If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.
Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess, but much less tactical and a lot more strategical games. In other words, computers can't beat the best players in these games yet.
For whatever reasons, the status of games is somewhat related to whether they are "solved" by programs. Chess, like backgammon and checkers, is really on its way down.
I love chess, and play it all the time, and same with many other games. But the allure goes down once it is solved.
maybe all games will be figured out by software... but at the moment, no limit and go seem extremely exciting in terms of their possibilities/strategies.
Although the best chess players are now computers, chess doesn't seem anywhere close to being solved in the formal game theory sense (where we know how to produce perfect play that can't be beaten even in principle). There was a gap of over a decade between a machine becoming the world checkers champion (1994) and checkers becoming a formally solved game (2007). (Impressively, both of these were achieved by the same person, Johnathan Schaeffer.)
The difference, of course, is between "this machine can beat the best existing human player" and "this machine can beat any conceivable player as long as it's logically possible to do so". And right now we're at the former stage for chess (at least in some abstract sense: I'm not sure that a specific machine exists in operable condition that reflects the state of the art), but nowhere near the latter.
yes, absolutely agree. that's what i mean by "solved" in quotes. i mean that computers can beat the best humans, not that the games are solved in the absolute sense like tic tac toe.
>If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.
I love chess, but this type of thinking is flawed. Using this logic, the Twilight movies are misunderstood masterpieces, Justin Beiber is the millennials' Mozart, and WWE style wrestling should be in the Olympics alongside the decathlon.
I think it's the "game" wording that is wrong. I don't know what would suit better, but finding chess, shogi, go, xiangqi as boring would just mean you don't understand something. I was originally a chess player, but found the depth of go much more inspiring, once I "learnt the language."
you're right. i should clarify that i mean "a life long pursuit" kind of interest and devotion. That something could offer that many stimulating moments to many people intellectually and aesthetically and socially.
and "usually" of course. I concede that there may exist a game that many people devote a lot of time to that is not a "good" game in an objective sense, if there can ever be an objective sense of that kind about games.
> Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess.
Go is, poker is not. The key difference is that in go and chess, all the information about the game is known by both parties. That's not true in poker, where each player has data that's intentionally hidden from the other players.
You can apply your first statement to most things in life. When people think things are boring, most of the time it is because they don't understand the nuances, history etc
Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess, but much less tactical and a lot more strategical games. In other words, computers can't beat the best players in these games yet.
For whatever reasons, the status of games is somewhat related to whether they are "solved" by programs. Chess, like backgammon and checkers, is really on its way down.
I love chess, and play it all the time, and same with many other games. But the allure goes down once it is solved.
maybe all games will be figured out by software... but at the moment, no limit and go seem extremely exciting in terms of their possibilities/strategies.