OT: Game Theory/Statistics

[narf poit chez BOOM]

That's still a guessing game. You've simply added a meta strategy game over a series of games.

(You know you've hung out over at The Forge for too long when...)

[AngleWyrm]

True, and a great summary of a lot of Game Theory games. they tend to have both players secretly select a move and then reveal the results. Not necessarily a bad thing -- the opening moves in most RTS and 4X games are done without the other player knowing what you're doing.

But it gets so much attention -- is it because it's easy to do on a chalk board? How would you quantify building a scout to shorten the time until you know something about your opponant's build order?

Secrecy does have merit in war. I once saw an interesting definition of a secret: Any info that, if others found out, would damage your score. Something like that.

Another problem is framing games of perfect knowledge like chess, where you see all and take turns. They are usually drawn as a tree of possibilities, that quickly grows enormous. Too much, really. Maybe that's the problem that needs to be worked on: How to represent a game where the players take turns, and see the pieces, but doesn't draw out to an exploding tree.

Like maybe some sort of greedy current situation heuristic, that only remembers a short list of successful things tried when in the current/similar position. And maybe also a short list of tragic things to definitely not try when in that situation. Isn't that sort of how people do it?

[capnq]

AngleWyrm said: Maybe that's the problem that needs to be worked on: How to represent a game where the players take turns, and see the pieces, but doesn't draw out to an exploding tree.

I dunno, a game that doesn't develop into an exploding tree sounds kind of dull to me.

Lots of things are like that: the interesting stuff is rarely easy to analyze.

[AngleWyrm]

Oh no, I didn't mean that the game would be different. Take chess for example. You can still model the game as an exploding tree if you like, but it's not possible to draw the whole thing out. It's too big.

Now think of another way to model the game of chess (no changes to the game of chess allowed).