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Comment by dsjoerg | Hacker News Reader

Good point! Some reasons: 1) large and international community of players meeting and playing all the time, both in person and online

2) its a game you can play at every age, so your investment in the game pays off over your lifetime

3) all your games can be easily recorded for future analysis

4) fun for hackers: there's lots of software to analyze and manage your game history

5) also fun for hackers: there are massive databases of games at every level

6) hundreds of years of published analysis that will become interesting as you get good

7) playing well requires you develop and exercise a wide range of cognitive skills

I'm going to a tournament tonight at my local club. I'm terrible (USCF 1224) but playing is a rush.

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You can do all those things and more with other games. Eg: street fighter.

I'm just agreeing with xyzzy4; finding the game fun is more important than anything else.

Personally, I don't like the fact that luck is a bigger factor that chess players are willing to admit. Sometimes you make a move that anyone would consider strategically good, but little did you know, that move would put you in a bad situation many moves later, and only a machine or maybe a grand master could know it.

> You can do all those things and more with other games. Eg: street fighter.

While you're right (all ages can play Street Fighter), it's hardly something that one can expect to be common in, say, 45 years. Chess will certainly still be played ubiquitously.

Furthermore, Street Fighter requires good reaction times, hand/eye coordination, etc. A better counter-point might be something like poker (or another card game).

That said, you're right: if you don't find chess (as a game) interesting, you probably shouldn't spend time pursuing it :)

I'd like to add Scrabble to this list - it will be around in 45 years for sure, though the number of people playing is orders of magnitude smaller than Chess

Provided you like it, Scrabble can also be nice to acquire new vocabularies in foreign languages.

True, in fact the french scrabble champion recently doesn't even speak french, he just memorized a ton of words: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...

This is interesting in and of itself. I think it would be interesting to have a linguistic conversation surrounding it. This is akin to memorizing gibberish (in this case, words without meaning). Which is more difficult than it sounds!

I'm amazed that he also (intuitively) figured out "the French sound" (the linguistic term escapes me) well enough to be able to call out words for not being words. I wouldn't be surprised if many French speakers tried to sneak some high scoring words past him, knowing he can't speak French only to be flabbergasted when he called their bluff.

French has less hybrid linguistic heritage than English, so its orthography is much more regular. Scrabble is a very English game.

Street Fighter has been here for about 26 years, and it's only growing. It's going professional, with sponsors for the players and everything :p

And by the way, I too thought the reactions needed were insane. But after some time, you realize all that is just muscle memory, and the hard part is the strategy. It's a conversation between two minds.

One critical skill in chess is the ability to analyze the consequences of your various options, several moves ahead. If you find yourself in a situation you didn't foresee, that's not bad luck, you just need to work on improving this critical skill.

I think high level Street Fighter play has the some factor. But! I'm not arguing one is better than the other. If someone wants to play chess, play chess.

Your definition of "randomness" is interesting (but classifying it as a problem is misleading). Of course, if you don't have profound knowledge/skill of a game and you're not able to evaluate moves, their outcome will seem random just because you're ignorant of them. That's exactly what differentiates good and bad players! If the game were not random for newcomers and they could predict the outcome of every move, they would win or lose solely based on starting conditions (i.e. the game becomes perfect play tic-tac-toe).

Chess isn't random, it's chaotic. Where randomness is unpredictable, chaos is deterministic but so computationally complex that it can't practically be solved. Chess is the art of navigating that chaos.

That definition of randomness is actually fine (randomness as ignorance), it's consistent, and the most often used definition actually. For example, take the Monty Hall problem: it doesn't matter what process Monty actually uses to choose doors, all that matter is you're ignorant of it (so you choose the uniform prior).

In fact I don't think many processes in nature are truly random (quantum phenomena have to have a large effect and you need to choose a no-hidden-variable theory), but it doesn't really matter. It's just a model.

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