Comparing a centuries old board game with completely balanced rules, to an infant video game that still has major balance problems (if you looked hard enough), is silly. Chess is as balanced as it gets.
It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races.
>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
>Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point.
>Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html
I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.
In other words, a sucker punch?
In SC2, 6pooling is certainly quite powerful (Zerg makes Tassadar cry...) but if it is scouted, the Zerg is now fucked.
The thing is, in the current meta, you never bother drone/probe/scv scouting that early, so you'd have to be able to read your opponent and know that he's a kind of player that loves those "Cheesy" build orders!
I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.
The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.
I love Taeja so much.
I find it funny that you'd assume that I don't know that. Of course I do. The balance in Chess is what makes it a far more strategic and "complex" (in terms of strategy and tactics) game. I said as much in my post. I like Chess, I just thought it was funny that despite playing chess all throughout school and competing in various tournaments, I'd never made the connection with StarCraft's various terms, ideas, and strategies.
That's what I was expressing. I have no idea what you thought I was trying to say!
Now I remember you had a build system that came with Pharen, any plans for that in the future? Mainly because I think using it as a build system with a nice functional syntax would be _amazing_ to use even with normal PHP!
What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that...
Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that.
If you ever want to discuss this stuff more feel free to shoot an email on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen) or drop by #pharen on Freenode.
Phake, that's the one. I was curious about it, as I think a nice LISP styled build system that can be bootstrapped with only PHP and the Pharen runtime-lib would be really awesome as a build system for PHP in general. With Composer and a lot of other projects, tooling in PHP is moving forward at a rapid pace, but we're all hacking together shitty build systems from scratch (or using Phing, which is painful in my experience). Phake could be a nice alternative. For now, I'm using Make and calling into Pharen directly :)