Taikyoku Shogi

Yes, well, self control is incredibly hard, and we all die one day. No need to feel guilty about doing something you find interesting.

I think you can extend that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, i.e. "what is the value of leisure time?", and then you arrive at a question that's been debated by philosophers... well, as long as philosophy has existed.

I struggle with this question for myself, certainly. I know I could be working on some kind of revenue-generating side project, or volunteering my time on a political campaign I believe in, or working to feed the homeless, but instead I play video games. Is that.. okay? Is it "right" or "good"? I don't know that I have a perfect answer.

I know this much: without some amount of leisure time, I'd go crazy, nor would I be much use in any of my "productive" capabilities; so clearly, there's an amount of leisure time that is a net good for me. I think the question becomes: what is that amount?

The goal of solving problems would be to make people happier. You're a people. Don't forget yourself.

You ever hear the saying "Ted Kaczynski never played Monopoly." (it might have been a different board game - I forget the saying TBH. I heard it in passing at a bar one night when I was saying how I should be working instead of hanging out) I think it has to do with the fact that we all need to decompress sometimes. If all you do is something important 100% of the time, your going to end up being a crazy person. People need a valve release.

There is a more general idea here: why don't we efficiently allocate resources, when we know that we could?

Why is the fashion industry so big? Apparently it causes >10% of carbon emissions. 85% of used clothes end up in the dump.

Why is marketing so big? It has long since surpassed the point where it simply matches products with demand. The best marketing is designed to create demand. I view that as a market inefficiency.

The human emotional system has been tuned for local optimization and self benefit.

This is the same argument against basic and theoretical research. Why spend your time studying obscure insects and animals when you could be doing something worth while? Why study pure math or chase strange theorems that often have no application to anything relevant what so ever?

Because these endeavors all lead to novel tools and learnings that are at times applicable in surprising ways to help solve "whatever important problem."

For example, number theory, on its face, seems completely useless, and since 1800 BCE, years were "wasted" by scholars toying with useless factoring problems...

...until we got RSA cryptography in the 1970s.

If I had lived in the year 1900, I could have never imagined number theory having such immensely important applications, but in 2020, I sure as hell believe AlphaGo and these game solvers have relevance because it's already bearing fruit.

AlphaGo, for one, inspired many application papers. My favorite example though is of a neural net trained to solve CSPs through sudoko which was applied to the inverse protein folding problem! https://ostrokach.gitlab.io/project/proteinsolver/

Having fun is an important part of the learning process, which ultimately lead to technological advances so I don't think it's a waste. Also, mining crypto could be a total waste of energy.

You think it’s a waste to some the time and energy on board games, but it’s not a waste on curing cancer. It’s a bias, why is it more value able to do the latter?

Why bother having fun? Why bother reading? Why bother doing anything but maximizing your human potential? Because it is exhausting. We eat fruit not just for the nutrition and dietary fiber. It is also delicious and inspires joy.

And joy might be the best thing we can have.

I'm gonna go against concensus and say I agree. There are countless excuses for why it's a net neutral or even a positive for us to waste our most finite resource (time). But chances are, you're not going to be glad you played that one extra game, or watched more TV shows, when you're on your deathbed.

I don't accept that life is about happiness. Happiness is too vague of a term, used to describe multiple different things. Does it mean a measure of how much pleasure one is feeling in a given moment? Satisfaction with one's own life? How much entertainment someone manages to have?

We could reduce the argument that life is about simple pleasure to its logical conclusion, and ask why it wouldn't be optimal to use drugs and/or a neural device to induce a semiconscious, lasting state of maximal pleasure. I don't accept that most people would choose this life. And to anticipate that objection that it's because you have to look at a ultiliarian view of everyone's happiness, I don't think most people would choose to have everyone collectively in that state, either.

I assert that life is about meaning. That's why the above doesn't sound appealing (probably). What do you do that is truly meaningful, to yourself? That is what makes a life well lived and gives you satisfaction, and it's separate from how happy you feel.

And it could be chess games. It's up to us to look inside and figure it out for ourselves. I'm just tired of people expressing existential angst and it being met with "it makes you feel good so it's good".

Human thought and attention isn't fungible. I can think about my job for a certain amount of time and then my productivity plummets, I can read for pleasure for a certain amount of time before I get antsy and my mind drifts, and so on. There's no "cure" for this because humans are intrinsically capable of stepping outside of the system and imagining what else we could be doing at a given moment; getting in the zone is a way to quiet this line of thinking, but humans have a specific amount of "zone" in them and that's it.

If we assume a slippery slope here, it goes

- why play a game when you could work for society?

- why work for society when you could create replicateable value for society's future?

- why do that when you could change society?

- why do that when you could save lives today?

- why do that when you could save humanity from extinction?

- why do that, any of that...at all?

At the end of the day, the only remotely satisfactory reason for doing anything is to pursue individual fulfillment (even if that be in pursuit of a collective goal).

Additionally, progress in any valuable-to-society pursuit does not happen singularly within the confines of an academic or professional field. Human brains work in mysterious ways, and giving them a wider space of things to bounce off of and different systems to analyze only strengthens it, not take away from it.

I would be willing to bet the time (if/when) we find a cure to cancer will be concurrent with the most board-game-shaped-activities being participated in by humanity, not the least.

TL;DR: human brain utility is non-zero-sum, unlike computers.

How else can you learn to think? You need the ability to fail, repeatedly, in a short amount of time.

Then you need people who actually dedicate serious resources to the game, to bring it to its limit and to be able to teach students the relevant parts.

If people spent more time playing board games and less time fighting and mistreating each other, the world would be on the whole a better place.

Keep a balanced approach! The mind is part of your physical body and just like the rest of you it needs periods of rest and exercise.

A great quote I heard about physical training is, "if you try to peak all the time you will plateau."

Work is important but it is helpful to have a couple of things to do with your life besides it.

I prefer the reverse question: "What's the purpose of these 'productive' activities" - usually to increase the amount of time I have to read articles about bizarrely huge japanese chess games I guess :)

Apart from the obvious points like burnout, the point of living is really to live - not to work. We work to live sure, but in a perfect world we’d all be able to do what we want such as Place chess right?

If you're able to find a way to use peoples desire for playing to solve hard problems like curing cancer, you'll deserve a nobel prize.

You'd be turning work into fun, and that into solving hard human problems. If you get there, maybe you'll notice that curing cancer wouldn't help humanity in the long run, so you'd turn to the cause of that. Could end up in a vicious circle. But as long as it is fun, go for it.

Chess as a purely mental challenge is not that interesting to me, and playing against a computer is not something I like at all. But playing against a human opponent is one of the few games that interest me. I like that it is so old and has so long traditions, that means something in addition. So my conclusion is, it is as much a social activity as a mental one.

> the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem

That's the catch. We don't know what problems are important. We think we do, and sometimes we're right, but we've gone down dead ends too. And sometimes something that feels like a dead end turns out to be pivotal.

I'd bet there's many scientists and researchers out there who had their eureka moment while their brain was disengaged during leisure time. Disconnecting and play are essential parts of discovering the important things.

I think people tend to be bad at difficult tasks they are not specifically interested in, and we're all better served if people tend to be able to work on what they're interested in. I suspect that's going to end up better than if we somehow create a list of world problems ranked from the most to the least important and get the entire world to work from the top of the list down. (Never mind the difficulty of creating such a list.)

There are charities that focus on reducing human hunger. There are also charities that focus on reducing child hunger. Why should the latter exist, since it's a subset of the former? Isn't everyone working on the child hunger charities ignoring the problems of adult hunger? Of course not. There are just some people who, for whatever reason, are specifically interested and motivated in fighting child hunger, and I strongly suspect that overall outcomes are better when those people have the opportunity to focus their work on child hunger.

>There is a huge number of people on this planet wasting their mental energy (computional power) on a board game where the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem. What's the difference between using calories to compute unnecessary peer to peer game calculations with no goal vs. using electricity to compute hashes in crypto mining.

The problem is that without some eventual justification the whole value system becomes circular. You can't put all of your efforts into working to keep people alive so they can... put all of their efforts into working to keep people alive, etc. All value systems are ultimately circular or unjustified, but the latter is IMHO superior since it's more honest.

Because life is short and you should do what you're passionate about!

Six days ago, I had brain surgery. I made it home a few days ago and I'm still mostly bed ridden. Despite this, I'm starting to work again because I love my job and I'll be bored out of my mind if I stop...

If I was at differently stage in my career, I would probably be playing Civ and shooting for a religious victory under Canada (the religion would be named "Tim Horton's" of course).

I think it goes both ways. If Hitler or <your favorite historical bad guy> had spent their time playing chess instead of <bad things>, we would've been better off collectively. Also, who says I'm smart enough to contribute to cancer research?

Evolution and markets are efficient. The purpose of your genes to copy themselves (“Selfish Gene”). As long as it happens, evolution doesn’t care what host is doing in leisure time.

Because you can't always reach "noble goals" by simply brute forcing your way through them. Looking at other topics, even the most mundane ones, could end up giving you new ways to conceptualize reality.

Another take on this is that there is no "noble goal" at all, whatever one individual finds interesting is their own choice and freedom and there's no reason to create a hierarchy of goals which would be completely arbitrary.

Remember that the Jacquard loom was invented so people could have frilly damask fabrics, and that's where punch card programming came from. You can't conceive of what advances might come from the study of something seemingly frivolous. Progress and innovation aren't necessarily cranks that you can just focus on grinding harder.

The mental effort required to run the human analog to alpha-beta pruning is extremely rewarding for other tasks. Mental working memory is significantly stressed (and therefor, more capable). I wouldn't be surprised if studies on GM chess players show that their brains stay far more strong as they age than average individuals.

As you grow older mind sports are an effective and cheap way to stay mentally active.

Much better than being at home watching TV all day which is what many elderly people are forced to do due to poor mobility.

In Japan many elderly people play Go and Shogi. In China people play Weichi and Xiangqi, the equivalent games respectively.

They are also not necessarily a waste of time. The intuition and insights gained in board games can be used in other aspects of your life.

We do many wasteful things as humans. We cut down trees to turn them into supermarket marketing that go directly into the trash.

We drive 5 seat vehicles with one person in them and spend a lot of time waiting in traffic so for other 5 seat vehicles with one person in them.

We spend money on overpriced shiny stuff with no purpose.

We spend years in college learning about computer science so we can disregard most of it and push dirty code full of tech debt.

We spend in scientific research so then a climate change denier, flat earther or anti vaxxer refutes it with no proof.

The premise of your question is the world model in which humans are given short lifespans to do something, replicate themselves and vanish from existence. I won't debate this hypothesis, but I want us to agree that this model isn't necessarily correct.

In the first world model, wasting energy and time is indeed suboptimal and humans indeed must focus on survival. In the second world model, curing the cancer is about as valuable as extending the lifetime of cars to thousands of years, while figuring out how the world works is the number one priority. I believe that humans intuitively lean towards the second model, and although they can't say it out loud, they do things that are optimal in that model. Thinking about chess won't extend anyone's lifetime, but it might reveal something important about the underlying principles of our world or of our thinking process and we secretly recognize that making that little discovery would be worth everything.

Leisure time etc. is very important to creativity and productivity as well. There's a lot of studies that I'm too lazy to link to, but you can find them pretty easily.

People aren't computers, but even without the computational analogies, what you're saying is still true. We spend a lot of our time and energy on unimportant problems while the world is full of real problems that could use our help.

I think what it comes down to is access. It's easier to buy a chess board and books about chess strategy than it is to buy the tools you would need to do cancer research. The chess community is open to anyone who wants to join; to join the cancer research community, you need years of school. There's an institution sitting in front of the problem saying "trust us, we're working on it" -- and if you want to work on it too, you have to do it as part of that institution. Most people aren't motivated enough to climb this institutional mountain. They'd rather stay at base camp and enjoy themselves.

(This is one nice thing about software, by the way. You don't need a degree or an expensive lab to play around, learn, and contribute.)

having fun and create are basic human needs, it's like asking why are people spend time sleeping instead of working, or saying art is useless

I want to download a car.

> wasting their mental energy (computional power) on a board game where the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem

Frankly I'm much more worried about engineers wasting their mental energy on improving tracking of users to sell useless stuff that will end up in a landfill.

Hardcore optimization of one's life is the path to becoming soulless imho.

Your question made me think of Richard Feynman. He had this approach where he had a dozen difficult problems in the back of his mind and every time he learned a new technique or perspective, he would re-evaluate each of them and see if the new technique could help get him closer to a solution. This made him sometimes come up with brilliant solutions that nobody else had thought of. So there can be enormous value in using insight from one domain in another domain. Point being, don't discount the value of using your brain in different ways - there's plenty of people hammering at problems from the obvious direction, and you're actually more likely to be able to contribute in a significant way if you're not a one-trick pony. Plus, by going with the grain of how your brain works, and what motivates you, rather than against it, you are able to be "productive" (actively thinking and learning) much longer and more effectively than by forcing yourself to work on something because you "should".

IMO that's like saying why all those athletes waste their time warming up, instead of breaking world records.

It's ok to have fun.

Yeah, the presence of piece drops means the average piece power has to be lower in Shogi. If you play Crazyhouse you see how quick the game is if you have drops in a game with as powerful pieces as Chess.

I think both games have their interesting parts and it's fun to play both.

> And, you are expected to recognize a checkmate and resign

Is that different from chess?

> And pawns capture diagonally which I have always found very weird.

If you ever do reenactment of a sword-and-shield line fight it'll make a lot more sense. You naturally counter the person in front of you and neither makes any progress, the people who are diagonal from each other are where the action is.

Yeah, my first thought was that this is the 16th century version of The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43. Probably only played a few dozen times in the history of the world.

I don't know what the Japanese word for Grognard is, but whomever played this qualifies.

> For example "Advanced European Theater of Operations" has 2200 pieces played on 2 poster-sized maps...

And can be linked to Advanced Pacific Theater of Operations for those who think it is too small of a game on its own.

Awesome!

This is a smaller variant.

You could still fit this in the Twilight Imperium box and have enough room left over for Gloomhaven.

Deep Mind have already beat this game with AlphaZero.

The Chimera Ant Arc is top-tier.

The game they spend most of the time playing is the fictional Gungi [0].

[0] - https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Gungi

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_records#Ar... :

- Longest article title: Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles (253 characters)

- Longest article title without spaces: Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon (183 characters)

- Longest full typed number with an article: 9,223,372,036,854,775,807

EDIT: Er, it makes more sense for me to have interpreted that as article length rather than title length. :P There's actually an entire autogenerated page for tracking that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages

> Because the game was found only recently after centuries of obscurity, it is difficult to say exactly what all the rules were.

Proceeds to detail information on 257 different unit types

Indeed, "List of fatal dog attacks in the United States (2010s)" is currently the 15th longest article on Wikipedia. "Taikyoku shogi" is far behind but still respectable at #80. But of course neither can touch the absolute epic "List of Red vs. Blue episodes".

Based on the link kibwen provided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages