Playing to Lose (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Playing to Lose (2014)

jefftk.com

49 pointsluu16 comments

In the game "First Loser Wins" you win points by coming in second place in competitions, and then you win the game overall by having the second-most amount of points. http://firstloserwins.com

It's difficult to develop a winning strategy.

There are a couple of other important changes in basketball:

1. The three-second rule is no longer a significant factor.

2. The offense can only possess the ball for ten seconds on the side of the court they're trying to score on. After that, they either lose the ball, or they have to retreat across half-court and shoot from there.

> When you have your stronger players stay on the bench but still keep going for goals you're balancing your desire to lose against your need to look to the judges like you're still trying to win.

This reminds me of historical approaches to war-fighting, where both you and your opponent nation-state would build e.g. five classes of ships, biggest to smallest; and then bring them all with you to a battle; and then your big ships would fight their big ships, while your medium ships fought their medium ships, and the smalls fought the smalls.

It always seemed to me that, in such situations, choosing to send those medium and small ships off to fight one-another was, in some way, "playing to lose"—or at least not "playing to win."

It goes against the more recent war-fighting learning: force concentration. If you've got medium and small units, well, you can have them also shoot at whatever the big units are shooting at, and maybe it'll get dead sooner such that they can all move onto shooting at something else!

I hope the analogy to business strategies is obvious :)

> and then your big ships would fight their big ships, while your medium ships fought their medium ships, and the smalls fought the smalls.

big ships, medium ships, small ships ≤ big ships, big ships, big ships

Thus (assuming big ships are more advantageous) show up to the battlefield with all big ships.

If you have infinite resources, sure, just make infinite big ships.

You make medium and small ships because they’re more cost-efficient: they can turn the same number of dollars into more mobile gun/missile barrels (usually at the cost of armour—the little ships are like DPS “glass cannons.”) But whereas a DPS player in an MMO game gets protected by a “tank” player while they do as much concentrated damage as possible, conventional historical military doctrine actually had the small ships act as a “screen” for the big ships—effectively having the DPS “tanking” for the “tank”!

Luckily, we’ve worked out how crazy this was in the last 80 years, and modern doctrine for combined use of air and sea materiel actually concentrates fire and has the most durable units protecting the strike units (basically by having the sea units protect the air units from below, recapitulating the millennia-old role of mobile artillery in protection of—and area denial for—infantry.)

That assumes all your navy does is fight pitched ship-to-ship naval battles. Historically, countries also needed ships for important functions such as reconnaissance, communication, blockades, harassment of enemy shipping, protection of friendly shipping, coastal raids, coastal security, transport of troops and supplies, and control of smuggling. In fact, the only reason you even care about winning big pitched naval battles is to control the seas so your navy could execute those functions better than the other navy! So you definitely need all those small and medium-sized ships, and in the case of a big battle, you wouldn't automatically send them away. You'd bring them to the fight as long as you believed their impact would outweigh the risk and trouble of bringing them.

Source: I read a couple of Horatio Hornblower novels a decade ago.

This is a non sequitur. One can lose by not appearing, by violating rules, by exposing yourself to the spectators, etc. Because the solution space for “win-losing” is infinite, there is no game, hence no winning or losing.

> But what if we relax the second requirement to only apply to intentional resignations, forfeitures, and fouls? What if we had a game where both sides were trying their absolute hardest to make the other side win?

The article address that. You still have to follow the rules of the game.

No, you see, the article author is playing a supergame which is won by finding a play-to-lose version of a game. The parent commenter is simply playing the play-to-lose version of that supergame.

I don't think that's the point of the article. It's to appear within the confines of the game to pursue winning, while retaining losing as the goal. Perhaps it makes the game more challenging when, for whatever reason, the game is no longer fun to play. I imagine athletes at their peak fitness and training would be performing in a way that can become routine, repetitive, and restrictive.

Similarly, 5 red cards would end the game in soccer (must field 7). If that's considered forfeiting and not just playing to lose, there would then be stalling when the other team scores to waste time. This is something that is a part of the game today. One team passes the ball back to score an own goal, the other team has someone sprint after it and go down with a hamstring injury. Injury time will be added, but it never quite adds up to the amount of time actually wasted. In this style of game, I have Italy edging out Brazil in the finals.

Here is a tic-tac-toe version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe_variants

And a chess version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_Chess

A large (finite?) list of chess variants also exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants

To be expected but nonetheless amazing how changing one bit in the game rules can have strong effects in gameplay and strategy.

This is odd - so we just switched the definitions of winning an losing by switching the rules around.

We could just play RevSoccer where the other team needs to stop you from scoring own goals. You're technically still playing to succeed (i.e. win).

I’m sorry to tell you all that I just lost the game, and now you have too.

I was really confused when reading about the text under title "Football". Then I noticed the title "Soccer". I guess I'll never learn.

Apparently "sakkā (サッカー), derived from "soccer", is much more commonly used than futtobōru (フットボール)" in Japan[1].

The term "soccer" also seems to be used in South Africa, although not exclusively[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Japan [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Soccer_League

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