5 ms·

+1 for funding issues. When I was working on my undergraduate thesis on applying machine learning techniques to board games, I developed the basis of a new met

by ig1 16y ago

+1 for funding issues. When I was working on my undergraduate thesis on applying machine learning techniques to board games, I developed the basis of a new method of analyzing board games (using graphs of games and graph isomorphism) but I wasn't able to find anyone who could finance me doing a research masters in it. Although I think part of my issue was that it wasn't obviously Computer Science, nor was it obviously Mathematics.

troutwine 16y ago
The old saw still rings true: turn your research problem into a military application and the DoD will likely fund it. Perhaps instead modeling a chess board as a graph you model passable routes in a mountainous terrain. Instead of chess pieces, maybe the forces you're modeling are small groups with different movement characteristics?
- jrockway 16y ago
  Which chess piece is the guys with guns, and which chess piece is the airstrike?
  - troutwine 16y ago
    "In this paper we assume all forces are ground-based and beyond any hope of air-support or resupply. Historical analysis of battle-field circumstance will reveal numerous instances--even in the modern period--of such occurrences. A more general result is beyond the scope or intention of this paper."
bumbledraven 16y ago
Sounds interesting. Is an overview of your new method available to the public?
- ig1 16y ago
  No, mostly I just had a whole bunch of vaguely related ideas to do with analyzing the graphs of games, but I really need to find some time to hammer out the details to get something I could actually publish. I spent a lot of time while writing my thesis on machine learning thinking about the different approaches that have been taken to board games and most tend to involve some sort of analysis of the board, and it occurred to me that rather than studying the board it might make sense to study the graph that shows how those different board states are connected. After all you could have two games that superficially from their boards and rules look completely different but have identical graphs. Now what if we could solve one of the games easily but the other game was hard, if the graphs are identical you could covert any game state between the two games, thus using the easy game to solve the hard game. So then you can look at things at how to create an easy game which has the same graph as a hard game, obviously for something like chess this is hard, but you don't have to replicate the whole game graph, you can do it in chunks breaking the big graph into a series of smaller graphs and then attacking them. There's all sort of other interesting things you can do with game graphs, for example you can start enumerating all games with a certain complexity (in terms of node and vertices) and ask questions like "are some game graphs fundamentally more difficult than others" and perhaps more importantly "why?". I think the area has a big potential for deepening our understanding of board games and also raising some interesting complexity and information theory problems.
davidst 16y ago
Was it anything like the 'Method of Analogies' from KAISSA?

by ig1 16y ago

troutwine 16y ago

The old saw still rings true: turn your research problem into a military application and the DoD will likely fund it. Perhaps instead modeling a chess board as a graph you model passable routes in a mountainous terrain. Instead of chess pieces, maybe the forces you're modeling are small groups with different movement characteristics?

jrockway 16y ago
Which chess piece is the guys with guns, and which chess piece is the airstrike?
- troutwine 16y ago
  "In this paper we assume all forces are ground-based and beyond any hope of air-support or resupply. Historical analysis of battle-field circumstance will reveal numerous instances--even in the modern period--of such occurrences. A more general result is beyond the scope or intention of this paper."

bumbledraven 16y ago

Sounds interesting. Is an overview of your new method available to the public?

ig1 16y ago
No, mostly I just had a whole bunch of vaguely related ideas to do with analyzing the graphs of games, but I really need to find some time to hammer out the details to get something I could actually publish. I spent a lot of time while writing my thesis on machine learning thinking about the different approaches that have been taken to board games and most tend to involve some sort of analysis of the board, and it occurred to me that rather than studying the board it might make sense to study the graph that shows how those different board states are connected. After all you could have two games that superficially from their boards and rules look completely different but have identical graphs. Now what if we could solve one of the games easily but the other game was hard, if the graphs are identical you could covert any game state between the two games, thus using the easy game to solve the hard game. So then you can look at things at how to create an easy game which has the same graph as a hard game, obviously for something like chess this is hard, but you don't have to replicate the whole game graph, you can do it in chunks breaking the big graph into a series of smaller graphs and then attacking them. There's all sort of other interesting things you can do with game graphs, for example you can start enumerating all games with a certain complexity (in terms of node and vertices) and ask questions like "are some game graphs fundamentally more difficult than others" and perhaps more importantly "why?". I think the area has a big potential for deepening our understanding of board games and also raising some interesting complexity and information theory problems.

davidst 16y ago

Was it anything like the 'Method of Analogies' from KAISSA?