6 ms·

Comparing a centuries old board game with completely balanced rules, to an infant video game that still has major balance problems (if you looked hard enough),

Comparing a centuries old board game with completely balanced rules, to an infant video game that still has major balance problems (if you looked hard enough), is silly. Chess is as balanced as it gets.

girvo 13y ago
StarCraft has balance problems? So thats why the new patch got released! I find it funny that you'd assume that I don't know that. Of course I do. The balance in Chess is what makes it a far more strategic and "complex" (in terms of strategy and tactics) game. I said as much in my post. I like Chess, I just thought it was funny that despite playing chess all throughout school and competing in various tournaments, I'd never made the connection with StarCraft's various terms, ideas, and strategies. That's what I was expressing. I have no idea what you thought I was trying to say!
rthomas6 13y ago
Well... perfect balance has yet to be proven. But it's certainly better than Starcraft, at any rate.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  How do you know?
  - rthomas6 13y ago
    Well, actually, I don't. At high levels of play, white does win more often than black, which points to an imbalance of sorts [1]. But if the SC2 patches were frozen right now, and the game enjoyed 500 years of popularity, with reams of books written by top minds throughout the ages about analysis of the game, do you really think that there would not be one race that would come out ahead? I find that to be implausible. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
Hasu 13y ago
Chess isn't close to perfectly balanced. White has a significant advantage, both theoretically and statistically. The win rates between races in Starcraft is closer to perfect balance than the white/black divide. Balance is achieved by alternating colors between players, but one player still gets white more in a BoX. You can't switch from zerg to terrain between games in Starcraft.
Scriptor 13y ago
But...he didn't even mention balance. He simply was saying how Starcraft helped him appreciate the "nettlesomeness" aspect of professional chess more. It's just a comment about an interesting observation.
- girvo 13y ago
  Scriptor! I just wanted to geek out a little and say I love Pharen so much!
  - Scriptor 13y ago
    Haha, thanks! Glad you like it. I recently got back into toying around with Pharen, the goal being to get accepted to the next Strange Loop.
    - girvo 13y ago
      Nice one! I'm still working on a better web dev framework for it, basically a really nice, functional wrapper for Slim + ORM's -- taking a leaf out of Haskell's book, keeping it all pure except for where IO operations have to happen (and making sure that that is demarcated in the code itself!). It's so much fun to hack on (although I do crash the REPL constantly. I might have to hack around on that actually, see if I can't get a super REPL going that you can use for actual development). Now I remember you had a build system that came with Pharen, any plans for that in the future? Mainly because I think using it as a build system with a nice functional syntax would be _amazing_ to use even with normal PHP!
      - Scriptor 13y ago
        I've been putting some thought into how I might implement some sort of type system that might at least partially help with separating IO and other side-effects. It's probably impossible to guarantee 100% purity, but I was thinking at the very lease I could use reflection to see if any functions called in a piece of code had arguments of or returned values of PHP's 'Resource' type. What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that... Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that. If you ever want to discuss this stuff more feel free to shoot an email on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen) or drop by #pharen on Freenode.
KVFinn 13y ago
>Chess is as balanced as it gets. It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races. >So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw. >Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point. >Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope. http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html
- dasil003 13y ago
  So is it safe to say you consider Go the superior game?
- smky80 13y ago
  As much as I recognize and appreciate the limitations of chess, it pains me physically to see the strategic depth of it compared to something like Starcraft. It's not close by orders of magnitude. I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.
  - 13y ago

girvo 13y ago

StarCraft has balance problems? So thats why the new patch got released! I find it funny that you'd assume that I don't know that. Of course I do. The balance in Chess is what makes it a far more strategic and "complex" (in terms of strategy and tactics) game. I said as much in my post. I like Chess, I just thought it was funny that despite playing chess all throughout school and competing in various tournaments, I'd never made the connection with StarCraft's various terms, ideas, and strategies. That's what I was expressing. I have no idea what you thought I was trying to say!

rthomas6 13y ago

Well... perfect balance has yet to be proven. But it's certainly better than Starcraft, at any rate.

macspoofing 13y ago
How do you know?
- rthomas6 13y ago
  Well, actually, I don't. At high levels of play, white does win more often than black, which points to an imbalance of sorts [1]. But if the SC2 patches were frozen right now, and the game enjoyed 500 years of popularity, with reams of books written by top minds throughout the ages about analysis of the game, do you really think that there would not be one race that would come out ahead? I find that to be implausible. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess

Hasu 13y ago

Chess isn't close to perfectly balanced. White has a significant advantage, both theoretically and statistically. The win rates between races in Starcraft is closer to perfect balance than the white/black divide. Balance is achieved by alternating colors between players, but one player still gets white more in a BoX. You can't switch from zerg to terrain between games in Starcraft.

Scriptor 13y ago

But...he didn't even mention balance. He simply was saying how Starcraft helped him appreciate the "nettlesomeness" aspect of professional chess more. It's just a comment about an interesting observation.

girvo 13y ago
Scriptor! I just wanted to geek out a little and say I love Pharen so much!
- Scriptor 13y ago
  Haha, thanks! Glad you like it. I recently got back into toying around with Pharen, the goal being to get accepted to the next Strange Loop.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Nice one! I'm still working on a better web dev framework for it, basically a really nice, functional wrapper for Slim + ORM's -- taking a leaf out of Haskell's book, keeping it all pure except for where IO operations have to happen (and making sure that that is demarcated in the code itself!). It's so much fun to hack on (although I do crash the REPL constantly. I might have to hack around on that actually, see if I can't get a super REPL going that you can use for actual development). Now I remember you had a build system that came with Pharen, any plans for that in the future? Mainly because I think using it as a build system with a nice functional syntax would be _amazing_ to use even with normal PHP!
    - Scriptor 13y ago
      I've been putting some thought into how I might implement some sort of type system that might at least partially help with separating IO and other side-effects. It's probably impossible to guarantee 100% purity, but I was thinking at the very lease I could use reflection to see if any functions called in a piece of code had arguments of or returned values of PHP's 'Resource' type. What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that... Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that. If you ever want to discuss this stuff more feel free to shoot an email on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen) or drop by #pharen on Freenode.

KVFinn 13y ago

>Chess is as balanced as it gets. It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races. >So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw. >Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point. >Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope. http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html

dasil003 13y ago
So is it safe to say you consider Go the superior game?
smky80 13y ago
As much as I recognize and appreciate the limitations of chess, it pains me physically to see the strategic depth of it compared to something like Starcraft. It's not close by orders of magnitude. I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.
- 13y ago