[HN Gopher] Taikyoku Shogi
___________________________________________________________________
Taikyoku Shogi
Author : Hooke
Score : 148 points
Date : 2020-10-27 01:55 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I am curious what HN has to say about a thought I reluctantly
| admit that I occassionally have : "There is a huge number of
| people on this planet wasting their mental energy (computional
| power) on a board game where the same amount of energy can be
| expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever
| important problem. What's the difference between using calories
| to compute unnecessary peer to peer game calculations with no
| goal vs. using electricity to compute hashes in crypto mining."
|
| I love chess and all kinds of board games :) but I can't help
| thinking about stuff like this.
| temuze wrote:
| Because life is short and you should do what you're passionate
| about!
|
| Six days ago, I had brain surgery. I made it home a few days
| ago and I'm still mostly bed ridden. Despite this, I'm starting
| to work again because I love my job and I'll be bored out of my
| mind if I stop...
|
| If I was at differently stage in my career, I would probably be
| playing Civ and shooting for a religious victory under Canada
| (the religion would be named "Tim Horton's" of course).
| inakarmacoma wrote:
| What is it like, recovering from brain surgery, in ways that
| may be different from recovering from other kinds of surgery?
| I imagine it could be quite challenging and unique?
| firebaze wrote:
| If you're able to find a way to use peoples desire for playing
| to solve hard problems like curing cancer, you'll deserve a
| nobel prize.
|
| You'd be turning work into fun, and that into solving hard
| human problems. If you get there, maybe you'll notice that
| curing cancer wouldn't help humanity in the long run, so you'd
| turn to the cause of that. Could end up in a vicious circle.
| But as long as it is fun, go for it.
| bserge wrote:
| Yes, well, self control is incredibly hard, and we all die one
| day. No need to feel guilty about doing something you find
| interesting.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| I think in addition to this, people's engagement in hobbies
| often allows them the mental plasticity to return to
| difficult problems with a solution. Improving on something
| that doesn't necessarily benefit society directly, but which
| one finds personally fulfilling, tends to make people more
| energised when it comes to those society-building concerns
| (whether as activism, community engagement, or scientific
| advancement as previously mentioned.)
| keerthiko wrote:
| If we assume a slippery slope here, it goes
|
| - why play a game when you could work for society?
|
| - why work for society when you could create replicateable
| value for society's future?
|
| - why do that when you could change society?
|
| - why do that when you could save lives today?
|
| - why do that when you could save humanity from extinction?
|
| - why do that, any of that...at all?
|
| At the end of the day, the only remotely satisfactory reason
| for doing anything is to pursue individual fulfillment (even if
| that be in pursuit of a collective goal).
|
| Additionally, progress in any valuable-to-society pursuit does
| not happen singularly within the confines of an academic or
| professional field. Human brains work in mysterious ways, and
| giving them a wider space of things to bounce off of and
| different systems to analyze only strengthens it, not take away
| from it.
|
| I would be willing to bet the time (if/when) we find a cure to
| cancer will be concurrent with the most board-game-shaped-
| activities being participated in by humanity, not the least.
|
| TL;DR: human brain utility is non-zero-sum, unlike computers.
| failrate wrote:
| Why bother having fun? Why bother reading? Why bother doing
| anything but maximizing your human potential? Because it is
| exhausting. We eat fruit not just for the nutrition and dietary
| fiber. It is also delicious and inspires joy.
|
| And joy might be the best thing we can have.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Does it really inspire joy? Or does it just give pleasure?
| They are not the same.
| ketzo wrote:
| I think you can extend that kind of thinking to its logical
| conclusion, i.e. "what is the value of leisure time?", and then
| you arrive at a question that's been debated by philosophers...
| well, as long as philosophy has existed.
|
| I struggle with this question for myself, certainly. I know I
| could be working on some kind of revenue-generating side
| project, or volunteering my time on a political campaign I
| believe in, or working to feed the homeless, but instead I play
| video games. Is that.. okay? Is it "right" or "good"? I don't
| know that I have a perfect answer.
|
| I know this much: without _some_ amount of leisure time, I 'd
| go crazy, nor would I be much use in any of my "productive"
| capabilities; so clearly, there's _an_ amount of leisure time
| that is a net good for me. I think the question becomes: what
| is that amount?
| animal_spirits wrote:
| That is the whole idea of the sabbath. Humans are not
| supposed to be slaves to work. Work in the garden (or at the
| homeless shelter, etc.) six days and rest the seventh
| ggus wrote:
| My life got significantly better when I managed to switch
| from working 5 days and resting 2 (37.5 hours/week), to
| working 4 days and resting 3 (30 hours/week).
| ketzo wrote:
| For me, a lot of that is the fact that my "rest days" are
| really days where I gotta do work I don't get paid for :D
| adult life, huh...
| jandrese wrote:
| Pretty soon you should come to the realization that the real
| question is "What is the value of work?", and the answer is
| that it enables your leisure time. If you work so much that
| you have no leisure time then you have defeated yourself,
| your life is empty.
| mongol wrote:
| Chess as a purely mental challenge is not that interesting to
| me, and playing against a computer is not something I like at
| all. But playing against a human opponent is one of the few
| games that interest me. I like that it is so old and has so
| long traditions, that means something in addition. So my
| conclusion is, it is as much a social activity as a mental one.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| The goal of solving problems would be to make people happier.
| You're a people. Don't forget yourself.
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| How else can you learn to think? You need the ability to fail,
| repeatedly, in a short amount of time.
|
| Then you need people who actually dedicate serious resources to
| the game, to bring it to its limit and to be able to teach
| students the relevant parts.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think people tend to be bad at difficult tasks they are not
| specifically interested in, and we're all better served if
| people tend to be able to work on what they're interested in. I
| suspect that's going to end up better than if we somehow create
| a list of world problems ranked from the most to the least
| important and get the entire world to work from the top of the
| list down. (Never mind the difficulty of creating such a list.)
|
| There are charities that focus on reducing human hunger. There
| are also charities that focus on reducing child hunger. Why
| should the latter exist, since it's a subset of the former?
| Isn't everyone working on the child hunger charities ignoring
| the problems of adult hunger? Of course not. There are just
| some people who, for whatever reason, are specifically
| interested and motivated in fighting child hunger, and I
| strongly suspect that overall outcomes are better when those
| people have the opportunity to focus their work on child
| hunger.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I'm gonna go against concensus and say I agree. There are
| countless excuses for why it's a net neutral or even a positive
| for us to waste our most finite resource (time). But chances
| are, you're not going to be glad you played that one extra
| game, or watched more TV shows, when you're on your deathbed.
|
| I don't accept that life is about happiness. Happiness is too
| vague of a term, used to describe multiple different things.
| Does it mean a measure of how much pleasure one is feeling in a
| given moment? Satisfaction with one's own life? How much
| entertainment someone manages to have?
|
| We could reduce the argument that life is about simple pleasure
| to its logical conclusion, and ask why it wouldn't be optimal
| to use drugs and/or a neural device to induce a semiconscious,
| lasting state of maximal pleasure. I don't accept that most
| people would choose this life. And to anticipate that objection
| that it's because you have to look at a ultiliarian view of
| _everyone 's_ happiness, I don't think most people would choose
| to have everyone collectively in that state, either.
|
| I assert that life is about meaning. That's why the above
| doesn't sound appealing (probably). What do you do that is
| truly meaningful, to yourself? That is what makes a life well
| lived and gives you satisfaction, and it's separate from how
| happy you feel.
|
| And it could be chess games. It's up to us to look inside and
| figure it out for ourselves. I'm just tired of people
| expressing existential angst and it being met with "it makes
| you feel good so it's good".
| lhorie wrote:
| > We could reduce the argument that life is about simple
| pleasure to its logical conclusion
|
| If you really want to reduce, then you might as well go for
| the physics explanation: everything is deterministically
| following the laws of physics and any perception from your
| meat brain about what's desirable or noble or whatever are
| merely entropic microstates of a large complex physical
| system. Therefore, there's no "choice", and whether one
| specific individual chose to play a game at one time and
| another chose to study cancer at another time are entirely
| inevitable outcomes given the exact arrangement of atoms at
| their respective times.
|
| The idea that an individual conscience has control over any
| outcomes would have to somehow prove that it's possible for
| some metaphysical force to change chemical reactions enough
| to "flip a bit" in a neuron in some way that is capable of
| affecting a macroscopic human decision that would otherwise
| have taken a difference course, had one "let" chemistry run
| its deterministic course.
|
| I've read of experiments where lab rats lost the will to live
| so to speak, when they had their pleasure chemical receptors
| short-circuited (meaning, given the choice after experiencing
| the "neural device", they chose to submit to it). This
| suggests that motivation is indeed merely governed by a
| series of chemical reactions, rather than being a
| supernatural actor in its own right. It just so happens that
| from a natural selection perspective, organisms that take
| outside stimulus into account in their pleasure mechanisms
| are more likely to reproduce. Acts like choosing to play
| games or choosing to study are, under that interpretation,
| merely variations of evolved neurological mechanisms
| attempting to generate dopamine through convoluted means.
| chewz wrote:
| > I assert that life is about meaning
|
| For some people yes, for others not.
|
| > Frankl points to research indicating a strong relationship
| between "meaninglessness" and criminal behavior, addiction
| and depression. He argues that in the absence of meaning,
| people fill the resultant void with hedonistic pleasures,
| power, materialism, hatred, boredom, or neurotic obsessions
| and compulsions (Frankl 1992, p. 143).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl
|
| https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-
| happiness/vi...
| yters wrote:
| If people spent more time playing board games and less time
| fighting and mistreating each other, the world would be on the
| whole a better place.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| You ever hear the saying "Ted Kaczynski never played Monopoly."
| (it might have been a different board game - I forget the
| saying TBH. I heard it in passing at a bar one night when I was
| saying how I should be working instead of hanging out) I think
| it has to do with the fact that we all need to decompress
| sometimes. If all you do is something important 100% of the
| time, your going to end up being a crazy person. People need a
| valve release.
| scythe wrote:
| >There is a huge number of people on this planet wasting their
| mental energy (computional power) on a board game where the
| same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of
| curing cancer or whatever important problem. What's the
| difference between using calories to compute unnecessary peer
| to peer game calculations with no goal vs. using electricity to
| compute hashes in crypto mining.
|
| The problem is that without some eventual justification the
| whole value system becomes circular. You can't put all of your
| efforts into working to keep people alive so they can... put
| all of their efforts into working to keep people alive, etc.
| All value systems are ultimately circular or unjustified, but
| the latter is IMHO superior since it's more honest.
| x3iv130f wrote:
| Keep a balanced approach! The mind is part of your physical
| body and just like the rest of you it needs periods of rest and
| exercise.
|
| A great quote I heard about physical training is, "if you try
| to peak all the time you will plateau."
|
| Work is important but it is helpful to have a couple of things
| to do with your life besides it.
| pushrax wrote:
| There is a more general idea here: why don't we efficiently
| allocate resources, when we know that we could?
|
| Why is the fashion industry so big? Apparently it causes >10%
| of carbon emissions. 85% of used clothes end up in the dump.
|
| Why is marketing so big? It has long since surpassed the point
| where it simply matches products with demand. The best
| marketing is designed to create demand. I view that as a market
| inefficiency.
|
| The human emotional system has been tuned for local
| optimization and self benefit.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > why don't we efficiently allocate resources, when we know
| that we could?
|
| Huh? How do we know that we could? I thought we knew that we
| _couldn 't_.
| pushrax wrote:
| Perhaps "should" instead
| fny wrote:
| This is the same argument against basic and theoretical
| research. Why spend your time studying obscure insects and
| animals when you could be doing something worth while? Why
| study pure math or chase strange theorems that often have no
| application to anything relevant what so ever?
|
| Because these endeavors all lead to novel tools and learnings
| that are at times applicable in surprising ways to help solve
| "whatever important problem."
|
| For example, number theory, on its face, seems completely
| useless, and since 1800 BCE, years were "wasted" by scholars
| toying with useless factoring problems...
|
| ...until we got RSA cryptography in the 1970s.
|
| If I had lived in the year 1900, I could have never imagined
| number theory having such immensely important applications, but
| in 2020, I sure as hell believe AlphaGo and these game solvers
| have relevance because _it 's already bearing fruit_.
|
| AlphaGo, for one, inspired many application papers. My favorite
| example though is of a neural net trained to solve CSPs through
| _sudoko_ which was applied to the inverse protein folding
| problem! https://ostrokach.gitlab.io/project/proteinsolver/
| hiq wrote:
| I'm not sure an analogy between maths or AlphaGo and board
| games is reasonable, at least for the kind of board games OP
| was, I think, considering. OP was mentioning "mental energy",
| meaning they were thinking about playing the game.
|
| Chess, Go, etc. are constrained environments. Playing these
| games makes you better at them. Maybe you'll find a new
| opening, a new sequence, etc., but I don't think you'll ever
| be able to apply it to another field.
|
| Implementing AlphaGo is no longer playing the game, it's
| analyzing a computer science problem and finding a solution.
| Number theory was still about understanding some objects that
| seemed natural and given, rather than arbitrary ones with
| artificial constraints, like these games are.
| minblaster wrote:
| This falls into the thinking "pure math is ok, since it will
| often become practical on a long enough time horizon". Why
| not "pure math is ok because that's what people want to do"?
|
| Whether you can get funded for your explorations is a
| separate question, but no justification is needed for them.
| hospadar wrote:
| I prefer the reverse question: "What's the purpose of these
| 'productive' activities" - usually to increase the amount of
| time I have to read articles about bizarrely huge japanese
| chess games I guess :)
| nathanyukai wrote:
| Having fun is an important part of the learning process, which
| ultimately lead to technological advances so I don't think it's
| a waste. Also, mining crypto could be a total waste of energy.
| v64 wrote:
| > the same amount of energy can be expended into building new
| ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem
|
| That's the catch. We don't know what problems are important. We
| think we do, and sometimes we're right, but we've gone down
| dead ends too. And sometimes something that feels like a dead
| end turns out to be pivotal.
|
| I'd bet there's many scientists and researchers out there who
| had their eureka moment while their brain was disengaged during
| leisure time. Disconnecting and play are essential parts of
| discovering the important things.
| franklampard wrote:
| You think it's a waste to some the time and energy on board
| games, but it's not a waste on curing cancer. It's a bias, why
| is it more value able to do the latter?
| msla wrote:
| Human thought and attention isn't fungible. I can think about
| my job for a certain amount of time and then my productivity
| plummets, I can read for pleasure for a certain amount of time
| before I get antsy and my mind drifts, and so on. There's no
| "cure" for this because humans are intrinsically capable of
| stepping outside of the system and imagining what _else_ we
| could be doing at a given moment; getting in the zone is a way
| to quiet this line of thinking, but humans have a specific
| amount of "zone" in them and that's it.
| exdsq wrote:
| Apart from the obvious points like burnout, the point of living
| is really to live - not to work. We work to live sure, but in a
| perfect world we'd all be able to do what we want such as Place
| chess right?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This game belongs on a listicle of the most complex and possibly
| time-consuming board games and tabletop wargames ever conceived.
| hinkley wrote:
| You could still fit this in the Twilight Imperium box and have
| enough room left over for Gloomhaven.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think that article wants to compete with "List of People Killed
| By Dog Attacks in the United States" for longest Wikipedia
| article.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Because the game was found only recently after centuries of
| obscurity, it is difficult to say exactly what all the rules
| were.
|
| Proceeds to detail information on 257 different unit types
| pierrec wrote:
| Indeed, "List of fatal dog attacks in the United States
| (2010s)" is currently the 15th longest article on Wikipedia.
| "Taikyoku shogi" is far behind but still respectable at #80.
| But of course neither can touch the absolute epic "List of Red
| vs. Blue episodes".
|
| Based on the link kibwen provided:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages
| kibwen wrote:
| According to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_records#Ar...
| :
|
| - Longest article title: Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F.
| Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters
| on Cerro Quemazon, 15 Miles South of Bahia de Los Angeles, Baja
| California, Mexico, Apparently for a Southeastward Range
| Extension of Some 140 Miles (253 characters)
|
| - Longest article title without spaces: Lopadotemachoselachogal
| eokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymen
| okichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopele
| iolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon (183 characters)
|
| - Longest full typed number with an article:
| 9,223,372,036,854,775,807
|
| EDIT: Er, it makes more sense for me to have interpreted that
| as article length rather than title length. :P There's actually
| an entire autogenerated page for tracking that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages
| InitialLastName wrote:
| That Special:LongPages list is a perfect example of
| Wikipedia's biggest weakness, in that crowdsourcing is a bad
| way to do curation.
|
| Ideally, the length of an encyclopedia's article about a
| subject would be proportional to the subject's importance and
| to the amount of information available to the subject, not
| proportional to the contentiousness, propaganda value, or
| recency bias of that article.
| carstenhag wrote:
| On the contrary, it's probably on of its benefits: You can
| add as much as is relevant and provides information. After
| all, importance and relevancy is subjective and why would
| you need to remove 5000 words if someone wrote it and it
| provides value?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosil
| phiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteral
| ektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganoptery
| gon
|
| Huh. Without looking, I thought that would be a dinosaur
| species that someone named in jest. It turns out it's a dish
| in Aristophane's Assemblywomen.
| inasio wrote:
| I'm pretty sure parent was talking about longest article.
| thisjepisje wrote:
| If anyone wants to give it a try:
| https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Taikyoku%20Shogi
| (download the player from here: https://ludii.games/download.php)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I was never a chess guy but I do like shogi. Chess has too many
| pieces that can move across the entire board: 2 bishops, 2 rooks,
| queen... And pawns capture diagonally which I have always found
| very weird.
|
| In shogi there is no queen and there is only 1 bishop and 1 rook.
| Pawns capture forward and can move only 1 tile at a time and
| there is no en passant. There are lances which are like rooks but
| can only move forward. Knights have 2 ways of moving instead of
| 8.
|
| There are many more differences, like drops, different promotion
| rules, etc. It is a cool game.
|
| Shogi gets pretty exciting towards the endgame.
|
| An easy way to play shogi is in 81dojo. That site is available in
| English and is pretty active.
|
| It can take a while to get used to reading the pieces and
| memorizing moves and promotions, but there are piece sets
| available that show you the available moves for each piece.
|
| Illegal moves are the easiest way of losing. e.g.: nifu. And, you
| are expected to recognize a checkmate and resign.
|
| And there is a "beginner" version, doubutsu shogi. Which consists
| of fewer pieces and a smaller board.
| Corence wrote:
| Yeah, the presence of piece drops means the average piece power
| has to be lower in Shogi. If you play Crazyhouse you see how
| quick the game is if you have drops in a game with as powerful
| pieces as Chess.
|
| I think both games have their interesting parts and it's fun to
| play both.
| SamBam wrote:
| > And, you are expected to recognize a checkmate and resign
|
| Is that different from chess?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Not different to offline chess, but online shogi will usually
| expect you to resign and penalize you if you don't.
|
| Although it is rather hard to explain for a beginner like
| myself. Mating in shogi is complicated...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkmate
| jandrese wrote:
| I assume the penalty is in some metagame ranking? An in-
| game penalty for failing to recognize that you have already
| lost seems pointless.
| [deleted]
| jonbaer wrote:
| Good luck DeepMind.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Deep Mind have already beat this game with AlphaZero.
| [deleted]
| pmontra wrote:
| The standard version of shogi.
|
| I wonder if the extra space and pieces would increase the
| length of training polynomially or exponentially.
| SetTheorist wrote:
| Chu shogi and Tenjiku shogi are other larger (not so ridiculously
| large) variants of shogi that are quite playable and enjoyable.
|
| Also, people do play crazy games these days, look up "monster
| wargames". For example "Advanced European Theater of Operations"
| has 2200 pieces played on 2 poster-sized maps...
| jandrese wrote:
| Yeah, my first thought was that this is the 16th century
| version of The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War
| 1940-43. Probably only played a few dozen times in the history
| of the world.
|
| I don't know what the Japanese word for Grognard is, but
| whomever played this qualifies.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| How do these games work? sounds like they're, by definition,
| balanced by obscurity. If they're so vast, they can't
| possibly have good coverage of good design.
| jandrese wrote:
| Players tend to think of them less as a game and more as a
| giant simulation. There may be rules that are overpowered
| or underpowered but in a simulation so large they don't
| move the needle that much on the final outcome.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| That sounds hard to believe. I would think effects
| compound, not cancel out.
|
| Sounds fun though. I enjoy playing new boardgames on
| steam against friends without having read the rules. In
| an electronic game, you can't make illegal moves, so
| you're on even footing, clueless, but still playing in
| some approximation of correctly.
|
| Somehow I don't think I could do that for this one,
| electronic or otherwise.
| jandrese wrote:
| There is a sort of metagame aspect to this. If Hitler had
| ditched the occult and superweapon projects and focused
| on winter coats and boots for his soldiers trapped Russia
| what would have happened? Then you wargame it out.
|
| You'll never get anywhere on a real grognard game without
| spending hours poring over the rules first. The
| complexity is inherent to the system. Many of the better
| ones will try to compartmentalize it however, so you can
| start play on a relatively simple ruleset and only dive
| into the complex stuff when pieces interact.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Often, modern ones have rules designed around simulation,
| often using simplified versions of the empirically-derived
| rules used in actual military table exercises or operations
| analysis. Balance is typically done in victory conditions,
| though some also use the players to provide balance; e.g.,
| Empires in Arms, IIRC, has players bid victory points for
| starting countries, so to the extent that a country is
| otherwise favored by imbalance, there's a minigame around
| that.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For example "Advanced European Theater of Operations" has
| 2200 pieces played on 2 poster-sized maps...
|
| And can be linked to Advanced Pacific Theater of Operations for
| those who think it is too small of a game on its own.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I was curious to see how a game of it looked so I googled around,
| I found this video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ve8xo
| jakobmartz3 wrote:
| Awesome!
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| This is a smaller variant.
| blouzada wrote:
| I learned Shogi in Hunter X Hunter
| tyrust wrote:
| The Chimera Ant Arc is top-tier.
|
| The game they spend most of the time playing is the fictional
| Gungi [0].
|
| [0] - https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Gungi
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(page generated 2020-10-27 23:00 UTC)