I was going to ask the same question. I would assume that most (not all, but most) of the looking-ahead in the middle game involves ‘forcing moves’ - checks, captures, threats of capture - that limit the number of viable replies, because that’s what allows you to de-clutter the landscape of possible futures.
If you’ve got 30 possible moves you’re considering, this move, and only 3 of them substantially restrict your opponent’s array of viable responses, then you’re looking at over 800 possible positions the next time it’s your turn to move. My USCF rating never got out of the low 1700s, so I don’t know what goes through the mind of a really good chessplayer, but it just seems improbable to me that a GM is considering more than a fraction of those.
Since you’re internationally ranked, glee, you’re one of those good chessplayers whose thought processes with respect to chess are beyond mine, so I’d be interested in anything you have to say about how you look ahead while playing.
Finally finishing Zelda, TOOT will be a major accomplishment for me. I still haven’t done it although most my contemporaries think it’s ridiculous for a 51 year old to still play games.
Kasparov worked incredibly hard on both those matches. He spent months preparing for Deep Blue, and it was the most watched chess match ever. It was at least the equivalent of Fischer-Spassky - do you count that as a ‘real professional chess match’?
Obvviously you don’t understand what it meant to both Kasparov and the chess audience. Facing a computer is unnerving, because (for example) they never tire and have analysed every tournament game you’ve ever played.
As for the match v the Rest of the World, there were 4 top juniors each working hard and each leading Internet discussions. Undoubtedly the most analysed game ever. 75,000 people making suggestions and doing analysis over 4 months and you think it’s a ‘game show’? :rolleyes:
How do you know a move does not have merit without analysing it?
How do you know in which cases it would be reasonable to assume this?
As computer programs have shown, you can’t discard anything without checking it.
I admit I exaggerated (almost all moves are discarded well before the 8 move example, but I was irritated by posters who don’t understand the work that goes into international chess. (see above)
It is fascinating to study the thought processes of top players.
You don’t necessarily study the forcing moves first - the position ‘makes demands’ on you - by which I mean you have to understand what plans are more likely to work and see how to implement them.
In your example, what if the best move is not one of the forcing ones?
Watching Magnus Carlssen play the sharp + tactical Dragon is scary, because there could easily be a forcing continuation leading to a lost position several moves ahead (and both players know this).
Based on analysing with GM’s*, they do indeed analyse deeply only 1-4 moves at each stage. But they have to select those out of 30-odd choices - and they can’t explain how they do it. Obviously pattern recognition, memory, positional understanding and experience all play some part. but to see a GM wander over to a game you’re analysing and make an astute observation after a few seconds is scary.
*my best rating was 2390. A GM told me seriously once that nobody under 2400 understands chess at all!
Who cares? The question was whether or not chess can draw big audiences and I responded that the reason those events drew big audiences was because of the game show factor.
If Kasparov was playing a man who was nicknamed “Deep Blue” instead of the prototype for Skynet (while not the same match, does everyone remember this image?), would anyone at all outside of the chess community have cared?
The sentence she was responding to was “anything that you are using to escape your own life isn’t necessarily the healthiest thing.” I see nothing in her statement that the pasttime as a whole leads to these things. And she has since clarified TWICE that its SOME.
It isn’t medically speaking, an addiction. But it doesn’t really matter if what you are using to escape your life is reading or games or golf or scrapbooking or crossword puzzles.
If you are managing to pursue whatever your hobby is without it interfering with your responsibilities (your family, your non-hobby related friends, your job, having clean laundry, having groceries in the house), then it isn’t damaging.
I know people who read / play computer games / watch TV/ run / golf / got religion - what have you - to the point that they don’t take care of the stuff that happens in their regular life - it doesn’t matter what that activity is - that’s not healthy.
I’m not saying anything bad about any of these activities. I play video games. I watch TV. I read. At times, I’ve done these things to counterproductive levels - to the point where they’ve caused more problems in life than the pleasure they’ve given. Watching stupid TV in order to not write a paper in college… Playing computer games when laundry and dishes continue to pile up and my son needs clean jeans. Reading novels when I really should be working… Been there, done that. Been able to stop before its become really problematic, but I’ve noticed the tendency. And I also know that I’m not alone.
Sure and the point I was making to her, and which I’ll repeat to you, is that it’s a mistake to focus on those people with that tendency. Yeah we all know people who get lost in games (or maybe have experienced something like it). But we know even more people - many more, I’d bet - who play games without any troubles.
Let me venture an analogy - someone who likes wine, goes to wine tastings, has a wine cellar and so on might come into some teasing about being a snobby oenophile but most people wouldn’t jump from ‘he’s kind of silly about his wines’ right to ‘therefore he must be an alcoholic’. Oenophila itself does have a certain cachet and lends an air of worldliness or social capital to the person who pursues it - even though alcoholism has killed more people than video games ever will and even though some percentage of Oenophiles probably are coincidentally alcoholics.
So why, with videogames, is it that people feel a need to reference those problem gamers immediately? Why, when the subject comes up, do people so quickly reach for phrases like ‘addict’ and ‘devoting their life to it’ when in reality most gamers are healthy and happy individuals. (And just to reiterate, I don’t think ‘gamer’ is a term that applies only to harcore FPS type games’.)
Actually, I guess that’s a big part of what I’m saying - pretty much everyone who uses a computer is a gamer on some level. Unless they’re Steve Jobs, I mean. Gamer isn’t a niche category. It’s a mistake to feel like one has to clarify - ‘oh, well, I don’t devote my whole life to it’ as if that’s the default
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been trying to get at. I’m not going to keep harping on my point since I’ve already posted more than three times.
As for you chess players:
You’re not playing the right video games.
(Sorry I had to say it. Do you play Go, too, by any chance, glee?)
Does this actually happen in the real world? Or are we complaining about a nonexistent problem? Because it doesn’t happen on my planet.
I mean, I play video games. Everyone I know knows that. I’ve never had any of them suggest I was addicted to video games or suddenly raised the spectre of video game addiction. My sister’s a long time WoW player and nobody talks about video game addiction with her. Nobody prattled about video game addiction to my wife when she was into EverQuest or Pharaoh.
Well, actually, that’s simply false. Chess is a deep and fascinating game, but it’s not that complex. The number of potential board positions may seem gigantic if you play math games, and you can quote silly numbers like players analyzing 6.5*10^11 positions in midgame - which, obviously, they do not, or even a thousandth that many - but it’s certainly far less than the number of potential states that can exist in, say, a computer strategy game like Civilization. By what possible measure does chess involve more “calculation” than Civilization? It can’t; Civilization isn’t even all that complex a game but its potential complexity is orders of magnitude greater than chess, when you’ve got multiple players moving scores of pieces around a “Board” twenty times larger than a chessboard and making a thousand other decisions with no equivalent in chess.
I mean, I’m glad you’re good at chess and all, but it’s not the most complex game ever invented by humans.
And what her and I are both responding to is that anytime anyone gets over immersed in any hobby activity, these questions come up. This situation of “you drink too much, you play too many video games, you watch too much tv, you spend too much time knitting” is not unique to video gamers. And even if you aren’t over immersed, there are people who think any involvement in “your strange hobby” is bad.
And if you think that they don’t, you are self selecting.
You want a bad one - talk to gun hobbyists. There are people out there convinced anyone who has laid eyes on a gun is a violent nutjob. Gun hobbyists have it worse than video gamers by far.
Its funny you bring up wine - I have about $2,500 worth of it in my basement right now. We brought a 1992 Dom to a NYE party last night. On a very “drinky” week, my husband and I will go through two bottles of wine - about the amount that doctors will say is “heart healthy.” Anyone who is an actual oenophile will tell you we are not, by any means, excessive. And yet, people jump right to “you drink too much” all the damn time. Maybe not most people, but I also play video games and I’ve never had anyone accuse me of video game addiction, but I have had people “concerned” over my wine hobby.
I’m going to take some issue with this statement. If they were simply thought of as butchers and quacks then a physicians like James Lind (18th century) and a surgeon like John Woodall (17th century) would not have commanded the respect they did. Take a gander at John Woodall’s book The Surgion’s Mate first published in 1617 and you’ll see that the man was no quack. He must have commanded a great deal of respect because his book was issued to ships in the English East India Company, he was in charge of what went into medicine chests for the Company, and later he had the same responsibility for the medicine chests of the English army. Throughout the text of The Surgion’s Mate, an instructional manual for young surgeons going to sea, Woodall goes to great lengths to encourage them to do no harm to their patients. My favorite part of the book is when Woodall cautions surgeons to avoid trepanning their patients because the outcome was likely death.
Likewise James Lind, a physician, must have commanded a great deal of respect because his essay “An Essay on the Most Effectual Means of Preserving the Health of Seamen in the Royal Navy and a Dissertation on Fevers and Infection: Together with Observations on the Jail Distemper, and the Proper Methods of Preventing and Stopping its Infections” was the basis for Royal Navy policy on fumigation for the prevention of infectious diseases. Lind is better known as the man who pushed for the Royal Navy to give rations of lemons or lime to the sailors to prevent the bane of sailors everywhere, scurvy.
It’s true that you can find a lot of black humor and horror stories from contemporary sources about those in the medical field. Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) include some rather unpleasant descriptions of the conditions of where sick sailors were kept on board as well as the lack of skill many surgeons had. Smollett himself was a surgeon in the Royal Navy and based his descriptions in Roderick Random on his own experiences as well as the experiences of other surgeons.
The medical field has always had a reputation for charlatans and quackery. Livery companies such as London’s Fellowship of Surgeons and the Barbers’ Company (later combined in the Company of Barber-Surgeons circa 1540) were granted charters and part of their job was to regulate the trade to prevent bad barber-surgeons from harming people.
As Doctor John Gregory wrote in the Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician in 1772:
Gregory’s point here is that the ridicule isn’t against the concept of medical care it’s against the charlatans and quacks. I think that’s likely a valid point. Nobody would have paid Woodall to write his book for the East India Company or manage their medicine chests if they thought he was a quack or a charlatan. Nobody would have gone to see a barber-surgeon in 14th century London to get a cancer removed if they thought he was simply a charlatan or a quack.
Odesio
I’m not widely knowledgeable about starcraft, but I would have to say the number of combinations in that game have to exceed that of chess. After all, in chess you only have one opponent, as opposed to the multitude of people that can be playing starcraft. You have to account for what strategy they are following, what side they are playing on (humans, etc), what units they could be building, and many other unknowns. That is another large part of it, you have to work with unknowns. You can see what pieces another Chess player has, but you can’t always say the same in Starcraft.
Here’s one narrative of how the medical profession rose in prestige between 1850 and 1950 (one can read just the 1st two paragraphs):
I would need to dig through my archives to find a better book with more history. I think one of them used the phrase “glorified meat butchers” which I often plagiarize.
I think even prior to 1850, doctors really made a leap in respectability of repeatable results when germ and disease theory was understood. Micro-organisms like bacteria & viruses were the cause of diseases — not the sins against G-d. Ideas like this shifted the “power of healing” from the church to the medical profession.
You list several examples of doctors who were highly-respected, but I don’t think that changes the overall perception of the field a few centuries ago. I also don’t think it changes the overall message that today’s physician has more prestige than his counterparts 250 years ago.
Back to videogamers… they can’t seem to diagnose why they are disrespected so I simply brought up doctors as a possible parallel. If videogamers can elevate their worth to society (like doctors) or elevate their worth to entertainment consumers (like musicians), their complaints of misperception will solve itself.
Doctors didn’t post messages to SDMB (or bulletin boards of town square 250 years ago) asking “why does nobody love me?”
In a typical Tekken game, each player has a movelist of approximately 80-100 moves. Each of these takes between one-eighth of a second to two seconds to execute, and then it’s back to reassessing your options, taking into account your opponent’s possibly reactions from their movelist (which is wildly divergent from yours - in chess white and black have the same options with their pieces, whereas Tekken features a cast of thirty-ish, each with their own unique movelist of maybe 100 moves). Similarly, a chess board has 64 discrete positions, whereas a proximity in a Tekken match is constantly shifting along a rotating axis, where spacing is defined pixel-by-pixel and character facing (which is incredibly important) rotates through 360 degrees. Would you like me to try to break down the available number of gamestates as a formula? I can assure you it’d make the available number of chess gamestates look like kindergarten arithmetic by comparison.
The number of options available to a Tekken player is far, far, far greater than the number of options available to a chess player. This isn’t to say that fighting games are better games than chess (and, as mentioned upthread, both games heavily curtail which options are appropriate - no one would open a chess game with a3, and likewise no one in Tekken would throw out Paul’s b+1+2 while both players are standing) - the static nature of chess lines and significantly fewer options make it much more easily-dissected, which lends itself to mastery - simply that they’re far more nuanced.
“Burton, I think you’re right to compare the conversations about gaming to the conversations you had about rock music as a young man (although I think you’re underestimating the hard perseverance and grace in something like the Korean gaming competitions.) I’m betting at some point, you had people telling you that rock music was trash and listening to it would rot your mind and it would forever be inferior to the types of artistry preferred by the previous generations. Well that’s how comments about gaming sound to people who grew up playing video games.”
I don’t doubt that yet its not the same as an athletic endeavor and never will be. No reasonable person ever told a teenage boy playing baseball would be detrimental. All the boys mentioned in my earlier post participate in sports as well as video games.
I once overheard a person boasting that he had never read a book in his life ( “Books are for ponces!” was another of his statements. ) and that he gained all his knowledge from “living”! His Neanderthal features deterred me from delving into the value of his comments, but I must say, it tickled me enormously.
Chess at least at the upper levels does require the ability to look into the future based on the current state of the game, but saying that games dont is just silly, and I will use an fps for my example to boot
Tribes 1, shifter mod. tirbes was an fps that broke a lot of new ground but one thing different was that everyone had a jet pack that drained your armors energy, flight was a requirement to simply get around your base and energy management as well as ammo and health management is an on going moment by moment process. one match I fly into the enemy base through the front door lobbing grenades from a grenade gun down the main hall making sure to shoot at least one slightly left and one slightly right to get anyone in the wings, then before I even land I have swapped to my boom stick in anticipation of some close range fighting and since I am in a light armor splash damage is a bad thing in a narrow hallway. I move up to the T at a full run and scan left while moving right whipping around to check my six and as I hit the top of the ramp I am have already done my 180 turn to see whats at the top , I head for the main room with my boom stick (shotgun) pointed up a bit and just before I step into the doorway an enemy comes out click BOOM one shot to the face and hes down, I step forward and there is another one there he managed to squeeze off a round with his disc launcher but again I boom stick in the face for a one shot kill, I burn my health pack and one from the bodies and grab the last one for later, once in the room I drop a plastique between their inventory station and ammo station and jump/fly up and onto the ledge and head out the door this time I have the disc launcher armed up as I am expecting some flag D and sure enough I get hit with a turret as soon as I step out the door, fire a couple rounds near the turret and kill it with splash damage then switch to the nade launcher and back into the hall checking left and right, move ahead and start firing nades down the hall to the flag before I am even lined up with it, they will bounce down the hall going off in different spots and are very effective at clearing defenses and defenders, stop firing as I move down the hall because they will just bounce off the back wall and kill me if I dont and as I near the corner I start firing again into the hall with the flag in it. after I burn the last of the nades I poke my head around the corner to see whats left hoping there isnt any lazer turrets because they will one shot my light armor ass back to respawn. no more d other than a forcefield and since I am in Chameleon armor I can walk through that to the flag, as soon as I touch the flag the alert lets the enemies know I have it, I head back down the hall I came in to avoid any other d and this time I take a ramp down to the main room and just run right out the back and jump/boost up a long shaft to the next floor, on my way up I stick a plastique to the wall (10 second timer, anyone near it will die when it goes off) who knows who is following me at this point, I turn left and lob another plastique at an inventory station and head to my right, up the ramp into the lower generator room where there is a bad guy, I fire off a shot with my boomstick then switch to disc launcher again meanwhile hes trying to take me out with a chaingun, I boost to the upper gen room, toss another plastique and drop a satchel charge near the enemy gens and fire a round or 2 as I head out the back, the guy after me is in heavy and I am not interested in sticking around until he finds his mortar launcher once around the corner I stick another plastique to the wall and keep going, thankfully the base turret is already down as I head to the roof, as I am boosting up to the roof I get a kill message, my plastique took out the heavy I spin around and after a quick check on my health I jump/boost and fire a disc point blank into the ground at my feet which launches me at high speed across the map towards my own base, with some quick adjustments I land right in our main entrance running with a sliver of life left, thankfully our base is devoid of the bad guys because I would die to a slightly nasty fart right now. make my way to the flag and cap that bitch.
constantly thinking ahead while dealing with immediate threats, constant monitoring of energy and life bars while keeping track of how much ammo I had of the different types, I had to use an ammo pack to carry so many plastiques as it was. knowledge of the map is not enough, I also have to predict where I will run into player deployed defenses, players who can be anywhere, internal defenses and how I can expect the enemy to react once I grab the flag. can I count on my team backing me up? what do I do if I run into the unexpected? planing and fast twitch are not exclusive. thinking and reacting can go hand in hand. killing a player you cant even see because you predict his location becomes a question of is it worth a mortar round to find out if you are right? and much like chess, just because I have the option doesnt mean it gets considered. if I am playing to win I dont walk across the map firing weapons at nothing until I am out even if it is an option I never have to consider it, its totally pointless. noone other than a computer has ever once considered every possible move in chess for both players 4 turns out, simply insane to even suggest it.
crap I meant to include a bit about the Art as a player comments as well, my above post isnt anything to exceptional but there were moments while playing that game that were simply beautiful to watch. the fact that a non gamer/tribes player may not have seen that is meaningless. art is subjective it is 100% in the eye of the beholder. like watching UFC when the fighters are rolling around on the ground like a couple of fags (as I heard it described once) well thats one way of looking at it but to someone with some education in martial arts seeing 2 skilled jujitsu guys just chain countering each others moves from one to another is a thing of beauty as well.
But I just want to go back to this. You state that 99.9% of your reading is non-fiction, and thus inherently “better” than reading fiction. This bugs me, a lot. How is knowing the minutiae of the life and thoughts of historical persons (or even a major player) any more relevant than being able to quote the Lord Of The Rings chapter and verse ? I don’t get the conceit. Especially if you claim to value knowledge - surely human litterature counts as knowledge ?
As for the intellectual superiority of chess over “stupid video games”, don’t get me started. I’ll just say one thing : 3rd bloody scenario in the Dark Elf campaign of Heroes Of Might & Magic 5 on Expert difficulty. Deep Blue ? HA ! Try playing chess against 7 opponents at once. With only one set of pieces. Minus the rooks and queen. Then we’ll talk
There’s no need to get into the realm of video games, either. It’s a non-debatable fact that a game of the boardgame Diplomacy is infinitely more complex than a game of chess. Yet it only has 2 types of pieces which can only perform two actions (3 for the fleets that can ferry armies over water) - but it involves outchessing not one, but 6+ opponents at once.
Yet expert Diplomacy players don’t command the respect chess personnalities do. I for one would love being able to watch the most brilliant and devious minds in the world ponder and negociate over the Belgium problem
What’s the worth of book-reading to society or entertainment consumers ? Or, for a better question, why should the respectability judgment be based on worth to society to begin with ?
But nevermind that, since you’re guilty of intellectual fallacy : musicians are respected because they produce music, true enough - but avid music listeners are not looked down upon. Yet they don’t produce squat, don’t increase their abilities in any shape or form, and essentially waste their time idly listening to music… because it’s a pleasant activity. A pleasant passive activity, should I add (in contrast to playing games).
Should they be disrespected ? Should my dear old grandma who spends hours every day listening to classical vynils be seeing a shrink regarding her Mozart addiction ? Should I be worried about my own Led Zeppelin problem ?
