Comment by 58x14 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 58x14 | Hacker News Reader

This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games. I play Chess at ~1600 ELO. My path to improvement is clear.

I also play poker, sometimes with fairly significant stakes, both in cash games and tournaments. I consistently profit, but it's practically impossible for me to quantify my skill, because poker is an imperfect information game.

Many of the principles I've learned about emotional regulation and awareness (recognizing when I or others are on tilt), strategic opportunity cost (which table or house game am I joining), evaluation of expected value (calculating probabilities and assigning weights to uncertainties) come from poker.

I think it's no surprise that many investors use poker as their game of analogy, for the world is indeed a gigantic imperfect information game.

I practice chess to practice logic and consistency, foundational skills that are very relevant to my financial and software development activities. I play poker to remain comfortable in the face of limitless, unclear decisions, where I'm frequently forced to realize a loss despite optimal play.

Strategy requires continuous reclassification between perfect and imperfect information contexts.

> This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games

Football is not a perfect information game. The opponent may line up in front of you, but you don't know their playbook. Football seems to be one of the biggest games discussed in this article (for good reason: Football + US Military culture are strangely ingrained upon each other)

League of Legends and Starcraft are both games with "fog of war", your opponents actions (scouting, building, etc. etc.) are fully obscured unless you yourself send a scout out. Both games are discussed in this blogpost (mostly LoL)

> Football is not a perfect information game. The opponent may line up in front of you, but you don't know their playbook.

That would make football a game of perfect information. You know everything about the state of the game. You don't know what your opponent is planning to do any more in chess than you do in football.

> You know everything about the state of the game

Is that fully accurate? Do players know how fast the other teams players run? The frequency with which they can catch the ball? How successful their blocking will be?

Random elements do not interfere with perfect information. Adding a coin toss to chess won't make it a game of imperfect information. It will make it a game that is less deterministic than chess-without-the-coin-tossing. The opposite of "perfect information" is "hidden information", not "fallibility".

If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals.

The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location. You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball.

Not everyone sees everything. If the quarterback truly saw everything on the field, the quarterback would never get sacked.

> If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals.

> The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location.

That is fair.

> You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball.

But that's irrelevant.

> But that's irrelevant.

Certainly not within the constraints of Football.

The Linebacker's entire focus is going to be on pushing against the other linemen once the play starts. The linemen are not going to know what's going on over there, their eyes are literally not looking at what everyone else is doing. (Well, a decent lineman can sometimes snatch the football if a quarterback throws it too low over their heads. But... linemen definitely don't have their eyes on much of the game)

The fact that you only have two eyes leads to the constraints that is the game of football. Skilled players keep watch over other players: where they are looking and how they are moving.

The "hidden information" is literally their eyes themselves. You can't see things that are behind you. That's how you sack a quarterback: you run at them from an angle that they're not looking. That's why trick plays work, because you have an expectation for how those people will move... except they moved in a way you didn't expect (and were blind to seeing, because you were doing some other job).

A good quarterback takes advantage of this: the top-tier quarterbacks can look at one player (and all the defense start focusing on that player, say the wide receiver), but then blindly throw the ball to someone else (!!!), based off of timing alone. That's why playbooks matter in the game. This isn't even a "trick play", this sort of stuff is the basics of football.

The quarterback never looked at say, his tight-end for the play. The quarterback just "trusts" that the tight-end is in the correct position. By looking at the wide-receiver, the Quarterback is obscuring his intentions and is misleading his opponents.

nitpicking on terminology, but if the world is anything it's a game of incomplete information, not imperfect information. and this make things much harder than poker where you know the game you're playing and so does every other player,and there exist layers of common knowledge.

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