2 replies to this topic

[Alexander]

I can already see the future... even online games won't be the same. People will just use it to make their moves. Although there is no point, people will still do it

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/stor...d569f4b&k=48367

[Ykkrosh]

If every player used that method, every game would be a draw, but that possibility doesn't necessarily kill the game - consider the International RoShamBo Programming Competition, in which it is trivial to be 'unbeatable' on average (by just choosing randomly each time, so you always draw) but requires much more strategy to do better than average when your opponents are a mixture of unbeatable and beatable. (And as soon as you implement some kind of strategy, you become beatable and make the game interesting for your opponents - there will be a definite winner if at least two players are not purely random.)

There's some discussion of strategy on that page, and some about Iocaine Powder (which won the first contest definitively) with second-guessing and triple-guessing and meta-strategies and meta-meta-strategies. Forcing a draw is not an optimal strategy for winning a tournament, so the game can still be interesting

[Ykkrosh]

Incidentally, this is an interesting account of the checkers-playing program, and its relationship to the man who was "arguably the most dominant player in the history of any sport".