War games: Battlefield strategy and the game of chess | Hacker News Reader

War games: Battlefield strategy and the game of chess

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34 pointsmellosouls33 comments

Chess and actual war has some similarities at the very abstract level like space control, initiative, gambits etc but other than that trying to make some romantic parallels is too much and a bit ridiculous.

Ray Keene is certainly a bit of a 'character' [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Keene#Controversies

The examples cited here to illustrate similarities between chess and war are just that : similarities. Juste as one could see similarities with a basketball game. The differences between chess and war are so numerous (chess has no fog of war, no command issue, no logistics, no morale...) that I'm starting to dismiss every "generals can learn from the game of chess" piece as bullshit.

Contemporary expressions of the influence of prevalent strategy games on geopolitics might be:

- Chess, a popular game in Russia and a game of gambits and bloody material exchange for a pawn: the Ukraine war

- Go, a popular game in China and a game of long term development and area control: China building artificial islands, investing heavily in Africa, and avoiding direct confrontation in Taiwan

A certain characteristic of chess is the need to study and memorize openings and lines, which has no parallel in real life. Overall, if there was a strong correlation between chess and other areas of life, chess grandmasters would be prominently successful in top military and business leadership positions.

This is just confirmation bias. You're looking for patterns so you're finding them. If you look for the opposite patterns you'll find them too.

Russia besides the mandatory invasion every decade has been infiltrating the west and avoiding the direct confrontation for decades, they spent a lot of money on encouraging brexit, trump and financing a lot of far-right and far-left parties in EU in hope of breaking it.

Russia also invested heavily into gas infrastructure hooking up Germany to have direct influence on its politics.

China isn't above invading some countries either when it thinks it can get away with it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Peo...

China is also currently running concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of people. Somehow we don't talk about that.

Both countries are agressive militaristic dictatorships using whatever tools they think will serve them best at the moment. China is simply more patient because it isn't in obvious decline (yet).

Another contrast is that China is importer of basic resources and exporter of goods - so it needs international peace to profit. Russia is exporter of basic resources - so it needs international chaos for best prices. When you listen to Russian economists they often talk about international "pressures" that are beneficial to their economy because oil prices go up.

I concede that this is a pattern that I enjoy contemplating and could be confirmation bias. A "Go" philosophy, if it were indeed a thing, is in itself certainly not morally superior, as it ultimately tries to surround and eliminate enemy pieces in an attempt to control most of the board. Chess on the other hand also includes plenty of moves that are intended to control the board or provide small longterm advantages that are hopefully not fully clear to the opponent.

I do think that the Eastern way of avoiding direct confrontation is a major cultural difference to the West, and is reflected in both Go and geopolitics.

Going back to the article, any Strategist should probably study a wide range of games to maybe gain a small improvement in strategic thinking.

I think strategists should study a wide range of actual wars and conflicts, and fall back to games (as opposed to actual "war games") as like a third tier approach.

And I think you're perception of "go" philosophy <-> geopolitics as practiced is absolutely confirmation bias. For one thing, Chinese Chess is absolutely a thing, and at least within China, is at least as popular, if not more popular than Go.

How do you define "Eastern", because the Mongols, Huns, Chinese, Japanese definetly didn't shy away from direct confrontation. Historically speaking.

And USA was isolationist not that long ago. Chess was already invented ;)

West and East are relative anyway. Also, go far enough east, and what used to be west is all of a sudden east of you.

> - Chess, a popular game in Russia and a game of gambits and bloody material exchange for a pawn: the Ukraine war

And yet, here we are. American strategists planned, and the governments executed a chess-like game against Russia decades ago, and the public in the west knows everything started last year and attributes all the bloody hell only to Russian expansionist politics ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard

USA didn't wanted USSR to break up. It was trying its hardest to prevent it in 80s/90s because it was afraid of nuclear proliferation and wars. USSR has broken up against all the political games - simply because people were fed up with it.

Proping up Russia right now is probably going to end up similarly - the country is just too big for its organization and economy to survive as a normal country. It can only survive as a militaristic dictatorship. And who wants that?

The West is probably generally influenced by chess. Thinking in terms of of the "Grand Go Board" would probably be less bloody, but still be confrontational on a fundamental level (concepts like my pieces vs your pieces, control, surrounding, eliminating, a winner and a loser).

The Mackinder heartland theory is self evidently incorrect. Russia has controlled the heartland for hundreds of years. But has never been the global hegemon.

given enough battles and enough chess matches, one can find enough correlations. The same could be said about football games or kitchen recepes. It remains doubtful if those analogies could be used for something productive or they would serve to stroke someone's snobbish ego.

I guess the article is ego. No hint of actually studying military history deeply enough to be more than a Wellington fan boy. Don't get me wrong, Wellington was brilliant commander. But covering the Battle of Waterloo in one short paragraph, saying it was Wellington who defeated Napoleon, without even hinting at the Prussian contribution and some command and control issues on the French side (parts of Napoleons army came late) is, well, sad for someone who actually studied history. But well, how else would you be able to write about your Wellington-style chess game?

Edit: Oh dear, Agincourt. Famously, the ground was so muddy that day that French armored knights had to fight on foot... No, English longbow men did not defeat armoured cavalery, said cavalery fought as armored infantry. One could imagine how it would have went if French could have fought indeed on horse back...

Re Agincourt. The ground was so muddy that the French armoured knights had to walk their horses rather than charge. That's not the same as fighting on foot - or at least, not until your mount has been killed beneath you by English and Welsh longbowmen raining arrows on your densely packed (and slow-moving) forces.

I had similar thoughts. It échos with one of yesterday submitted link on “being wary of neat stories in history” ( I paraphrased )

The big thing that's missing is that in chess you know where all the pieces are, you both have the same objective, and you both have the same resources.

In a real war there are a lot of unknowns and part of the decision making is reacting to the fact that you don't know everything.

And then someone finds a way to move a pawn four fields diagonally, and kill your Queen. Wont happen in Chess, but does in warfare (the Battle or France, Dien-Bien-Puh...).

For those to whom this isn’t obvious, Dulwich College is a private high school in London. The events described probably happened when they author was 14.

Also, apropos of nothing, the school that gave us Nigel Farage.

Top-flight chess does not go in for this kind of nostalgia.

Dulwich College also ‘gave us’ seven Victorian cross medalists and numerous admirals/generals - better chance of someone being notable in military strategy coming out of Dulwich than an average school, regardless of the articles worth

Better chamce of progressing in the military, espevially in the UK, when comming from a London family afluent enough to send you to a private Highschool I guess.

Victoria Crosses aren't earned easily so.

Ironically, apparently my no-name family has one (I don’t know the details, or rather, I forgot and the family historian is long-since dead).

But even VCs are much easier to achieve at a commissioned rank.

Interessting family history. If you have the name and time, the VC citations should be available from the DoD.

Yeah, I don’t, sadly. All I have is a bunch of memories from 40 years ago from when someone drew out a family tree and I’ve no particular inclination to put in the hard yards to reconstruct it far back.

The list isn't too bad actually, if you're English! Or any other nationality, but here is the English list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Victoria_Cross...

Just in case it's easy enough to ctrl+f for your surname :)

Edit: I'm sorry, just realised this is a partial list. My bad.

Also P. G. Wodehouse[0], so it can't be all that bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse

I believe it was in Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets" that she demotes (?) chess as a life-like metaphor and instead says poker has a closer parallels.

The crux of her argument is (if I recall correctly), at any given moment, chess has a finite number possible moves, and from those finite possible outcomes. Effectively, everything is know. On the otherhand, poker has unknowns (i.e., some cards remain hidden). In addition, you can - based on knowns - make good decisions and things can still go badly. That is the quality of the decision is not tied to the quality of the outcome.

> The parallel thesis which I have proposed, is, therefore, backed up by history, precedent and fact.

but not by personal experience of actually fighting in a war. That tends to add depth and nuance to one's perspective.

Not often an article has a full page photo of the author in his youth in it.

He has to back up his military competence credentials somehow, doesn't he?

OTC at Dulwich College is probably the opposite of military competence to be honest!

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