once a month or
so).

~~~
dtran
Thanks for reading! Whoa, do you still play BW once a month, or is that SC2? I
never started playing SC2, so I actually had to look up Artosis pylon. I def
remember Manner pylon though :)

And hmm, I actually didn't think I'd find ANY readers at the intersection of
startups, CS, SC, poker and basketball. Assuming most people on HN are
interested in startups and computer science, I'd imagine that the limiting
area of intersection would probably be SC ∩ bball (at least more so than SC ∩
poker or poker ∩ bball), so it's pretty awesome that we share all of those!

