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Re: Are you out of your mind, or just more brain damaged than me? by Ice Cream Jonsey 12/04/2015, 3:47pm PST
Commander Tansin A. Darcos wrote:

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

Original Title: Re: Unfortunately, chess is a "solved game."

On the Caltrops sitcom I'm developing, one of the episodes has the cast of Caltrops trying to enter a chess tournament. In addition to one of the characters like Jizaboz not knowing what a "solved game" is (for instance, it's not a game that simply produces a winner) laudablepus cannibalizes one of the chess clocks in order to know when to change out his liver and Entropy Stew gets in a fistfight when asked to put on a suit before he's allowed in the building. Guest-starring Matt Berry in a wheelchair who faces off against Tdarcos much to his chagrin (while taping he is chargrined having to act with Paul, not like because we wrote that for his character or anything).


This was one of the things I had to go and look up on Wikipedia to understand if I thought the term was what I thought it meant. And even Wikipedia admits that Chess is only partially solved and may never be.

But I'm going to argue it isn't solved and never was, because unless someone is using a computer to make all their moves - an idea that goes back at least to a 1967 episode of Mission Impossible - an ordinary player such as you, me, Pinback or anyone else here or on Jolt Country, is not going to play perfectly. Errors can occur. And that's the big argument against claiming the concept of chess as a solved problem: to claim it is solved requires that all players involved play perfectly. You can make that argument for Tic-Tac-Toe and maybe for checkers, but chess is too complicated for most unaided humans to play at perfection, at least a large part of the time or all the time.

I'm somewhat familiar with chess, both because I've done the two spoken versions of the article on Wikipedia; it takes about an hour to read it, and because I've done some playing going back perhaps 40-45 years, as this quote from the preface of my book In the Matter of: Instrument of God tells about a chess game I played once.

When I first learned to play chess back in 5th or 6th grade in school, I was about 11 or 12 at the time, I was terrible at it and a friend of mine kept crucifying me, I kept losing badly. I got so mad one day I swept all the pieces off the board. Well, one day - and he swears he was playing his best and did not throw the game - my friend made some really bad mistake in one of his moves. You can bet I enjoyed every minute of that game as I turned around and destroyed him! No mercy and not a bit of charity, I enjoyed watching him suffer and lose big time. You have to figure it was a significant moment of my life when I can remember one chess game I played over thirty years ago, and yet sometimes I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.

Do I regret destroying him in that game? Of course not, it was payback for what he did before. And if he was able to come after me again, I should have no complaints. And yet we could still be friends in other circumstances even if we were merciless competitors on the chessboard.


The point being was, in that game, when I realized I was winning I asked him if he had made a mistake on purpose, and he said no. The fact I knew I wasn't that good indicated to me that I suspected he was letting me win. I believed him when he said he was not; this sort of thing makes it clear, at least to me, that believing that the game of chess is solved or is close to being solved ignores the fact it is easy for people to make a mistake serious enough to lose the game while not meaning to.



Hnmmm, no, I don't think that's quite right. A "solved" game means that there is a winner at the end. And naturally, most chess games involve either the white or black player winning. Where the controversy comes in is with draw games. Allow me to explain.

Take Connect Four. Connect Four is known to be a solved game. There is always a winner -- at some point, the losing player has to hit the little trigger to dump all the chips which the game defined as the loser. That is an active solved game: the loser has to do something.

Tic Tac Toe is also a solved game, but it is a passive solved game. When you win Tic Tac Toe, you note the victory by drawing a line through your three marks in a row. This serves to both draw attention to the victory, but humiliate the loser. When you have that done to you (passive), it's a solved game.

This brings us to chess. The philosophy behind chess being a solved game is that you aren't really playing the other player, you are playing the game of chess. Right? I mean, people say it all the time. "Let's play chess." "We're playing chess." You don't go and say, "I'm playing Paul." People would have no idea what we're playing. So when there is a draw game, it means the game is over versus chess. The passive winner is chess. Either white defeats black, black defeats white or there is a draw game where the players lose to the game of kings.

It took me a while to understand solved games, but I think that lays it out.

the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!
PREVIOUS NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
Here's an online chess tournament I'm in. by pinback 12/03/2015, 3:30pm PST NEW
    Unfortunately, chess is a "solved game." by Ice Cream Jonsey 12/03/2015, 4:16pm PST NEW
        Chess is not solved. Like you said, that has a specific meaning by Entropy Stew 12/03/2015, 9:47pm PST NEW
        Are you out of your mind, or just more brain damaged than me? by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 12/04/2015, 3:26pm PST NEW
            Re: Are you out of your mind, or just more brain damaged than me? by Ice Cream Jonsey 12/04/2015, 3:47pm PST NEW
            I LOST AGAIN?! TIME TO FUCK SHIT UP NT by 12 year old TDarcos 12/04/2015, 4:05pm PST NEW
            Jesus fucking Christ, TDARCOS really did read the goddamn Wikipedia chess articl NT by Mysterio Lollerson 12/04/2015, 11:09pm PST NEW
            The fact that a computer is making a move is immaterial by Entropy Stew 12/05/2015, 1:07am PST NEW
 
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