[zests]

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

[legitster]

Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games.

He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game.

But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is important to attract players - there's a softening of skill gaps.

[mod]

In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree.

Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it.

Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play.

I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.

[tialaramex]

The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines.

Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette.

In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine.

Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.

[mod]

You've picked two of the easier games to solve--heads up games. More specifically, heads up games with specific stack depth

There is no AI that can play well, for instance, in a 9-handed game with varying stack sizes, while itself and some competent players are 600BB deep and some other players are 40bb deep.

It takes a specific, narrow ruleset to tailor an AI to be able to play it at such a high level. Or more compute than we currently have in real-time.

Pluribus' matches against pros had each hand reset to 100BB.

Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. Additionally, no human can realistically implement an AI strategy, meaning the AI is not a big detriment to the actual game of poker, as it's currently played.

[bskrobisz]

>Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros.

To be clear about why this might be true for someone who doesn't know much of poker strategy--the AI is (I presume) going to optimize for strategies that can't be beaten by changing one's own distribution of plays (for (simplified) example, if the AI raises a given hand 20% of the time and folds 80%, it's doing so because even if opponent were to call 100%, fold 100%, or something in-between; it wouldn't change the overall expected value of that hand with that distribution of plays). Professional human players, on the other hand, will absolutely cotton onto a player whose distribution of plays is not optimal and can therefore be exploited for profit.

[mod]

Yes, and bluffing bad players generally doesn't work out as well as bluffing good players.

The AI notoriously bluffs a lot, which many bad player types accidentally counter by calling too often.

Good human players will also specifically exploit bad players, as you note, while the AI attempts instead to itself be unexploitable.

[tialaramex]

Cepheus doesn't care about "stack depth". It's just brutal statistics, this strategy beats your strategy unless your strategy is also approximately perfect regardless of what strategy you have. Good, bad, newbie, pro - it doesn't matter.

Yes, if it's very chip poor, Cepheus could run out of chips before it stops being unlucky and takes your money, but that's unavoidably true anyway in Poker due to it being a game of chance as well as skill.

Cepheus is actually a good Rorschach test for players who say "GTO" a lot. If you actually grasp what game theory optimality is about, you see Cepheus and you're like "OK, I'm done playing Heads Up Limit" (and indeed although it was once somewhat common you won't find any professionals playing this for some years now). But if you're the sort of person for whom it's just another phrase to sling around, like complaining you had a "bad beat" when you were never better than evens, chances are you see Cepheus and you think "I could beat that". Oh dear.

> Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post.

This is exactly the useless observation I'm complaining about. Poker is a game of chance so of course anybody might get lucky in the very short term. If what you value is the fact you could win despite being terrible at it, just play roulette and save everybody else the trouble.

> In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros.

It isn't about "doing worse" here and that's yet more of the mindset that got you into trouble here. The machine doesn't care about "doing worse" it just wins statistically over time. A grinder needs to make rent and buy groceries, so for them being up $50 after a full day feels like losing, it is losing. But the machine doesn't need money.

Again, if it's just about being able to get lucky and get some sort of temporary "High" from that, I'd commend roulette over poker, or, if you like cards, try blackjack.

No, there aren't any academics showing off bots that play full ring. Of course, there weren't any academics showing off that they could count Blackjack. At least not until after they were run out of Vegas with a fortune of the casino's money... Grinding online full ring with AI is not academically interesting, but it would be profitable. The former would cause you to publish (like Cepheus) the latter not so much.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Good to note that Pluribus is trained with Counterfactual Regret Minimization rather than deep learning, same as Libratus, the first AI player to beat professional players in Heads up no limit Texas Hold' em.

I'm not sure about the relation between Pluribus and Libratus- I think Pluribus is a newer version of Libratus, essentially?

[mcguire]

Greg Costikyan's book Uncertainty in Games is another good source.

And this topic frequently comes up in wargaming circles (frequently enough to be annoying :-)). Some feel that nondeterminism is a crutch for the low-skilled while others feel that it is the only reasonable way to handle a low-fidelity model of reality or that it teaches the valuable skill of how to deal with the bag of rotten lemons that the universe periodically hands you.

[da_chicken]

You can see his lecture on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/dSg408i-eKw

You can tell he's going a little from memory, but the points are all still there. His arguments that skill and luck are not opposite sides of the same spectrum is quite good.

[joshuaissac]

> some even being a 4 player game with dice!

Charutaji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturaji

[mikepurvis]

In many games, it's pretty clearly part of the design that the random elements are there to provide rubber-banding— particularly in games with more than 2 players, where sometimes you try to win without looking too much like it, so you avoid getting ganged up on (think: the robber in Settlers).

[floren]

This is why I really like cribbage. There's a major element of randomness based on the cards you're dealt, but lots of opportunities for strategy in how you play them. New players have a chance but more experienced players tend to make better choices with what they have.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Yeah, add health to pieces and use dice to determine what happens when pawn takes the queen: roll 5 and your queen wins, but with 1/3 health.

That would really suck.

[btilly]

It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years.

Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450.

The game has since been stable for about 500.

And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.

[lupire]

"white moves first" is an arbitrary/aesthetic/logistic choice, that doesn't affect gameplay logic.

Left-handed players may prefer Black goes first.

[QuercusMax]

Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though? It's just a convention.

[dragonwriter]

> Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though?

Materially, no, though it probably makes it less complex for humans by slightly simplifying the pattern recognition issues, particularly in the opening.

[dvirsky]

Statistically, white wins more than black.

[Jtsummers]

Because white goes first. The phrasing and context becomes important. There are two statements that are true but without them as context you end up with a misleading notion:

First player wins more than second in chess (because there's a slight advantage).

White goes first in chess.

Therefore, white wins more than black in chess.

However, that conclusion (what you present) is valueless without the context. If you reversed which color starts the game then we'd end up with "black wins more than white in Chess" as a conclusion and your statement would be false. And if there was no specific color which always started, we'd be left with just the first statement: First player wins more than second in chess.

[BeefWellington]

First player advantage seems to be consensus but I wonder how much of an effect piece layout has for players playing second.

If you reversed the king and queen placement for both players would the advantage be as great?

[InitialLastName]

Unless there are hidden psychological effects (which good players will attempt to surmount, as a matter of course), mirroring the board placement will make no difference.

There is no asymmetry of moves other than the starting position of the king and queen, so all strategy will simply be mirrored if the king and queen are mirrored.

[rodrigosetti]

Yes, if our definition of "game" is broadened to mean "culture" around this tradition (as historians might), rather than just reducing to the rules.

In this sense, it also includes the conventions, skill-level titles, playing etiquette, etc.

[JohnJamesRambo]

What did the queen do before then?

[btilly]

The queen was called a fers, and could only move one space diagonally according to most descriptions.

[gus_massa]

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess#History

[boomboomsubban]

Even more details, like how Queen Isabella may have inspired the change and that it was common to declare the queen in "check" for quite some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(chess)#History

[dvirsky]

> ... the ability of pawns to be queened was restricted while the original queen was still on the board, so as not to cause scandal by providing the king with more than one queen.

This is awesome :)

[primus202]

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules.

I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!

So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.

[lllllll0]

> I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin

Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.

[capableweb]

Seems like the precursors might have originated from India but what would evolve into what we today call "Chess" seems to have been taking shape in Persia (Iran).

[renewiltord]

Do the historians who track these things have some metric that they determine that separates 'precursors' from the game itself or is it a human "you know it when you see it" or consensus? Just curious. I imagine it's something similar to how we answer the question "Are these distinct species?" (which doesn't really have a great answer).

[satchlj]

Thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out.

In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of square ones.

I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.

[thehappypm]

A rectangular die would basically only have 4 sides, still very useful for rolls. Landing on the square side would be like a coin landing on its edge: possible but would be a re-throw.

[simonh]

It may be they were mimicking the shape of knuckle bones.

[anthk]

In Spanish some piece names are different.

Rook = tower. Knight = horse. Bishop = alfil, maybe from Arabic for "elephant".

[alternatetwo]

For us Germans it's the same, except the bishop is called "runner" or "sprinter", and the knight also "jumper" or maybe "leaper".

[satchlj]

Just bought "It's All a Game" - looking forward to reading it!

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants…

It’s going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games getting “frozen” with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example, with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.

[dragonwriter]

> Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.

Or go the other way, as low-/no-code customization tools and online distribution make it easier to make and share variants than it is to do so at any scale with physical games, subject to the openness (both in design and social factors like IP status) of the base game.

[zentiggr]

I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of an otherwise very structured ruleset.

[goblinux]

Very Bad Chess by Zach Gage is the best I’ve seen of this. It’s on the iOS App Store, might be on google play. Worth a look if you like “bad chess”

[failrate]

I enjoy thr Royal Game of Ur and even made my own board. One recommendation I'm trying to propagate is to use 4 "2-sided" randomizers instead of a 4-sided randomized for purposes of more strategic play (normal distribution versus flat). I usually play with a reroll 0s option or my ultimate house rule: 0s get you maximum 1 free reroll token.

[joemi]

I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough.

Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have different colored pieces, but directional pieces to show which side they belong to.

Xiangqi is my favorite of the two. To me, it feels like a better depiction of war than Chess. The equivalent of Chess's king stays in a small area, there's a river separating the two sides of the board which some pieces can't cross, there's a catapult for interesting ranged attacks. Maybe I've just grown a bit bored of Chess over all the years and Xiangqi is just relatively newer to me, but Xiangqi feels a lot more fun to play, IMO.

[mcguire]

And then there's hnefatafl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games).

[colordrops]

It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.

[dragonwriter]

> It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess

Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.

[colordrops]

Well would you look at that, you are right. The different layout fooled me, with the pawn row being smaller. It even has the same number of different types.

[joemi]

Actually, Xiangqi has 7 types and western Chess only has 6, unless I'm counting wrong.

[Revery42]

I'm actually working on a rogue-like chess game as an independent project right now! It got me thinking and researching more deeply about variant chess. My favorite so far is Fog of War.

[mcguire]

Have you looked at InfoChess? (https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permu...)

[Revery42]

I hadn't seen this before, thanks for the tip! Not being able to capture certain pieces sounds like a fun challenge.

[sellyme]

> The game has since been stable for about 500.

There were a few patches to chess in the mid to late 20th century that disallowed promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (this was useful for forcing a smothered mate), and to prevent vertically castling to a pawn that had been promoted into a rook on the 8th rank (notated as 0-0-0-0-0-0).

Not exactly fundamental changes, but still amusing that they needed to be made after so many centuries.

[jcmeyrignac]

Some researchers try to rebuild the original rules from these old games, using AI: https://ludii.games

About Senet, a few rules have been suggested: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet

[shusaku]

It seems like an AI can now be trained just by encoding the rules and having it play itself (no database required to bootstrap). This should be great for variants (assuming enough processing power) since you will always be able to find a partner.

[toxik]

I think paying an AI won’t be very satisfying, though. You can’t do sneaky things to a player that is essentially statistics on steroids - even if you pull it off, it’s likely not that you were sneaky that gave you the win, you just found a pattern it didn’t know. It’s dead, cold, calculating. Beating a human will always be more interesting, because you can talk about it, “ha, you could’ve mated me then in two moves,” etc.

Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.

[chadcmulligan]

Yes, until artificial gloating I suppose - the next big thing :-)

[andrepd]

The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.