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[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I don't think they're truisms, but I do think they're true. I am most impressed when somebody unearths something simple and obvious from what appeared to be subtle and complex. That's what I want to see. So first I have to find something that seems really complex, and then show how it's really simple.

I think I'm more impressed when someone unearths something actually quite complicated and subtle, from what appeared to be simple and obvious.

You wouldn't happen to play Go, would you? Nine elementary rules only, and the resulting game is 120 orders of magnitude more complex than chess is (10^170 legal positions vs. 10^50).

[Student of Trinity]

That sounds like a perfect test case. I don't know if Slarty likes Go, but I don't. I don't hate it, and I can certainly admire it as an interesting thing, but it kind of makes me shake my head sadly. What would make me grin, though, would be if I watched a Go tournament, having no idea of the rules of the game, and gradually figured out what they were.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

That sounds like a perfect test case. I don't know if Slarty likes Go, but I don't. I don't hate it, and I can certainly admire it as an interesting thing, but it kind of makes me shake my head sadly. What would make me grin, though, would be if I watched a Go tournament, having no idea of the rules of the game, and gradually figured out what they were.

I can't seem to get the hang of it, either- I've always preferred chess. For me, it just fits- everything has a specific place, everything works together, there are predictable combinations, well-known openings, and decided endgames. It's very neat, orderly, and tactical. I just can't seem to broaden out into the strategy necessarily to win at Go.

Based on your "watching a Go tournament" reference, I'm presuming you're familiar with Feynman's famous comments on physics and chess? I always did love that little speech...

[ex post slarto]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

You wouldn't happen to play Go, would you? Nine elementary rules only, and the resulting game is 120 orders of magnitude more complex than chess is (10^170 legal positions vs. 10^50).

Never played it, actually. Also, I don't think it's fair to equate numbers of legal positions with complexity. That could be a part of it, but I think complexity would also need to take into account, rather more relevantly, how the different positions are related.

Maybe abstract strategy games (including essentially abstract games with themes attached, like many eurogames) are a good test case in general, though. My favourite games tend to be those like St. Petersburg or Egizia whose presentation is relatively simple compared with the subtle weighings and judgments required at most decision points. Whereas the games I dislike most quickly are those that have more rules, but fewer meaningful decision points. It always feels to me like: why waste my time dealing with all these fake decisions?

[Student of Trinity]

I think I actually have a pretty lowbrow taste in games. I like games with luck or concealment rather than pure strategy, because I do enough hard thinking at work, and if I'm going to play a game, I want to relax a bit. The game shouldn't be trivial, but it should be no more than a moderate challenge to play optimally. Deterministic games that are easy to play optimally get boring faster than games where luck or bluffing adds an element of surprise, so luck is good.

 

In fact, I can state my board and card game preference very succinctly: rollick over grit.

 

One of the ultimate rollicking wargames has got to be Titan. If your standard is grit, then Titan as just a terrible, terrible game. But you get to collect huge armies of monsters, and roll enormous handfuls of dice, for about six hours. It's a great game with beer.

 

Another great rollicking wargame was Divine Right, where there was so much luck involved that there could be astonishingly fast reversals of fortune, but since you played to achieve as many glorious exploits as possible, rather than establish a winning state, skillful play definitely gave you an edge over the course of the whole game.

 

If you managed to secure a dominant position in DR, whether by carefully biding your time or by seizing a moment, then the game didn't bog down into cautious consolidation. You had to damn the torpedos and go for glory fast, because your good position would be sure to fall apart completely, in some totally unpredictable way, within a few turns. But then it was just as much fun to be in a terrible position, with some other player outclassing you completely, because you only had to keep laying traps and watching for your chance.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Slarty

Originally Posted By: Dantius

You wouldn't happen to play Go, would you? Nine elementary rules only, and the resulting game is 120 orders of magnitude more complex than chess is (10^170 legal positions vs. 10^50).

Never played it, actually. Also, I don't think it's fair to equate numbers of legal positions with complexity. That could be a part of it, but I think complexity would also need to take into account, rather more relevantly, how the different positions are related.

Speaking as someone into game tree search, both are important, really. If you want to (strongly/weakly) solve the game, then only the size of the state space is important. But when making a player of an unsolved game, performance is greatly improved once you give your player heuristic knowledge of how strong each option is. And for a number of reasons, coming up with position value estimates for games like Go or Shogi is a lot tougher than for games like chess or checkers. Well, for computers at least. Human players, even novices, can learn that sort of stuff very quickly, and researchers in my field have had to come up with fundamentally different algorithms to be remotely competitive in these games. We're catching up, though, at least until the next level of difficult domains are found.

EDIT: @SoT: I know what you mean about sometimes wanting lighter games. I consider Zendo to be one of my favourite 'filler' games now, but for a while I hated playing it because it felt too much like the work I was doing in one of my courses.

[ex post slarto]

I've also spent a lot of time with state space search, and I agree with what Dintiradan said. But what I was getting at was more that how we define "complexity" for a state space program is not the same as how we define "complexity" as it relates to us humans.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: VCH

The paradigms and theories that are worth anything aren't complicated, at least not if you don't want them to be. Island biogeography, trophic-pyramids, trophic cascades, natural selection, metapopulation theory—all are pretty simple guiding paradigms (of course I'm biased as an ecologists, so maybe geneticists or biochem people have more complex thoughts). In my opinion it's not a question of incorporating as much as you can get away with, as much as it is getting away with incorporating as little as possible and still having the result sync up with real communities and ecosystems. But I agree that a lot is lost in simplifying an idea, however, a lot is gained too, like communication.

yeah i was thinking more of molecular biology than ecology when i said that. i guess the best way i can put it is that there's a whole lot of stuff that's contingent rather than necessary. there is, for example, no particular law of nature requiring that animals use acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter: it just so happened to turn out that way. there's a bunch of stuff like that that there's simply no reasonable way to predict except by looking to see what you find.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm sure that's true. But on the other hand, not just anything could serve as a neurotransmitter. And to some extent neurons probably are as they are, and do what they do, because acetylcholine turned up; if it had been something else, maybe a lot of other things would have turned out differently, as well.

 

I'm curious as to whether the number of possible basic structures for life is really large, or surprisingly small. I have no idea which to expect, and I suspect no-one else does either. Maybe someday our descendants will find out, by visiting lots of alien races in their flying saucers, and abducting their rural folks to check out their biology.

[Alorael at Large]

There are some cases where you look at how life works and say, "Oh, of course it has to be like that! How elegant!" But there are also cases where you don't. Why do so many nerves use acetylcholine? There are other neurotransmitters. In many synapses the types of transmitters are important. But if it's acetylcholine only, it really could be norepinephrine only instead and as far as we know it would all be the same. But it isn't like that.

 

Or take eyeballs. The retinal ganglia are between incoming light and your retina, meaning your optic nerves create a blind spot. There's no reason for it to be this way, as far as we know; in fact, in the very similar but separately evolved eyes of cephalopods the ganglia are inside the retina and they don't have blind spots. Why is it this way? Bad luck, probably.

 

—Alorael, who has no idea how essential the most basic constituents of life, shared from the most ancient bacteria to today, are. The arsenic experiments says that maybe the elements aren't essential. The DNA structure and function are correlated, but there are other possible ways to create long, coded, coiled structures. These questions can't be reduced to first principles because first principles are quite far removed from the messy random processes of evolution.

[Goldengirl]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

Goblins.

Goblins is really good. Still, though, its updates are so slow-paced that I could no longer bear to follow it. Maybe one day I'll hear that it's complete, and reread the entire thing from beginning to end. I feel the same way about Order of the Stick, really.

Comics I currently follow are XKCD, Questionable Content (although, it's lack of any sort of long-term plot is putting it in danger for me), Eat That Toast! (which also has issues with updating), Amazing Super Powers, Cyanide and Happiness, and Bug. I couldn't really say that I have a favorite. For me to have a favorite, I'd want a webcomic that updates consistently and relatively quickly as well as has a good plotline.

In my experience, the ones that update quickly and consistently tend to just be independent jokes without plot - such as Cyanide and Happiness, Bug, and XKCD. Others have plot but don't release very often or regularly, such as OOTS and Goblins. Questionable Content is in the odd position of regularly updating, but only having relatively short story arcs that don't seem to have an overall plan behind them.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Goldenking

Goblins is really good. Still, though, its updates are so slow-paced that I could no longer bear to follow it.

Goblins has been updating about twice a week for several months now. It's still pretty slow moving, because the updates are only one page apiece and sometimes the updates are filler (hello, Shield of Wonder table), but it's better now than it was.

Dikiyoba.

[Erebus the Black]

Originally Posted By: Goldenking

...

Two good exception to the rule are D&D and GG, which, unless someone is sick, update very regularly.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I'm sure that's true. But on the other hand, not just anything could serve as a neurotransmitter. And to some extent neurons probably are as they are, and do what they do, because acetylcholine turned up; if it had been something else, maybe a lot of other things would have turned out differently, as well.

It doesn't seem so bad when you have one contingent fact to work into a bigger picture. But there are maybe thousands of other little facts like that that you can't work out from first principles, and not all of them are interconnected in simple ways, nor would we have any reason to expect them to be. Abstract it down to the level of DNA and it all looks simple enough, I suppose (at least if you only look at DNA as a source of information and not as a molecule with its own chemical properties), but look at the proteins that DNA codes for and while you do see some common structural and functional elements, you also see an enormous number of properties and interactions with seemingly no rhyme and reason. It's as if theoretical physicists had to deal with a thousand fundamental particles instead of a couple of dozen.

Quote:

I'm curious as to whether the number of possible basic structures for life is really large, or surprisingly small. I have no idea which to expect, and I suspect no-one else does either. Maybe someday our descendants will find out, by visiting lots of alien races in their flying saucers, and abducting their rural folks to check out their biology.

The betting among people who think they know the answer is that the number is large, to the point that finding DNA or RNA-based life on another planet would be considered compelling evidence of panspermia.

[adc.]

9gag

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