
Perfect Information Game: On Chess - Vigier
http://hazlitt.net/feature/perfect-information-game
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dkbrk
I don't mean to diminish the accomplishments or skill of chess players, but in
my opinion being a perfect information game makes chess, like go, much less
interesting.

It means that, in principle, it is simply a matter of running Minimax on a
sufficiently powerful computer, and the game can be solved. I do mean 'in
principle': actually doing this is still well beyond the world's computational
capabilities, though this doesn't stop computers playing stronger than any
human.

People find an abstract beauty in the purity of the game's structure, but I
find that lack of information asymmetry makes the game less rich. One does not
need to attempt to induce the other player's thoughts, their strategies or the
location of the pieces, one merely has to look at the board. There are no
feints, one cannot pretend to be following one strategy and actually be
planning something else.

Some of these features do crop up, sort of: due to the size of the game's
space and the imperfection of the players, players can be surprised by a
particularly brilliant move. But this is an artifact of the players not being
good enough, not a feature of the game itself.

I find it strange in this light that chess (and go) have historically been
seen as a sort of wargame, a respectable pastime for generals and the like.
Reasoning and planning in the presence of uncertain information (the "fog of
war") is one of the most important aspects of military strategy and actually
common to most human endeavours. The 'uncertainty' due to the combinatorial
complexity of the game doesn't really capture that sort of probabilistic
scenario very effectively. For example, many games lacking perfect information
do not have a solution, rather the optimal 'solution' is a mixed strategy
where a player randomly selects from a set of strategies weighted by
probability. This also means that the other player can't simply know "my
opponent is playing perfectly, therefore they will play strategy X", making
the game in some sense much harder. This, of course, tends to generalise to
imperfect players and real-world games as well as just the ideal.

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pacala
I don't mean to diminish the accomplishments or skill of backgammon players,
but in my opinion being an imperfect information game makes backgammon, like
poker, much less interesting.

It means that, in principle, it is simply a matter of running Minimax over all
possible distributions on a sufficiently powerful computer, and the game can
be solved. I do mean 'in principle': actually doing this is still well beyond
the world's computational capabilities, though this doesn't stop computers
playing stronger than any human.

~~~
citizen23
I think that backgammon is more similar to chess than poker in this respect.
Despite the exogenous element of chance it can still be considered a perfect
information game.

Your statement does not hold for games truly characterised by imperfect
information (e.g. poker), in theory or in practice.

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enugu
Gonzo style reporting of the chess scene.

>> My own personal conception of existential dread is, like my inability to
visualize, idiosyncratic. Many people, I think, are troubled by their own
insignificance, preferring not to think about being a tiny part of a vanishing
species in what couldn’t even be called a corner of the universe. Not me—I’m
fine with that. ... That’s all infinity does, or rather doesn’t do. It doesn’t
scare me.

>> What does scare me—what provokes real horror in me—is excess reality. I see
mental horror—The Void—in the tumbling numbers of securities trading, or the
heaps of barely decipherable ancient papyrus dug up in the near Middle East,
or the global weather patterns which have evaded, to this date, capture by any
mathematical model. I am troubled by the world’s great throngs of data—by
thickets of facts I might comprehend individually, but that together make a
chaos capable of receding before me as long as I live—the miles of definition
leading nowhere.

>> That’s what I felt, staring at the board in front of me. I felt like I
couldn’t put my pieces anywhere, because I felt like I could put them
everywhere, for all eternity. I basically blacked out.

These parts are well written and convey his experience on entering the zone.
These are negative images coming from the inability to perceive order. There
is also the positive part with the state of flow in being absorbed in this
alternate world.

I like Hikaru No Go, which conveys a sense of being a go player, with the
attractions of a game, the competitions, the disappointment in the backdrop of
a fantasy story.

~~~
a_imho
IMHO chess is portrayed like this by people not really exposed to it.

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Pamar
For everyone interest in a very readable overview of chess history I suggest:
[http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field-
isbn=0...](http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field-
isbn=0385510101)

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SuperGent
I wanted to get into chess as an adult, with the aim of becoming a master.
However, I found that even some people who had studied chess from an early
age, and where chess still dominated their lives, they still didn't raise
above IM or even master. This put me off for a while, as I was the sort of
person who needs to be the 'best' I can be and merely being good wasn't
enough, especially with all the study that comes with it.

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aphrax
This brings back memories. I played chess from years 8-12 at national level
and then I just dropped all interest in it. Wish I'd kept with it really

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frenchie4111
That story took an unexpected turn

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rosstex
This was a fantastic read!

~~~
Little_Peter
Agree. Very will written. I laughed out loud couple times:

\- "chess is a deeply unnatural skill - it requires the full command of a
bunch of neurons that the adult mind has already donated to the ability to
navigate a grocery store lineup without screaming"

