Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
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> “Chess is not a game [in a game theory sense]. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position […] If you lose at a game of chess, it must be because there were better moves that you didn’t make or didn’t see.”
> “The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of ‘real games.’ They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception […] Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.”
I agree with you that life doesn't come with symmetric information, but to argue that "Chess is a well-defined form of computation" is a bit much. Go/Weiqi is also a computation problem given this argument. What precludes asymmetric info games like poker from being "computation" problems, if one takes a wide enough view (to include the unknowns as the modeled state)? Quantum computing inherently probabilistic.
Your second argument is about zero sum stakes, and I think this criticism applies to virtually all "toy" games we play.
> They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception
As do decisions in chess, because the players aren't perfect computers.
I agree with the assessment that it is a computation problem.
As a go player for 25 years, I never thought that I would see a computer consistently beat a strong amateur in my lifetime (with many decades still theoretically left to live). Not only did I see it much sooner than I expected, but AI beats the best pros at an almost 100% win rate.
Within the Go community, there is consternation that a computer can make some moves that humans probably shouldn’t make due to the ability of the computer to follow up properly where humans cannot (yet).
This may change over time, but right now the computation part of the go world is much closer to expressing perfect play in a complete information game than humans are.
> What precludes asymmetric info games like poker from being "computation" problems, if one takes a wide enough view (to include the unknowns as the modeled state)?
Also as an avid poker player, I think many aspects of poker are rapidly leaning this direction, even though poker does not have complete information.
I’m not sure how much you know about the current poker scene, but GTO solvers have opened the poker world’s collective mind about what “good” play looks like, and the players are riding the tails of the computers in terms of strategic and tactical evolution.
In some formats, like heads up limit hold em, the game has been effectively solved.
Bringing it back to the original topic, I would love to see a GTO version of life. Even if it is hard to implement, it could provide a guide that informs decision making.
I personally don’t think I will see it in my lifetime. That said, like Go AI, I hope I’m wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%27s_theorem_(game_theo...
You kind of have to use a metaphor to praise monopolist practices ;-)
As a mediocre chess player who has played too many subpar bullet games, I've begun to recognize patterns. For instance, sometimes my opponent has a good move that they are ignoring, but then I make a bad move that naturally highlights that good move. And then my opponent makes that good move. To me, it seems there should be some good analogies to make in business, where your decision spurs your competitor to make a great decision. I just can't think of any.
Or the idea that chess is about keeping your options as wide open as possible and limiting your opponents options (i.e., to restrict the king). That's one reason you might play for the center. It is certainly why the Queen is more valuable than all the other pieces... she has more squares she can move to. Typically a knight on the edge of the board is inferior to a knight in the center because the edge reduces its 8 maximum moves. IIRC, you can compare point values assigned to each piece with the number moves a piece can make average over all position in an empty chess board and see that the proportions match up. It is also why playing positionally matters. Your opponent could be up a piece but if one of them is trapped, it is almost like they are. That is an example of a un-usable advantage.
Or take simple tactics. Forks are when you have two threats on your opponent and they can't deal with both. It is a lose-lose situation for them. Or a pin is about restricting their movement. Sometimes the pin or fork is subtle, where the fork is between checkmate and capturing a piece.
There is a lot to explore here that goes far beyond "chess requires thinking deeply, chess requires anticipating your opponents moves, etc" that requires the pattern recognition that comes from playing many games.
> The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong.
> So then, as the critics and the nay sayers and the tall-poppy-chopper-downers ask with their probing questions and their knowing sneers and unfriendly voices: "Why use the Pharaohs as the basis for a business manual?"
> "Well," I would answer, "I think any 'business' that lasted for more than three thousand years, as did that of ancient Egypt, is probably worth studying!" (Even if in a strict, or indeed even vague sense, it wasn't really a business at all but a civilization, with no comparable notion of "business".)
It is also something that demonstrably many people don't understand and don't even see as something they should understand, in contrast to "plan ahead" which of course everyone will agree is important, even if they don't do it.
Since everyone has all the information available, it lends itself to what you describe -- attack without weakening yourself. Or eventually allow weakness if it reaches victory conditions.
Generally the chess strats/tactics relating to business are more metaphor. "go for their king" may be fine as a metaphor to imply "win it outright". As a strategy, though, it's not possible to just castle in response. Unless you create another metaphor for castling. Keep repeating that and you're just describing your own domain coded into chess terms, with any cross-domain applications being by definition or coincidental.
It would be useful to think of counter-examples of successful businesses that clearly did not seize the middle. Hard to build analysis on top of abstract interpretation though.
What I'm saying is I don't find it useful to reduce complex real life positions or strategies into specific game terms like "ladder" or "ladder breaker" or "outpost" or whatever.
In the first example of controlling the middle vs the edges, well, there are chess openings with the strategy of explicitly giving up the center. A reply in a different chain on this post mentions these, known as hypermodern openings.
It does sound like a good book since I'm a fan of history, chess, and go, so I'll give it a read.
Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow”. Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: “Do not go fighting with your land armies in China”. It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives.
The difference is simply Mao sees a larger China and much better than Jiang. If you look at both men's life experience, you can easily see that Mao won't be nice to intercultural and Jiang will be very harsh to the poor. And in a power struggle, one who effectively mobilize the majority always won.
This by itself will make Mao the winner in the power competition.
As for other aspects, eg, Mao being a better military strategist. It's just a derived results of Mao knows the larger China better than Jiang.
I’d go as far as to say that applying the opposite of what the writer is implying is more beneficial in most circumstances. Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc. Although, even that sells the challenges of running a good business short.
The better you get at chess, the more it can feel like you’re trying to grind water out of stone, but persisting until you notice you’ve progressed after a year. I think that comes closer to the day-to-day experience of running a business.
P.S. This is the best article I've read about chess and life: https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-le...
Advocates of Go (the game, not necessarily the language) see the first view as problematic as well. In Go, attacking is much harder than it is in chess. The game is more like a negotiation, where every "take" is necessarily accompanied by a "give". As in negotiation, the more skilled player can subtly shift things their way, but from the Go mindset, each defeat is a lesson. You may have lost the immediate "negotiation", but what you were given in return was a lesson in how to improve for the next time.
Applied to business, competitors can be negotiated with and perhaps at times even cooperated with when it's in both party's interest (in software, you see this in things like conferences where people swap best practices and "war stories"), and competitors who have an advantage over you can be learned from.
> While the opportunities Rockefeller capitalized on are unlikely to come about again, they show how chess strategies can translate into business acumen.
India's youngest billionaire Nikhil Kamath played chess when he was younger, and he used his chess background much as this article does to promote his business acumen.
Just yesterday, he played in a charity simul against 5-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. He was the only player to defeat Anand, an obvious sign of computer assistance.
That's what can happen now that computers are better than humans at chess. Maybe one day they will outclass us at business too?
What do you want a computer to do: to sell as many apple as the trees can grow ? To change the way people consume so they start eating berries instead because they're cheaper to grow ? To diversify into building the collection machine and not just the apple sales infrastructure ? To sell to far away outsiders ? To cultivate in more and more places ?
It seems just so arbitrary and tied to human interest that a computer would have to have its own desires to satisfy to start doing "business" and then be so isolated from human desires that we d have no interest in keeping them online.
Or we d have to imagine very clever yet obedient machines that would stick and readapt to our changing desire and assist us, but then are they doing business or we are ?
Ok this is a bit much. This was a celebrities simultaneously against the grandmaster match, and this guy is a serious player who competed when he was young, and likely plays regularly for fun and practice. Given this was an exhibition fundraiser, and the guy had nothing to prove (already runs a very successful brokerage and hedge fund, India’s youngest billionaire and all) why make an accusation of cheating?
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/sport/other-sports/chess-fundraiser...
If a super-GM does lose, then it's probably because they blundered. That's not what happened — Anand played well, but Kamath played basically a perfect game with an accuracy of 99%. There are a handful of people on the planet who can do that consistently in classical, and they are all rated 2700+.
Pretty much, yeah. Especially when they don’t make any big mistakes, as was the case here.
As to why people cheat, there are a plethora of reasons. Running a brokerage or hedgefund is whatever, nothing really special to anyone. Being able to defeat someone like Anand -is- an incredible feat to have under one's belt. The thrill of dominating and/or getting key victories in a competitive sport far surpasses things like running a successful business or being rich. Money can't get you that. Business acumen can't get you that. Only your personal knowledge and skill can get you that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_players_by_peak_...
The guy obviously lied about his chess background, he lost to a scholar's mate (4 move checkmate) in one of his recent games. He probably just said he had a chess background to sound smart. Arrogant narcissist.
The big difference between chess and the real world is that in chess you lack resource production: the pieces you have are the pieces you will always have, and no more. This makes the hypermodern strategies viable: let your opponent occupy the middle while you prepare to attack from the flanks. While I am sure there is a business metaphor there waiting to be realized, a game with resource management like Settlers of Catan probably has metaphors that don't break down as easily under scrutiny.
Rockefeller put a premium producing a quality product. At the time, other refiners were sloppy, and sometimes sold kerosene that still had gasoline in it. Because of this, people sometimes accidentally blew their hands off, or worse. Rockefeller promised a safe, standardized product. Yes he was unscrupulous businessman, but he saved a lot of consumers from getting blown up, too.
In this regard, it's not so much about seizing the middle as it is about a talented player carefully mopping up the board once they have a slight advantage.
In reality, Chess below Master is a series of okay moves punctuated by complete blunders that your opponent may or may not notice or be smart enough to take advantage of.
The real lesson from Chess for anybody below Master is "He who makes the next to last mistake wins. And this can happen no matter how good you've been the rest of the game."
And while that is also a good business lesson, it is far less comforting.
The chess analogy is interesting, but I'm not sure it applies to Rockefeller. If anything, his strategy is closer to cheating than actually being good at the game.
Chess is also not really special here other than it being a very old, culturally important game. You could swap it out for go and nothing would really change except some strategy metaphors/comparisons. With all strategy games there are general, high-level strategies that players employ. But is it useful to anyone to make empty comparisons like "forward thinking"?
Actually rather than chess, I think it's better to learn strategy through more modern fighting games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike or Super Smash Bros. Melee. These kinds of games are much more reactive; one can see and intuitively understand their mistakes much more easily than through chess position analysis. These games still have very complex strategies going on, but they combine it with mechanical execution skills.
No matter what strategy game it is, I think everyone should experience that in their life; particularly business people. It really is incredible how much these games can teach us.