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Comment by mechEpleb | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that this is ridiculously reductionist and probably has nothing to do with the actual decision making process on either side.

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I would argue that games like go and chess are so vastly different from real life that it's not useful to make comparisons like this. Sometimes similar high-level strategies can be employed, but I'm certainly not thinking in terms of "controlling the middle" as that doesn't really make sense in real life. One can make that phrase as vague as possible to make it apply to real life, but what benefit does that bring?

Well, call me when you're two months into dealing a deal and realize you didn't place a ladder breaker and end up in a completely untenable position.

I'm not saying that strategy shouldn't be used. Obviously one should have a goal to not act in a way such that in the future their positions will be untenable.

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.

(yeah, totally agree; was quipping about ladder breakers precisely because they're completely irrelevant to any real world scenario.)

The book is much better than my one-sentence summary of it. As a small example, the author notes that Communist forces would often set up bases on the boundary of two warlords' areas, so that they could not be surrounded.

My point is that given enough contortion or reduction, one can apply any real life strategy to almost any strategy game.

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.

And they did that because it makes sense from a military perspective, not because they were aping go strategies. Are you being obtuse on purpose? You're taking two radically different problem domains and producing a shaky, extremely high level mapping between some elements in them that is essentially unfalsifiable.

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