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[eHalcyon]

Is it implied at all?  I didn't get that...it talks about using math outside of play, which I agree is important.

...

I don't see how else you can read it.  What are those players doing if not using the math during play?  How is studying data helpful at all if you aren't using the data?  Even the non-math players have an understanding of pot odds, implied odds, hand probabilities, etc.

I'm not giving you a hyper-specific example because I'm not a good player who thinks that way.  I'm just relaying what I've absorbed about poker based on what I've read and heard.  I get the feeling that we might be using the word "computations" differently.  All those assumptions you are talking about, to me they are things that you calculate.  Intuition would be like, you have the second best hand possible but just have this sixth sense that you opponent has you beat anyway.  But the more mathy players will be aggressive -- the odds are with me, I'm going in.  And it's working very well for them.

I would say that if you were awful at computations, you could still be a good poker player.  But not a truly great one.  And with chess, you can be a fine chess player without the ability to look more than a few moves ahead.  The best players are not looking 10 moves ahead on most turns.  You haven't responded to my example of how human players can even compete with computers that are searching deep.

[Seprix]

"Ascension is way better"

So I agreed to play Ascension with them, because hey, I've never played Ascension before, maybe it's okay. I played it as if it were Dominion, trying to thin down and buy draw cards. I won, and then overheard them describe my strategy to someone else as "buying random cards". It was way worse than Dominion though.

Are you sure they were talking about your strategy?  They might have just been describing how Ascension actually works.

At least it's card art is better than Dominions.

[scott_pilgrim]

Is it implied at all?  I didn't get that...it talks about using math outside of play, which I agree is important.

...

I don't see how else you can read it.  What are those players doing if not using the math during play?  How is studying data helpful at all if you aren't using the data?  Even the non-math players have an understanding of pot odds, implied odds, hand probabilities, etc.

I'm not giving you a hyper-specific example because I'm not a good player who thinks that way.  I'm just relaying what I've absorbed about poker based on what I've read and heard.  I get the feeling that we might be using the word "computations" differently.  All those assumptions you are talking about, to me they are things that you calculate.  Intuition would be like, you have the second best hand possible but just have this sixth sense that you opponent has you beat anyway.  But the more mathy players will be aggressive -- the odds are with me, I'm going in.  And it's working very well for them.

I would say that if you were awful at computations, you could still be a good poker player.  But not a truly great one.  And with chess, you can be a fine chess player without the ability to look more than a few moves ahead.  The best players are not looking 10 moves ahead on most turns.  You haven't responded to my example of how human players can even compete with computers that are searching deep.

Okay, well I think we just disagree on what counts as intuition and what counts as math.

I thought I responded to that example by saying, players who can compete with computers searching moderately deep are generally really good.  More accurately though, it's a combination of that, and the fact that strategy is still a factor in chess.  It's just not usually the deciding factor, except at high levels of play.

But in addition to that, I think you wouldn't necessarily call a game strategic (or not tactical) just based on how humans compare with computers.  There's a certain level of strategy that all (or nearly all) humans have.  In chess, humans can easily dismiss moves that are obviously bad, but I think computers have trouble with that.  So even though humans are better at strategizing than computers in that example, since all humans have that ability, it doesn't contribute to the strategic-ness of chess.

[enfynet]

enfynet why did you do what i just specifically asked you not to do

Needed an excuse to +1 you post?

[eHalcyon]

Okay, well I think we just disagree on what counts as intuition and what counts as math.

I thought I responded to that example by saying, players who can compete with computers searching moderately deep are generally really good.  More accurately though, it's a combination of that, and the fact that strategy is still a factor in chess.  It's just not usually the deciding factor, except at high levels of play.

But in addition to that, I think you wouldn't necessarily call a game strategic (or not tactical) just based on how humans compare with computers.  There's a certain level of strategy that all (or nearly all) humans have.  In chess, humans can easily dismiss moves that are obviously bad, but I think computers have trouble with that.  So even though humans are better at strategizing than computers in that example, since all humans have that ability, it doesn't contribute to the strategic-ness of chess.

I dropped discussion of strategy vs. tactics because it seemed from the very start that we were using them differently.  I was instead talking about intuition vs. calculation.  What do you call "moderately deep" for computers?  What kind of moves can a human dismiss as obviously bad that a computer can't suss out when looking 10 moves ahead?  My point is that this type of determination that humans are capable of would fall under "intuition".  It's something that is much more difficult or even impossible to emulate in an algorithm.

I think that strategy and tactics should be equally important at lower or average levels of chess play, and I don't really know which would matter more at the high levels.  I also find your last sentence totally confusing, but that might just be me not understanding what you mean by "strategy".  But even looking back at what you were saying about your definition of strategy, the sentence still doesn't make sense.  You said that you use strategy to describe the things that you can't calculate but must instead intuit.  If humans with intuition/strategy have an inherent advantage over machines, that seems like a very good argument for the "strategic-ness" of the game.

[scott_pilgrim]

I dropped discussion of strategy vs. tactics because it seemed from the very start that we were using them differently.  I was instead talking about intuition vs. calculation.  What do you call "moderately deep" for computers?  What kind of moves can a human dismiss as obviously bad that a computer can't suss out when looking 10 moves ahead?  My point is that this type of determination that humans are capable of would fall under "intuition".  It's something that is much more difficult or even impossible to emulate in an algorithm.

I think that strategy and tactics should be equally important at lower or average levels of chess play, and I don't really know which would matter more at the high levels.  I also find your last sentence totally confusing, but that might just be me not understanding what you mean by "strategy".  But even looking back at what you were saying about your definition of strategy, the sentence still doesn't make sense.  You said that you use strategy to describe the things that you can't calculate but must instead intuit.  If humans with intuition/strategy have an inherent advantage over machines, that seems like a very good argument for the "strategic-ness" of the game.

Yes, but what I mean is that, if all humans all have that advantage over a machine, then it doesn't really make the game more strategic, because we can all do that anyway.

What I'm trying to say is simple but I'm having trouble putting it into words.  Let me try giving a silly example.  Let's say we wanted to play a game, where each player looks at a picture and announces the number of birds in it, and then multiplies two huge numbers.  Each player gets 10 seconds to count the birds, and then scores 30 points for the correct answer and 0 for an incorrect answer.  (The pictures have maybe 0-5 birds in them, so that part is trivial for humans.)  Then you get 20/n points for correctly multiplying the huge numbers, where n is the number of milliseconds it took you to multiply them (you get 0 for a wrong answer).  Now obviously in this game, if it is played human vs. computer, the human will most likely win, because the computer will have a lot of trouble identifying the birds.  If you just look at the human vs. computer case, it looks like the game is all about correctly counting birds.  But when played human vs. human, it's just a contest to see who can multiply fastest, because the bird counting part is trivial for humans.

Okay, so what I'm saying is that, I expect there are aspects of chess that are trivial for humans, but hard for computers, that might give us the false impression that the game is more strategic than we might otherwise think, if we just base its strategic-ness on the results we get by playing against computers.  Does that make more sense?  In other words, the human vs. computer case makes it look like a strategy game, while in reality, the human vs. human case is tactical (and usually we only care about the human vs. human game).  I don't know enough about how computers (or humans) play chess to know if that's actually the case in practice, but it feels like it should be to me.

[eHalcyon]

OK, but I don't think that applies to Chess or strategy board games in general.  For one thing, I don't think there is a non-trivial amount of basic Chess strategy that is trivial for humans yet difficult to encode in an algorithm.  A beginner chess player isn't going to know which pieces are strongest, or what's worth sacrificing, or how to evaluate pawn structure.

But sure, I can imagine that tactics can play a bigger role than strategy among weak or average players.  It still seems weird to say that chess as a game is less strategic if strategy matters more for top players.  I think that's like saying that kingdom cards don't matter in Dominion because the average Dominion player is destroyed by pure Big Money.

[popsofctown]

"A knight on the rim is very grim" is even easier to code into an algorithm than it is to sing to elementary age children.  Most of the heuristics we can add to a chess computer to improve its assessment of positional advantage is just other rules of thumb like that that we don't have a nursery rhyme for yet.  Computers can learn heuristics just fine, and develop their own, given data.  Doubled pawns are empirically 4/5ths of a person due to bad pawn structure, and neither pawn gets to vote!

I think strategy games are cool and fun we can mess around, play a few games, and figure out a knight on the rim is very grim on our own.  That's why people draft new Magic the Gathering sets every year instead of developing ever increasing mastery of the ones that already exist.  Computers can do that too.  But it's something that's fun to do as humans too, I think.  Other shared skills like game-state-tree counting are not as fun.

It's even funner to just guess heuristics and hope they hold true.  Computers will steal everything from us eventually, but I think blindly guessing heuristics will stick around a while and are pretty neat.  A third grader playing chess with out any past games in his database seems likely to do a fianchetto because it "looks cool" and then it's actually strong, while if you create a chess computer and don't allow it any past games in its database and restrict his game-state-tree lookahead to match the third graders, seems less likely to come up with something like that or to manage to win.

[WanderingWinder]

Jack's chess aphorism #1: if you think you're winning or losing almost exclusively as a result of your tactical play, you need to work on your positional play.

This just doesn't sound like it could be true.  Can your positional play ever be so great that you actually do well enough to recover from a significant material loss?  It just has to be better to not make tactical errors, right?  There's so much positive feedback in chess that a lot of tactical errors are nearly impossible to recover from.  The more you plan in the long-term, the more your opponent can take advantage of the short-term difference in your losses.  That's how it would seem to me anyway.  I'm sure you're a lot better at chess than I am, so I don't know why I'm arguing this.  It just sounds like something you say because it sounds good, but it really doesn't seem like it could work in practice.

This is actually making me laugh. Not only is Jack Rudd "a lot better than you", he's actually an International Master.

His point is definitely correct; tactics don't just spring out of nowhere. I mean, okay, it might not apply to players who are just hanging pieces all the time, i.e. just moving them to squares which are attacked and not defended, but I wouldn't really call that 'tactical play', and anyway if you can get to the point of not losing Tic-Tac-Toe, you can get to the point of not just hanging things in Chess so much. Anyway, strategic decisions lead to positions where the tactics are going to be a lot more likely to favor the strategically-better player to start with. Beyond this, of course, you can just win a game by getting into strategically winning positions without anything particularly tactical happening. Take a look at the games of the current World Champion. I mean, not that tactics aren't still a factor - they certainly are.

And actually, you can recover from material losses - some of it depends on HOW MUCH better the rest of your play is, and how much material you consider to be 'significant'. But there have been plenty of occasions on which strong players will give material odds to weaker players and still win with relative ease.

[Polk5440]

Aphorism #2: You are not born with good intuition, it is built.

[sudgy]

So, I just finally realized how this new thread popped up with several pages already...

[Awaclus]

So, I just finally realized how this new thread popped up with several pages already...

I didn't know that two is several.

[2.71828.....]

So, I just finally realized how this new thread popped up with several pages already...

I didn't know that two is several.

He is still on the 25 posts per page system.  50 posts per page is much better

[GreyICE]

If you dislike Yomi, try BattleCON.  If you like Yomi... you're strange.  Try BattleCON.

I dunno, I don't have fun playing chess anymore, but I played hundreds upon hundreds of games.  It might still be my second most played game of all time.  There's something there.

[liopoil]

So, I just finally realized how this new thread popped up with several pages already...

I didn't know that two is several.

He is still on the 25 posts per page system.  50 posts per page is much better

I think Awaclus realizes this, but refuses to recognize that there is another possible system so as to pressure everyone into making 50 posts per page the standard.

[Awaclus]

So, I just finally realized how this new thread popped up with several pages already...

I didn't know that two is several.

He is still on the 25 posts per page system.  50 posts per page is much better

I think Awaclus realizes this, but refuses to recognize that there is another possible system so as to pressure everyone into making 50 posts per page the standard improving their lives.

Yes, exactly!

[eHalcyon]

I prefer 25 per page.  Sometimes I get lag from the YouTube embedding even with just 25.

[Archetype]

"Ascension is way better"

So I agreed to play Ascension with them, because hey, I've never played Ascension before, maybe it's okay. I played it as if it were Dominion, trying to thin down and buy draw cards. I won, and then overheard them describe my strategy to someone else as "buying random cards". It was way worse than Dominion though.

Are you sure they were talking about your strategy?  They might have just been describing how Ascension actually works.

At least it's card art is better than Dominions.

Really? I've heard more complaints regarding Ascension's art than Dominion's.

[popsofctown]

So, I just finally realized how this new thread popped up with several pages already...

Since no one explained the real reason for you: I changed the title during the existential discussion about the thread.

[markusin]

I enjoy Ascension. It's a lot more random and casual than Dominion, though. I think Legendary is a better version of Ascension, though. Although there are some slightly busted cards in that game.

I just played Legendary for the first time yesterday. It was reall y neat, actually. A lot of the concepts in Dominion appear in Legendary, and the unlimited actions/buys works well with this sort of game because a lot of cards don't reach their full potential unless used as part of a combo. It's nice to get trashing as a reward for defeating a villain.

[Asper]

I think there's a reason why buys are not that popular. Even in Dominion, you usually want one expensive card over two cheaper ones. Lab is better than Village/Moat, Gold better than two Silvers and Province better than two Duchies. Of course there exist counterexamples, but limited buys add difficulty where use cases are allready limited. Sure, you don't want players to buy all Coppers at once, but cards don't need to cost $0. Also buys are an invisible, abstract currency.