Senet
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It’s going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games getting “frozen” with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example, with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.
Or go the other way, as low-/no-code customization tools and online distribution make it easier to make and share variants than it is to do so at any scale with physical games, subject to the openness (both in design and social factors like IP status) of the base game.
Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450.
The game has since been stable for about 500.
And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.
Left-handed players may prefer Black goes first.
In this sense, it also includes the conventions, skill-level titles, playing etiquette, etc.
Materially, no, though it probably makes it less complex for humans by slightly simplifying the pattern recognition issues, particularly in the opening.
First player wins more than second in chess (because there's a slight advantage).
White goes first in chess.
Therefore, white wins more than black in chess.
However, that conclusion (what you present) is valueless without the context. If you reversed which color starts the game then we'd end up with "black wins more than white in Chess" as a conclusion and your statement would be false. And if there was no specific color which always started, we'd be left with just the first statement: First player wins more than second in chess.
If you reversed the king and queen placement for both players would the advantage be as great?
There is no asymmetry of moves other than the starting position of the king and queen, so all strategy will simply be mirrored if the king and queen are mirrored.
This is awesome :)
He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game.
But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is important to attract players - there's a softening of skill gaps.
Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it.
Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play.
I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.
Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette.
In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine.
Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.
There is no AI that can play well, for instance, in a 9-handed game with varying stack sizes, while itself and some competent players are 600BB deep and some other players are 40bb deep.
It takes a specific, narrow ruleset to tailor an AI to be able to play it at such a high level. Or more compute than we currently have in real-time.
Pluribus' matches against pros had each hand reset to 100BB.
Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros. Additionally, no human can realistically implement an AI strategy, meaning the AI is not a big detriment to the actual game of poker, as it's currently played.
To be clear about why this might be true for someone who doesn't know much of poker strategy--the AI is (I presume) going to optimize for strategies that can't be beaten by changing one's own distribution of plays (for (simplified) example, if the AI raises a given hand 20% of the time and folds 80%, it's doing so because even if opponent were to call 100%, fold 100%, or something in-between; it wouldn't change the overall expected value of that hand with that distribution of plays). Professional human players, on the other hand, will absolutely cotton onto a player whose distribution of plays is not optimal and can therefore be exploited for profit.
The AI notoriously bluffs a lot, which many bad player types accidentally counter by calling too often.
Good human players will also specifically exploit bad players, as you note, while the AI attempts instead to itself be unexploitable.
Yes, if it's very chip poor, Cepheus could run out of chips before it stops being unlucky and takes your money, but that's unavoidably true anyway in Poker due to it being a game of chance as well as skill.
Cepheus is actually a good Rorschach test for players who say "GTO" a lot. If you actually grasp what game theory optimality is about, you see Cepheus and you're like "OK, I'm done playing Heads Up Limit" (and indeed although it was once somewhat common you won't find any professionals playing this for some years now). But if you're the sort of person for whom it's just another phrase to sling around, like complaining you had a "bad beat" when you were never better than evens, chances are you see Cepheus and you think "I could beat that". Oh dear.
> Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post.
This is exactly the useless observation I'm complaining about. Poker is a game of chance so of course anybody might get lucky in the very short term. If what you value is the fact you could win despite being terrible at it, just play roulette and save everybody else the trouble.
> In fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do worse against weaker players than it did against pros.
It isn't about "doing worse" here and that's yet more of the mindset that got you into trouble here. The machine doesn't care about "doing worse" it just wins statistically over time. A grinder needs to make rent and buy groceries, so for them being up $50 after a full day feels like losing, it is losing. But the machine doesn't need money.
Again, if it's just about being able to get lucky and get some sort of temporary "High" from that, I'd commend roulette over poker, or, if you like cards, try blackjack.
No, there aren't any academics showing off bots that play full ring. Of course, there weren't any academics showing off that they could count Blackjack. At least not until after they were run out of Vegas with a fortune of the casino's money... Grinding online full ring with AI is not academically interesting, but it would be profitable. The former would cause you to publish (like Cepheus) the latter not so much.
I'm not sure about the relation between Pluribus and Libratus- I think Pluribus is a newer version of Libratus, essentially?
Charutaji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturaji
That would really suck.
You can tell he's going a little from memory, but the points are all still there. His arguments that skill and luck are not opposite sides of the same spectrum is quite good.
And this topic frequently comes up in wargaming circles (frequently enough to be annoying :-)). Some feel that nondeterminism is a crutch for the low-skilled while others feel that it is the only reasonable way to handle a low-fidelity model of reality or that it teaches the valuable skill of how to deal with the bag of rotten lemons that the universe periodically hands you.
Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.
I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!
So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin
Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.
In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of square ones.
I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.
Rook = tower. Knight = horse. Bishop = alfil, maybe from Arabic for "elephant".
Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have different colored pieces, but directional pieces to show which side they belong to.
Xiangqi is my favorite of the two. To me, it feels like a better depiction of war than Chess. The equivalent of Chess's king stays in a small area, there's a river separating the two sides of the board which some pieces can't cross, there's a catapult for interesting ranged attacks. Maybe I've just grown a bit bored of Chess over all the years and Xiangqi is just relatively newer to me, but Xiangqi feels a lot more fun to play, IMO.
Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.
About Senet, a few rules have been suggested: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet
There were a few patches to chess in the mid to late 20th century that disallowed promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (this was useful for forcing a smothered mate), and to prevent vertically castling to a pawn that had been promoted into a rook on the 8th rank (notated as 0-0-0-0-0-0).
Not exactly fundamental changes, but still amusing that they needed to be made after so many centuries.
Some very early boards from e.g. Aksum in Ethiopia were identified by archaelogists as mancala boards, but are more likely to have been for Senet.
It's probable that the Ancient Egyptians played both, but I don't believe the record is clear on where mancala came from and at what time it reached Egypt, presuming that isn't where it came from, which it might be.
I grew up on a small island in the Pacific and played something similar[1] called chongka' as a kid as well.
I was always under the impression that a form of backgammon was on the ancient Mesopotamian/Sumerian scene around the same time -- though, now that I actually come to look for a good source to support that notion, I'm struggling to find one.
Wikipedia and other sources just say "backgammon can be traced back nearly 5000 years" [0]
Because people (such as me!) found it interesting and up-voted it.
Per the guidelines:
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Unfortunately, this heuristic is probably just arbitrary, and nearly any set of weights would probably still produce a meaningful result since the main strategy is just Expectimax search. Disappointing. I was really hoping for some intuition that a human could apply
When and where was that? More details please? :)
It was a university student competition in (mostly computer science bachelor and master students).
The core algorithm is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectiminimax which is a type of heuristic tree search over the possible board states.
Winning such a tournament meant you can write efficient C++ code (so you can search more states during the allocated turn) and you can invent/feature-engineer good heuristics that estimate how close is a board state to winning the game.
I don't remember what heuristics was used, I don't even remember the rules :)
But I've uploaded the source to github a few years ago:
https://github.com/amitport/senet-ai
The heuristics are at: https://github.com/amitport/senet-ai/blob/master/SmartUtilit...
I can't really make sense of it anymore :) but it seems to work
Did the game happen to be one of these?
I can´t remember the URL right now, but there was a game collection full of items with "real life mimicking" pieces.
Senet: the original board game of death? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288441 - Feb 2020 (6 comments)
Senet: board game from predynastic and ancient Egypt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099052 - Feb 2016 (5 comments)
My grandpa helped us make a wooden set of pieces and a board before he passed, it was a a great little intro to woodworking project.
It's a curiosity,. But you should probably rather be playing backgammon.
Players can then play and vote on new games so that the popular and good ones rise up.
The texture we have of Chess history for example is part of the allure. That the rules have changed, we know how they changed, why they changed, how people played in the past, etc.
The game is the rules. Those people played different games. If you can do anything you want with it, it's a toy, not a game.
If everyone forgot and lost the rules to pinochle, would we say pinochle still exists because people are playing poker with the same deck of cards?
If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle.
Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing pieces on the board like some elaborately-scored tic-tac-toe, would you say they rediscovered Chess?
> The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that, modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65]
There was still some variation in the rules until the 19th century:
> The rules concerning stalemate were finalized in the early 19th century. Also in the 19th century, the convention that White moves first was established (formerly either White or Black could move first). Finally, the rules around castling were standardized – variations in the rules of castling had persisted in Italy until the late 19th century.
Is chess with different castling rules still chess? Chess without en passant?
Plus, it's easier to point to the set of rules that were standardised in the 19th century and call that chess. For a game like senet, there may never have been a standard set of rules. Or there may have been multiple standards that were all fairly popular, like poker.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origi...
Compare the changes to the rules of chess you've described to the descriptions of senet's rules referenced by the wikipedia article[0]. If these are the best attempts at senet rule reconstruction that the article author could find, then I must assume that the rules are basically made up from scratch with nothing but a game board, some pieces, and the vaguest of references to the game in ancient texts. Familiarity with one of these so-called senet rulesets would be of no use at all to somebody playing the other, and I'm sure familiarity with both would be of no use at all to somebody wishing to play senet with any ancient player.
Classifications can be fuzzy, but they're not just a giant meaningless void of gray where anything goes. Chess has variants that can be placed on an evolutionary tree. Senet appears to have nothing but a handful of naive attempts at total reconstruction from practically no information. The game that was historically called senet appears to be lost.
The gradual evolution of a well-documented game doesn't really compare with uninformed assumptions about how a game might work based on little more than mere physical artifacts.
There is no natural boundary with which to say that a game has so many variants from Platonic poker as to no longer qualify. Any abstraction proposed as a criterion for classification is just that, an abstraction, since poker is a socially-constructed category.
With Senet, we don't even know how much the rules have changed, so it's hard to say. But hopefully the reconstructors did well enough that an ancient player wouldn't say "what game is that?" but instead "that's a goofy way to play Senet."
Like, how much of a basketball game is concerned with the actual Rules Of Basketball vs. simulating a bunch of people playing basketball? And if you made Space Basketball with characters with superpowers who kept getting balance tweaks as the player community figured out holes in the rules, most of that simulation code would stay the same, as the tiny percentage of rules code evolved.
It seems that only "tomb images" and some game boards and pieces are used in the reconstruction. The article doesn't suggest that any rules have a basis in history. What rules we have are fabricated from nothing but the pieces, like reconstructing the English language from nothing but the alphabet.
So, it's not entirely black and white. Historians are pretty sure about some of the rules, but it's possible there were other rules we don't know. The rules played today are a balance between historical accuracy, and just trying the different theories and playing the one that seems the most fun.
That might seem like just making things up, but that's what the quote is referring to. It's hard to say what set of rules was the most common, but there is some reason to believe that the current set of rules is as least similar, and might have been played due to the way that these games didn't have 1 concrete set of rules. "House rules" meant that there was often many different sets of rules in place. Think how checkers has sets of rules that allow for non-forced jumps, flying kings, etc. Maybe your can't tell whether your set of rules was the most common set, but if your rules are based on evidence, it's likely that it was played similar to that somewhere.
"Although details of the original game rules are a subject of some conjecture, senet historians Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game."
Here is the citation[0].
My belief is that these are two completely different games, and therefor probably completely different from any ancient iteration of senet.
Using the same game board and (some of) the same pieces is totally insufficient to call a game a "variation". Is old Japanese text, which adopted the Chinese writing system, a variant of the Chinese language?
There are 3 ancient games still played commonly: chess, backgammon, and go.
* deterministic with heterogeneous pieces
* deterministic with homogeneous pieces
* nondeterministic