Chess vs. Bridge

[Dauphin]

Deep Blue supposedly could look at everyone possible outcome 40 moves ahead

Thats definitely no true. Each move there are around 10-20 pieces that you can move (and even more positions that they can be moved to). That equates to at least 10⁴⁰ possible outcomes.

A computer cannot analyse that many moves, it would take eons



In my experience the best moves in chess are not the most tactically sound, or strategically useful, but are the ones your opponent does not wish you to make.

[Immortal Wombat]

Sid is God?

Originally posted by ShuShu
God might not play dice, but he does play CIV III...

No wonder atheism is on the increase.

[steelehc]

i can kik all of ur @$$'s in chess

Oh really? Bring it on.

I think the point originally made here was that Chess and Bridge are two very different games, each of which requires a cartain amount of skill. Bridge additionally requires luck, as you don't know what cards you will be dealt. Chess can require luck, as in the case of the person who makes stupid moves, but luckily has a stupid opponent, allowing him a victory.

Steele

PS:If I have missed something, please correct me. I play Chess as often as I can, but I have never played Bridge.

[Dauphin]

I play both, but I prefer Bridge at it is more of a memory game than a predictive game.

That is you have an advantage if you can remember what cards have gone before - in chess remembering previous moves is unimportant. Conversely in chess predicting what can happen upto several moves ahead is important - in bridge it is not as difficult, because it is easier to force moves of the opponent, plus the opponent has only a few options of what card to play.

[Tarquelne]

"Chess can require luck"

I think it can accuratly be stated that even a "deterministic" system has an element of chance (luck) if a person is makeing decisions based on anything less that _complete_ understanding of the system.

Where a participant's understanding ends chance enters. A chess player, for example, might know that moving his rook either _here_ or _there_ is the best move.... but which is it? They look equal to him. If he had, say, 100 years he could figure out which move was "best" - which would be most likely to lead to victory. However, as his opponent isn't willing to wait that long he has to choose now. If he happens to choose the best move he's "lucky", if he happens to choose the less-favorable move he's been "unlucky."

A similar situation would be one in which the player knows that his opponent has a plan in operation, but doesn't have the skill to figure out exactly what that plan is. If his response is the one that foils his oppoent's plan he's "lucky" (but he could claim it was skill), if his response is one that leaves him vulnerable his opponent's gambit then he was unlucky, though you could also say, without contradiciton, it was his lack of skill that led to his loss.

Civ3? What's that? Oh. I'll say that I think Civ3 needs to have a strong element of chance to remain fun. I don't think the game is "deep" enough to remain interesting without the need to cope with and try to plan for unforseen events/eventualities. (Imainge Civ with only 2 civs on a 8x8, nothing-but-grassland map... might be amusing for a few games, but not much to it.)

[kimmygibler]

"The fact that machines that only use 0s and 1s can beat even the best humans, show that the game is simple enough to be completely represented in a binary language."

Bridge could just as easily be played by computors. I would say that for a game with simple rules, chess is exceedingly complex. No other game has such a simple set of rules and no random variables, yet it takes a supercomputor just to beat the top human. It seems to me that computors should have been unbeatable years ago. They can analyze millions more positions than a human can, but somehow humans can win. It shows that you must make moves beyond what you can actually calculate. The intuitional aspect shows how complex it is.

[Dauphin]

The intuitional aspect shows how complex it is.

As is the understanding of the opponent.

If you were playing a human player, whom you have some experience of, you will do far better than against a computer of the same "standard". Similarly if you think you are playing a human player instead of a computer you will play differently.

Sometimes it is a case of playing the opponent rather than playing the game. Hence my previous comment about making the moves that the opponent does not want you to play.

[Ming]

Originally posted by steelehc
Bridge additionally requires luck, as you don't know what cards you will be dealt.

When Bridge is played competitively... ie duplicate bridge... Luck is minimized. You all play the "same hands" and your score is based on how you do vs how others did with the same cards. So it doesn't matter what cards you have.

[ShuShu]

Time to return...

1) Thanks all for proving this is an eternal conflict that gets people rather heated.

2) As was pointed out, I was trying to emphasis that the same emtions that show up in the bridge/chess debate show up in the CIVII/CIVIII debate.

3) CIVII=chess, CIVIII=bridge. Civ II has predictable combat, and 100% reliability points (no polution, no corruption, no defensive bonus...) Hence the vehemence against the combat system and corruption.

4) luck comes into play in both chess and Bridge. as Sander, errr Sagacious points out, your opponent matters in chess. In bridge, its your cards. In both cases, if they match your style, you are lucky. The argument of Deeper Blue above is that Deeper Blue had enforced luck because its style was tailored to beat Kaparov's.

--- bit of personal advocacy
5) Despite large economic incentives to provide ever better AI's for both bridge and chess. Computers are already beating the masters in chess, they are not even close in bridge.

[CJM]

My $.02:

In terms of the deterministic (i.e., chess) and non-deterministic (i.e., bridge) argument, I would think that both Civ2 & Civ3 come out on the non-deterministic side (much as Salvor earlier commented). Why would I argue this? The random number generator/seed thing. If I recall correctly, the game generates some random number series that influences things like combat results and goody-hut outcomes of all players, human and AI. That's going to make the Civ games non-deterministic, at least from the player's perspective (Tarquelne's comment about a complete understanding of the system is relevant here; if we knew the random string used, and all the actions of the AI, the randomness could effectively be removed).

But why might Civ2 seem more deterministic than Civ3? Perhaps the combat differences play in here. My knowledge in this area is not as detailed as some others' may be, but I believe this more complex combat system was introduced to do away with the legendary "Anti-Tank Spearman." So even though Civ2 also used random numbers to influence the outcome of battles, perhaps the influence wasn't great enough to overcome the advantage a more advanced unit had over a more primitive one in terms of FP and/or HP. As a result, the combat appeared more "predictable."

CJM

[Libertarian]

Computers owe a lot of their strength to databases of ever larger size that contain millions of variations of opening moves and typical endgame situations.

Databases, I might add, that were culled from the games of the best human players.