xiangqi vs chess

Factual Questions
1

i play xiangqi or “chinese chess”. i was wandering around wikipedia where it says xiangqi has a game-tree complexity of 10[sup]150[/Sup] while chess is 10[sup]123[/Sup]. does that mean xiangqi is more complex than chess?

i’m not looking for reasonable comparisons really, as it would be rather pointless; just whether i can spew “xiangqi is more complex that chess dismissive wave” as fact to irritate my chess friends. :smiley: :ducks:

2

silence means it is true then. ok. :evil grin:

3

Go is already said to be more complex than chess:

From here

4

There’s supposed to be superscripts there after the 10.
I also missed this most important tidbit:

There are…a total of about 9.3x10^567 games.

5

Yes, but Go is not Xiangqi.

Of course, if we’re talking Go, may I advise that rather than deliberately offending your chess playing friends, instead why not bring your Goban and show them how much fun it is to play.

6

This I understand. I was just adding the info so he could irritate his chess friends.

7

go is something else altogether, while xiangqi and chess is similar enough for comparison. i’ve tried introducing the game to them before, but the reaction is ‘it is so similar what’s the point?’, which is also my reaction when i tried chess…

8

The size of a game tree doesn’t always tell the whole story about the complexity of a game. I used to dabble in the Complexity Theory of games, real and abstract. It turns out that generalized versions of Go, Chess, Checkers and even Go_Moku are all Exponential Time Complete.* That is, they are all similar in complexity. (Avoiding a lot of definitions here.)

But obviously Checkers In Real Life is nowhere near as complex as the others. A world class Checkers program is something a 2nd year CS student could whip out. A decent Chess program requires a grad student who really knows the game. They’re still working on coming up with a really good Go program.

They are games with infinite game trees (no repeating positions) which are trivial solvable. But others are Turing complete.

[Game tree] size doesn’t matter.

*I was a referee on 2 of the papers that presented these results. The editor started begging me to find a reason to reject the papers to avoid having to publish every game completeness paper.