posted
I like to think that both Jane, a sentient computer with a near-infinite number of nodes, and Bean, an annoying mutant Sooper-Geenyus, would be able to play a perfect game of chess.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I like to think that both Jane, a sentient computer with a near-infinite number of nodes, and Bean, an annoying mutant Sooper-Geenyus, would be able to play a perfect game of chess.
The closest I'll ever come is making a perfect chess set.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Blayne Bradley
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Chess is an inferior game compared to several other strategy games, I would suggest either Mahjong which still incorporates luck or Go which is far more guaranteed to actually cause her to struggle.
The problem here is to determine is Jane a genius with her computer network or is she merely a girl of average intelligence who simply has the infinite ability to brute force through problems?
We know Bean is a genius he can think fast yes but never does it to brute force a problem he always finds an elegant solution to solve it quickly and efficiently.
Can Jane do this or does she rely on brute force and infinite reserves of resources?
This could is easily what could tip the balance if its the latter (brute forcer) Bean could have the ability to trick or misdirect essentially it would be tough but still has wiggle room.
If shes actually a genius even if she didn't have her vast resources then Bean while could make a good accounting for himself just wouldn't be able to compete.
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You're saying a lack of luck makes chess inferior?? What strategy games do you find to be superior to chess?
Posts: 1314 | Registered: Jan 2006
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Interesting, Blayne. Does Jane have the ability to make an intuitive leap, and, if not, would that be more important than an ability to run throught billions of possible solutions?
Posts: 368 | Registered: Dec 2005
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I like to think that both Jane, a sentient computer with a near-infinite number of nodes, and Bean, an annoying mutant Sooper-Geenyus, would be able to play a perfect game of chess.
The closest I'll ever come is making a perfect chess set.
Karl will need one of those if you do, you know. Better make two.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:You're saying a lack of luck makes chess inferior?? What strategy games do you find to be superior to chess?
Mahjong for one, Go for two.
Mahjong is a highly complex strategy between 4 players that incorporates luck, strategy, and psychological warfare all centered around a game where the primary gameplay is drawing and discarding a tile each turn in a race to complete your hand first while not discarded tiles that the enemy could use to complete their hand.
The Manga's Ten, Akagi, and the anime Saki all go different degrees on expanding upon (with Ten being the most grounded with reality with Saki causing statisticians to cry.)
Go is the quintessiancial strategy game and chess's counterpart of East Asia essentially demonstrating and encapsulating Eastern military thought in a single game.
In Chess the goal is to defeat the enemy in a battle of attrition with skill being the ability to do this 'quickly' while cornering the enemies Monarch/King from the western concept of the Head of State or lead General as supreme importance.
In Go the strategy and goal is to control and capture territory in an war of what is essentially maneuver of checks and counterchecks with the supreme aim to capture the enemy army intact without fighting and essentially represents the entire successful strategy of the Vietnamese NVA and Charlie vs the more Chess obsessed US Army in the Vietnam War.
Go also has the advantage where the more pieces you put on the board the more the complexity of the game increases by an exponential amount contrast this to chess where the game gets simply as pieces are removed.
The consequence of this is that making any complex AI for go above the beginner level is encredibly difficult and non-trivial as the longer Go goes on the most stressed Jane would be accounting for possibilities.
This still leaves us with the consideration is Jane intuitive or is she iterative? There is off the top of my head alot of evidence to suppose that while she may be capable of some level of intuition its not nearly as well developed or sophisticated as we might imagine as Bean's own thought processes since she had access to billions of computers why would she need to make intuitive leaps instead of simply brute forcing an answer?
The Books suggest quite a bit of evidence that she simply uses her 'power' as a brute object and all problems something to be smashed via pure might and much of the inuitive leaps of her power came from actual human genius who had her crunch the numbers and realized that Jane could teleport people around, something that Jane herself never made the connection from the evidence she did have available.
Essentially Jane served more as a magic calculator or source of information through most of the novels rather then a source of independent ideas.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: In Go the strategy and goal is to control and capture territory in an war of what is essentially maneuver of checks and counterchecks with the supreme aim to capture the enemy army intact without fighting and essentially represents the entire successful strategy of the Vietnamese NVA and Charlie vs the more Chess obsessed US Army in the Vietnam War.
I'm 2 Dan and know my history, both about Go and about the Vietnam War, and none of this sounds right. I would like to know where you got your ideas. Go is more about taking and managing initiative than it is about "checks and counterchecks" (that is more like Chess than Go) and the strategy of the North Vietnamese was not to "capture the enemy army intact without fighting", and if it was, they failed miserably.
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Blayne Bradley
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DVD documentary on Sun-Tzu describes the NVA strategy as playing Go as their startegy focused less on direct confrontation and more about controlling the countryside.
[Removed link. Please don't link to torrent sites, Blayne.--PJ] This one here.
quote:taking and managing initiative than it is about "checks and counterchecks"
My definition of checks and counterchecks is like your managing of initiative.
'winning a battle without fighting is the acme of skill' is a quote from Sun-Tzu and generally encapsulates the doctrine of Chinese military startegy for most of its history as the goal wasn't to burn down and salt the land of the enemy kingdom but to capture the state intact and incorporate it into your own.
NVA strategy was akin to Go because of the focus on managing and controlling territory and influence rather then forcing direct confrontation (with exceptions).
Best exemplified by this conversation between a US and NVA Colonel postwar:
US Colonel: "You know we won every battle right?" NVA Colonel: *Nods* "Indeed, but also completely irrelevant."
[ March 09, 2010, 09:57 AM: Message edited by: Papa Janitor ]
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:My definition of checks and counterchecks is like your managing of initiative.
Only if you define counterchecks as something that would not definitionally be the taking of sente. In which case you are defining managing of initiative as *losing* initiative. So, I highly doubt it.
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: NVA strategy was akin to Go because of the focus on managing and controlling territory and influence rather then forcing direct confrontation (with exceptions).
You said that the supreme aim to capture the enemy army intact without fighting represents the entire successful strategy of the Vietnamese versus the Americans.
Now to defend that you are claiming something entirely different.
Can I have some consistency before we go on with this? Which is it? Did that or did that not represent the "entire successful strategy" of the Vietnamese?
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posted
Ain't that a shocker.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Parkour:
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:My definition of checks and counterchecks is like your managing of initiative.
Only if you define counterchecks as something that would not definitionally be the taking of sente. In which case you are defining managing of initiative as *losing* initiative. So, I highly doubt it.
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: NVA strategy was akin to Go because of the focus on managing and controlling territory and influence rather then forcing direct confrontation (with exceptions).
You said that the supreme aim to capture the enemy army intact without fighting represents the entire successful strategy of the Vietnamese versus the Americans.
Now to defend that you are claiming something entirely different.
Can I have some consistency before we go on with this? Which is it? Did that or did that not represent the "entire successful strategy" of the Vietnamese?
There is consistency, I said 'the aim was this' and 'the method was this' using the quote from Sun-Tzu to exemplify. Though I should add the corollary that the aim is ultimately victory with 'skillful' victory being the forced surrender of the enemy with minimal damage, the method used was the capture and control of surrounding territory something which I mentioned first in my post followed by my usage of the Sun-tzu quote to show the importance of the strategy.
To clarify I was saying that the aim of Go is to capture the enemy intact through the control of territory, and that the strategy of the NVA was inspired by this, namely inspired was maneuver and the control of territory as a suporior priority then wasteful assaults in decisive battles of attrition.
Thus to 'win without fighting' was to defeat the US without having to resort to defeating them in a strictly military 'final battle' in a Clausewitz'ian sense (where the goal is force the enemy to submit to your will) in a chess based view of strategy this requires defeating the enemy in battle with the ultimate aim of destroying the enemy as a fighting force.
The NVA did not aim for this, instead aimed for a strategy where they can simply out wait the US and force their withdrawal without having to actually defeat the US military as a whole as a fighting force, something which they in the end succeeded as the US pulled out after 2 decades of struggle where they won every battle above the company level.
My op was a generalized oversimplification, this I hope serves to establish my more nuanced opinion.
Tet offensive and the battle of Khe San notwithstanding.
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I would like to see them play poker. Seems like it would be fair, and you don't have to discuss Vietnam before you play poker.
Posts: 549 | Registered: Feb 2008
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posted
Blayne, Jane is described as a very powerful being. A lesser self wouldn't be able to master the philotic network body. So yeah, she can use computing resources, but she herself is supposed to be special too.
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Jane would win. If it started to look bad for her, she could take the set Outside and pop it back in, reconfigured, while Bean blinked, and rewrite all the electronic evidence that would have otherwise vindicated Bean's hysterical insistence that Jane was cheating.
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Blayne Bradley
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Except then she would have lost in both Beans and Janes minds.
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Blayne Bradley
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To illustrate, in the most likely hypothetical scenario assuming a meeting in Shadows in Flight is Bean testing his intellect against Jane and Jane under these constraints (say in person) also testing her full abilities, under this context neither would cheat.
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Maybe Bean will join Jane in philotic superexistence.
Maybe the Beanies will have independently arrived at the ability to step Outside, and furthermore learned to shift in time while out there. Maybe they are the descoladores.
The chess match may be a race between what looks like vicious hostility on the virus-spawning Beanie clan, but is actually a benevolent attempt to give the incredible gift of Beanitude to the rest of humanity, and Jane's efforts to thwart them. Culminating in a stalemate until Miro & Jane's genius compu-baby makes philopheromonic contact between the factions.
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posted
For the record, the chess match would end before the first move--when Bean offers a draw and Jane accepts.
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quote: Maybe the Beanies will have independently arrived at the ability to step Outside, and furthermore learned to shift in time while out there. Maybe they are the descoladores.
This reminds me of how BADLY I want to know what happened to Bean his babies! I hope OSC writes the next book soon.
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