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> Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance there? > What openings do aliens play? I love these questions about if anyone el

> Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance there? > What openings do aliens play? I love these questions about if anyone else in the universe is playing Go. My gut response would be yes -- it's a simple enough game (regular game grid of any size roughly 5x5 on up, one type of piece, two players take turns alternating placing pieces, and any that are surrounded are removed). I suspect other simple enough games that likely exist elsewhere in the universe would be tic-tac-toe, connect-N, dots and boxes, and Othello/Reversi -- any others? Contrast with, say, Chess, which has too many different types of pieces, all with specific movement rules, and with a specific initial layout. I wouldn't be surprised if Chess only existed here, though I also would expect plenty of games similar to Chess to exist out there in the universe, i.e. a game on a regular board with multiple types of pieces and different rules for moving the different pieces. If Shogi, Checkers, or Stratego weren't human games I wouldn't be surprised to learn them from aliens. It's a great question -- what is the most universal board game? What board game has been independently invented the most times throughout the universe? What if it's a game that we haven't even come up with?

SamPatt 7y ago
I imagine dice, or some other physical object that introduces randomness, is a sure thing if intelligent life exists elsewhere.
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  That implies that they think and behave like us.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Does it? A lot of concepts in board games are pretty natural results of universal mathematics. There's only three regular polygons that will tesselate a board (we have plenty of board games that use all three of them), and there's only three dimensions that games can work in (and we have plenty of games of all three types; Candyland, for instance, is played along a 1D path, and the first player to reach the end wins). Even if some aliens think so differently from us that the concept of a square is unknown to them, surely there are plenty of aliens that would think similarly enough?
    - cylon13 7y ago
      You're assuming a lot about what it means to be an intelligence. It's not the concept of a square that will potentially be missing from an alien lifeform. It's the complex circuitry involved in enjoying board games in the first place. One can imagine an intelligent lifeform evolving differently than us in such a way where the adaptation that makes games fun wasn't required.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        Yes, one can imagine some aliens evolving differently such that they don't enjoy games, but all of them?
        cylon13 7y ago
        Of course not all of them, we enjoy games, and we're the only actual data point we have. But since we're just one data point, we really don't know anything about the probability of different subsystems of the mind evolving. I certainly hope we encounter sentient empathetic aliens that enjoy games as much as we do!
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        Well for Go to not exist anywhere in the universe there'd either have to be no aliens, or no aliens that enjoy games, or something along those lines. So long as there are some aliens and some aliens that enjoy games, Go and other relatively simple abstract board games do seem like they should inevitably be reinvented many times over across the universe. Hell, maybe there's aliens that don't enjoy games per se but that use them for other purposes, like deciding legal guilt or who gets to rule.
      - dwaltrip 7y ago
        If they have a civilization, they probably are social creatures, and thus probably enjoy playing. Most social creatures on Earth engage in play when they are young. Also, for many animals, playing helps them learn how to hunt.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Yeah, but that's not a game on its own, it's just a part of a game. I'm wondering about which game exists in essentially the same form elsewhere. Once you start looking into the rules for specific games that only use dice, the rules are many and pretty specific (e.g. street dice), and it's the Chess problem again. I guess a dice game that probably exists pretty widely in the universe would be the simple children's dice game, namely, two players roll N-sided dice and the higher number wins, or you accumulate multiple rolls and play first to a given total, but that's not a very interesting game, and there's no strategy.
  - alanfalcon 7y ago
    The rules for Go are also actually pretty specific. Would you consider any territory capturing game played with simple tokens on a board to be Go? Is Reversi/Othello also Go?
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Are they pretty specific? It seems to me the concept is pretty general (and yes I'm familiar with the game): two players alternate placing stones on a square-tesselated board, with surrounded stones being removed from the board, and when the board is full the player with more stones wins. The no board state repetitions rules are just a natural evolution of the basic rules in order to prevent stalemates so that games actually end (and plenty of other human games have similar rules to prevent stalemates; it seems to be a generic, widely-applicable solution). Yes, there's some nuance in how scoring works (and we have multiple different scoring rules just here on Earth right now, more if you include the historical ones), and we don't actually play to the end but instead stop early once the result is clear and then calculate what the end score would've been, but those don't change the game that much and all would be considered Go.
beojan 7y ago
> My gut response would be yes I'd guess no, since there doesn't seem to be another human culture / civilization that independently invented it.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Go is a pretty generic game that leans heavily on basic mathematics and geometry (which are universal). You really think it could only be invented by humans? Why?
  - Tomte 7y ago
    No, he points out that even other humans haven't done so.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      I'm not following. The universe is unbelievably vast, and likely has many, many more magnitudes of intelligent species out there than we have had cultures down here on this one planet. I don't want to get into arguing Drake's equation here, but if you accept that aliens exist, then you're granting that there's a lot of them; it makes no sense why we would be, e.g., one of only two intelligent species in the entire universe.
      - Tomte 7y ago
        It's an argument against the "naturalness" or inevitability of the discovery. It may be wrong, but "aliens" is not a response to it.
        andai 7y ago
        If I'm understanding correctly, the sticking point here (and in most of the thread) is people arguing about different things. Some people are saying the discovery of Go is inevitable (certain?), some are saying it's likely (but not inevitable), some are saying it's possible (but not likely).
datashow 7y ago
If it is true that Go is also played by other Alien species, there is no guarantee that they all play on the same size of board. If earth is visited by Aliens some day, we should assume they play on larger board than us. It would be laughable that we get visited by 9*9 players.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Sure, but Go on larger boards is still Go. Even here on Earth there's at least four board sizes that are regularly played on.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > If earth is visited by Aliens some day, we should assume they play on larger board than us. It would be laughable that we get visited by 9*9 players. This only makes any sense if you're also confident that, should we visit an alien world some day, we would have updated the rules of Go to require a larger board. If we can play on a 19x19 board for historical and sentimental reasons, aliens can play on a 9x9 board for historical and sentimental reasons.
  - datashow 7y ago
    Why don’t we play a 9x9 board for historical and sentimental reasons? Because it’s too easy for professionals.
dkarras 7y ago
It's a weird thought I admit but as a computer game, I believe "Tetris" could have been independently "discovered". Board size - gravity rules - scoring etc. are arbitrary but there is some fundamental elegance about all possible tetrominos creating a game that is that fun. At the very least non tetris (so no creating and destroying lines) but a game with all possible tetrominos probably would exist.
- coldtea 7y ago
  There's no actual gravity rules in Tetris. Pieces move downwards, but that's about it.
  - rdlw 7y ago
    They move faster at higher levels, and the exact speeds and line clear requirements are arbitrary.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >They move faster at higher levels Which proves it's not gravity -- gravity would move the same speed always (assuming a vacuum game stage), or would move proportionally to air resistance (so based on shape), etc.
      - rdlw 7y ago
        Right, but this is called 'gravity' in the game, so I think it's what ggp was talking about
      - sdenton4 7y ago
        There is gravity, but Tetris pieces are dropped from very high, and have achieved terminal velocity by the time they reach your board.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        I know we're firmly into joke territory at this point, but anyway, if that were true, then line pieces would fall faster when oriented vertically than horizontally. Clearly the real answer is that Tetris is played in a weightless vacuum, and that pieces are shot at a constant speed from somewhere offscreen.
grawprog 7y ago
>If Shogi, Checkers, or Stratego weren't human games I wouldn't be surprised to learn them from aliens. Why do all theories about aliens start with the implication that they're similar enough that they developed the way we did, they think like we do, have similar senses, brain structure and locomotion. Any aliens that have evolved to any kind of level of intelligence would have done so under the conditions specific to their planet. Given the huge variation of life on Earth over its existence and that humans in their current form, or even animals in their current form, have existed for such a tiny insignificst fraction of time that it seems kind of preposterous to assume aliens elsewhere are anything like us in the slightest. Humans have problems anthropomorphizing animals as it is, but when it comes to aliens it just seems like everything starts with, well of course they must do the things we do....
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Why are people so quick to assume that every single other alien species would be completely unfathomable to us? We all share the same physics, chemistry, and mathematics of our common universe. For example, there's only three dimensions, and there's only three regular polygons that can tessellate a grid. Unless you're going to posit that there's no alien species whatsoever that will even come up with the concept of a game (which I find highly doubtful), they're going to be using the same abstract mathematical concepts as we are in building said games, because only so many abstract mathematical concepts even exist. Our simplest board games aren't that far removed from the realm of the purely mathematical. And yet aliens won't all have their own completely different mathematical systems; such a thing isn't possible.
  - andai 7y ago
    So, the smartest animals on earth apart from primates are dolphins, crows and octopuses. But most aliens are portrayed as humanoids. I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know :) I think the body shape part is relevant here because it determines what kinds of games are possible or practical. A species of intelligent octopuses might play games involving changing their pigment (in wavelengths we can't even see!) or manipulating eight things at once. Bird games might involve flying competitions etc. Edit: I guess the important part here in a species inventing Go, is having a body that can make a board game (or similar representation). Hands are pretty good for crafting tables and moving small pieces around. Beaks and snouts less so. (I'd put my money with the octopus.)
DanTheManPR 7y ago
Connect N type games seem almost certain to exist elsewhere, as are connection games such as Hex. The fundamental concept is very basic, and the there are not a lot of variations. There are a plethora of abstract games that have been invented that are not played very much, but seem to have the potential for extreme depth of play. I would be willing to bet that some of those neglected games are played by Aliens somewhere in the Universe, and enjoy the level of success in their society that Chess or Go enjoy here.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  This is a great thought. Do you know if anyone is looking at computationally examining these overlooked games and trying to find the ones with truly excellent depth, so that they may get greater attention? That sounds like a fun project.
  - gamegoblin 7y ago
    I think the game Quoridor has simple rules but is very deep. It's a 9x9 grid of cells where one places length-2 walls between the cells to inhibit movement (the goal is to get your piece to the opposite side of the board). On your turn you can either move your piece, or place a wall. You have 10 walls to place. The one non-obvious rule that completely changes the strategy of the game is that you cannot make it impossible for the other player to win (you can't simply box them in). So a common theme is to try to maximize the amount of paths your opponent has while minimizing the number of paths you have, so that whenever your opponent commits to a path, you block it and force them to backtrack. But say your opponent has 2 paths, and they begin to commit to one. You are waiting for them to commit further so you can block it and force them to backtrack. But before you do it, they block the other path themselves. Now it is illegal for you to block their only remaining path. On the face of it, the branching factor is much higher than chess. On each turn one has 100+ possible moves. I have written pretty highly optimized minimax AB-pruning type AIs for it and have never managed to make an AI that can search deeper than 7 moves or so in a reasonable amount of time, and my AI was the strongest (by far) of any I could find online (and better than any human player in my friend group). It's pretty computationally difficult due to the "cannot make it impossible to win" rule. If you do it naively, that involves an A-star search for each possible move. You'll max out around 4 moves deep with that strategy. A few observations will get you a bit higher. e.g. A wall cannot possibly block a path unless both ends of the wall touch another wall (or edge of board). There might be some sophisticated graph cutting algorithms I am not aware of that could make this tractable, but I haven't found any that mapped too well onto the problem. I think Quoridor is actually really ripe for an AlphaZero type approach (due to the high branching factor and expensive compute needed to determine move legality), and I would love to see a superhuman game played. You can play against someone's javascript AI here: https://danielborowski.github.io/site/quoridor-ai/display.html https://danielborowski.github.io/site/quoridor-ai/display.ht... I think this AI does a depth 2 or 3 search.
Iv 7y ago
Not exactly a board game but I would expect rock paper scissors game patterns to be universal. I think dice combination games are going to be popular as well.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  And they would be shaped by whatever they could form with their hands. Sickle - Brick - Foil
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    It doesn't even require physical representation. You can play it verbally, or if that results in simultaneity issues, each player separately says their play for the next round to a judge. Hell, if the players are far enough away from each other and shouting out their answers, you can solve the simultaneity issue. By the time you've heard the other player's move you're already halfway through saying your own move, and can't pretend you were going to say something else.
- saltyfamiliar 7y ago
  These are great answers. In general I think leveraging uncertainty and imperfect information is going to be pretty universal.
jefftk 7y ago
I looked into the complexity of games a few years ago, approximating this as the number of bytes needed to implement the rules as a program: https://www.jefftk.com/p/simplest-interesting-game https://www.jefftk.com/p/simplest-interesting-game Bottom line numbers: 280 gomoku 356 hex 483 dots and boxes 572 go 622 checkers
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  This is awesome! Any idea where Chess would stack up? I'm assuming it'd be greater than Checkers in that list, but how much greater? And would Nim be simpler than Gomoku (Connect-N)?
  - jefftk 7y ago
    If you or someone else would like to have a go at writing one I'd be happy to review and add it! https://github.com/jeffkaufman/game-complexity https://github.com/jeffkaufman/game-complexity
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Nice. I wonder, would it make sense to encode the idea of a square and hex grid with pieces of two different colors as a library of sorts, such that this basic grid implementation doesn't count against each game individually? The boards are very widely reused, generic, mathematical concepts. This would give something like Go or Connect-N a fairer shot of competing against something like a Nim, which only needs a single integer accumulator to represent its game state.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        The compressed Go program gets only 2.3% smaller post-gzip (13 bytes) if you remove the definition of the board: b=[[' ']*19 for x in range(19)] Most of the complexity is in what changes players are allowed to make to the board.
        7y ago
samatman 7y ago
I discovered a game in the Go family. It's played on a grid of overlapping circles, without counting the origin as an intersection. Every intersection has exactly four liberties, so it adds an optional move of a stone after each placement. Liberties are counted after both the placement and the move, so a player can't occupy a point with no liberties and then slide to capture. Anecdotally, it's enjoyable. Thing is, I came up with it in the year 2000, and it doesn't appear to have existed before that. This experience has left me skeptical that it's obvious that an alien race came up with Go. They might have.
- samatman 7y ago
  I meant to say, any given alien race. If there are enough intelligent aliens than it's just a numbers game. But would it be more than half? I doubt this. Sure would be fun to find out.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Yeah, that's the thing, there's likely to be lots of different alien species, so it is indeed a numbers game. I wouldn't want to try giving the odds of each alien species discovering Go, but so long as those odds are non-zero, which seems quite likely, the total number of Go inventions across the universe is likely to be quite large. This naturally introduces the idea of a "universality constant" for any given game, i.e. what percentage of species will have invented that exact game. For obvious reasons this figure is likely to be much higher for, say, Go, Connect-N, or Hex, than for something like Chess.
jdkee 7y ago
Conway's Life?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  It's not a game as such, but yeah, I suspect that it's pretty widely known across the universe too.
nitemice 7y ago
The simplest board game I can think of is Snakes and Ladders, which is based on an ancient Indian game. It definitely seems like the kind of thing that could be independently invented. It's so based in random chance.
nwallin 7y ago
If the universe is truly infinite, I would be incredibly surprised if any given thing happened a non-zero finite number of times. Every NxNxN cube of space has a finite state space. Assuming an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of such spaces. If a state is likely enough to occur once, it ought to occur an infinite number of times. This supposes not only a game functionally (if not superficially) identical to chess, possibly with differently shaped or colored pieces. It also supposes a world identical to Earth, called Earth by the English speaking humans who live there, who play a game called chess which functions exactly like chess, with knights that are called knights and bishops that are called bishops. Which leaves us in an interesting conundrum. We can't ask which game is the most common, because many games occur infinitely many times: infinity doesn't let us make comparisons like that.[1] Then we start asking questions like which games occur finitely many times? Of the finitely numbered games, which was the most common? Least? What does the probability curve look like? (This is honestly the most interesting to me. Is the peak at 1 unique copy which then exponentially decreases, or are there very few unique games which grow to a peak and then rapidly drop to zero, or is it a uniform distribution that just... Keeps going, or is it a boring normal distribution?) Which game had the most variations but still recognizable to a player of a middle of the road variation? Are there any ring species [2] of games, and if so, which has the largest ring? Is Star Trek 3D chess played unironically? Other questions we can't ask: are there infinitely many games? There are not. Life is almost certainly bounded in size, which means there are a finite number of states. This gives us a finite number of creatures, and therefore a finite number of unique ideas. Infinity is a fickle mistress. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Gra... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

SamPatt 7y ago

I imagine dice, or some other physical object that introduces randomness, is a sure thing if intelligent life exists elsewhere.

GrumpyNl 7y ago
That implies that they think and behave like us.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Does it? A lot of concepts in board games are pretty natural results of universal mathematics. There's only three regular polygons that will tesselate a board (we have plenty of board games that use all three of them), and there's only three dimensions that games can work in (and we have plenty of games of all three types; Candyland, for instance, is played along a 1D path, and the first player to reach the end wins). Even if some aliens think so differently from us that the concept of a square is unknown to them, surely there are plenty of aliens that would think similarly enough?
  - cylon13 7y ago
    You're assuming a lot about what it means to be an intelligence. It's not the concept of a square that will potentially be missing from an alien lifeform. It's the complex circuitry involved in enjoying board games in the first place. One can imagine an intelligent lifeform evolving differently than us in such a way where the adaptation that makes games fun wasn't required.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Yes, one can imagine some aliens evolving differently such that they don't enjoy games, but all of them?
      - cylon13 7y ago
        Of course not all of them, we enjoy games, and we're the only actual data point we have. But since we're just one data point, we really don't know anything about the probability of different subsystems of the mind evolving. I certainly hope we encounter sentient empathetic aliens that enjoy games as much as we do!
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        Well for Go to not exist anywhere in the universe there'd either have to be no aliens, or no aliens that enjoy games, or something along those lines. So long as there are some aliens and some aliens that enjoy games, Go and other relatively simple abstract board games do seem like they should inevitably be reinvented many times over across the universe. Hell, maybe there's aliens that don't enjoy games per se but that use them for other purposes, like deciding legal guilt or who gets to rule.
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      If they have a civilization, they probably are social creatures, and thus probably enjoy playing. Most social creatures on Earth engage in play when they are young. Also, for many animals, playing helps them learn how to hunt.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Yeah, but that's not a game on its own, it's just a part of a game. I'm wondering about which game exists in essentially the same form elsewhere. Once you start looking into the rules for specific games that only use dice, the rules are many and pretty specific (e.g. street dice), and it's the Chess problem again. I guess a dice game that probably exists pretty widely in the universe would be the simple children's dice game, namely, two players roll N-sided dice and the higher number wins, or you accumulate multiple rolls and play first to a given total, but that's not a very interesting game, and there's no strategy.
- alanfalcon 7y ago
  The rules for Go are also actually pretty specific. Would you consider any territory capturing game played with simple tokens on a board to be Go? Is Reversi/Othello also Go?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Are they pretty specific? It seems to me the concept is pretty general (and yes I'm familiar with the game): two players alternate placing stones on a square-tesselated board, with surrounded stones being removed from the board, and when the board is full the player with more stones wins. The no board state repetitions rules are just a natural evolution of the basic rules in order to prevent stalemates so that games actually end (and plenty of other human games have similar rules to prevent stalemates; it seems to be a generic, widely-applicable solution). Yes, there's some nuance in how scoring works (and we have multiple different scoring rules just here on Earth right now, more if you include the historical ones), and we don't actually play to the end but instead stop early once the result is clear and then calculate what the end score would've been, but those don't change the game that much and all would be considered Go.

beojan 7y ago

> My gut response would be yes I'd guess no, since there doesn't seem to be another human culture / civilization that independently invented it.

CydeWeys 7y ago
Go is a pretty generic game that leans heavily on basic mathematics and geometry (which are universal). You really think it could only be invented by humans? Why?
- Tomte 7y ago
  No, he points out that even other humans haven't done so.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    I'm not following. The universe is unbelievably vast, and likely has many, many more magnitudes of intelligent species out there than we have had cultures down here on this one planet. I don't want to get into arguing Drake's equation here, but if you accept that aliens exist, then you're granting that there's a lot of them; it makes no sense why we would be, e.g., one of only two intelligent species in the entire universe.
    - Tomte 7y ago
      It's an argument against the "naturalness" or inevitability of the discovery. It may be wrong, but "aliens" is not a response to it.
      - andai 7y ago
        If I'm understanding correctly, the sticking point here (and in most of the thread) is people arguing about different things. Some people are saying the discovery of Go is inevitable (certain?), some are saying it's likely (but not inevitable), some are saying it's possible (but not likely).

datashow 7y ago

If it is true that Go is also played by other Alien species, there is no guarantee that they all play on the same size of board. If earth is visited by Aliens some day, we should assume they play on larger board than us. It would be laughable that we get visited by 9*9 players.

CydeWeys 7y ago
Sure, but Go on larger boards is still Go. Even here on Earth there's at least four board sizes that are regularly played on.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> If earth is visited by Aliens some day, we should assume they play on larger board than us. It would be laughable that we get visited by 9*9 players. This only makes any sense if you're also confident that, should we visit an alien world some day, we would have updated the rules of Go to require a larger board. If we can play on a 19x19 board for historical and sentimental reasons, aliens can play on a 9x9 board for historical and sentimental reasons.
- datashow 7y ago
  Why don’t we play a 9x9 board for historical and sentimental reasons? Because it’s too easy for professionals.

dkarras 7y ago

It's a weird thought I admit but as a computer game, I believe "Tetris" could have been independently "discovered". Board size - gravity rules - scoring etc. are arbitrary but there is some fundamental elegance about all possible tetrominos creating a game that is that fun. At the very least non tetris (so no creating and destroying lines) but a game with all possible tetrominos probably would exist.

coldtea 7y ago
There's no actual gravity rules in Tetris. Pieces move downwards, but that's about it.
- rdlw 7y ago
  They move faster at higher levels, and the exact speeds and line clear requirements are arbitrary.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >They move faster at higher levels Which proves it's not gravity -- gravity would move the same speed always (assuming a vacuum game stage), or would move proportionally to air resistance (so based on shape), etc.
    - rdlw 7y ago
      Right, but this is called 'gravity' in the game, so I think it's what ggp was talking about
    - sdenton4 7y ago
      There is gravity, but Tetris pieces are dropped from very high, and have achieved terminal velocity by the time they reach your board.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        I know we're firmly into joke territory at this point, but anyway, if that were true, then line pieces would fall faster when oriented vertically than horizontally. Clearly the real answer is that Tetris is played in a weightless vacuum, and that pieces are shot at a constant speed from somewhere offscreen.

grawprog 7y ago

>If Shogi, Checkers, or Stratego weren't human games I wouldn't be surprised to learn them from aliens. Why do all theories about aliens start with the implication that they're similar enough that they developed the way we did, they think like we do, have similar senses, brain structure and locomotion. Any aliens that have evolved to any kind of level of intelligence would have done so under the conditions specific to their planet. Given the huge variation of life on Earth over its existence and that humans in their current form, or even animals in their current form, have existed for such a tiny insignificst fraction of time that it seems kind of preposterous to assume aliens elsewhere are anything like us in the slightest. Humans have problems anthropomorphizing animals as it is, but when it comes to aliens it just seems like everything starts with, well of course they must do the things we do....

CydeWeys 7y ago
Why are people so quick to assume that every single other alien species would be completely unfathomable to us? We all share the same physics, chemistry, and mathematics of our common universe. For example, there's only three dimensions, and there's only three regular polygons that can tessellate a grid. Unless you're going to posit that there's no alien species whatsoever that will even come up with the concept of a game (which I find highly doubtful), they're going to be using the same abstract mathematical concepts as we are in building said games, because only so many abstract mathematical concepts even exist. Our simplest board games aren't that far removed from the realm of the purely mathematical. And yet aliens won't all have their own completely different mathematical systems; such a thing isn't possible.
- andai 7y ago
  So, the smartest animals on earth apart from primates are dolphins, crows and octopuses. But most aliens are portrayed as humanoids. I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know :) I think the body shape part is relevant here because it determines what kinds of games are possible or practical. A species of intelligent octopuses might play games involving changing their pigment (in wavelengths we can't even see!) or manipulating eight things at once. Bird games might involve flying competitions etc. Edit: I guess the important part here in a species inventing Go, is having a body that can make a board game (or similar representation). Hands are pretty good for crafting tables and moving small pieces around. Beaks and snouts less so. (I'd put my money with the octopus.)

DanTheManPR 7y ago

Connect N type games seem almost certain to exist elsewhere, as are connection games such as Hex. The fundamental concept is very basic, and the there are not a lot of variations. There are a plethora of abstract games that have been invented that are not played very much, but seem to have the potential for extreme depth of play. I would be willing to bet that some of those neglected games are played by Aliens somewhere in the Universe, and enjoy the level of success in their society that Chess or Go enjoy here.

CydeWeys 7y ago
This is a great thought. Do you know if anyone is looking at computationally examining these overlooked games and trying to find the ones with truly excellent depth, so that they may get greater attention? That sounds like a fun project.
- gamegoblin 7y ago
  I think the game Quoridor has simple rules but is very deep. It's a 9x9 grid of cells where one places length-2 walls between the cells to inhibit movement (the goal is to get your piece to the opposite side of the board). On your turn you can either move your piece, or place a wall. You have 10 walls to place. The one non-obvious rule that completely changes the strategy of the game is that you cannot make it impossible for the other player to win (you can't simply box them in). So a common theme is to try to maximize the amount of paths your opponent has while minimizing the number of paths you have, so that whenever your opponent commits to a path, you block it and force them to backtrack. But say your opponent has 2 paths, and they begin to commit to one. You are waiting for them to commit further so you can block it and force them to backtrack. But before you do it, they block the other path themselves. Now it is illegal for you to block their only remaining path. On the face of it, the branching factor is much higher than chess. On each turn one has 100+ possible moves. I have written pretty highly optimized minimax AB-pruning type AIs for it and have never managed to make an AI that can search deeper than 7 moves or so in a reasonable amount of time, and my AI was the strongest (by far) of any I could find online (and better than any human player in my friend group). It's pretty computationally difficult due to the "cannot make it impossible to win" rule. If you do it naively, that involves an A-star search for each possible move. You'll max out around 4 moves deep with that strategy. A few observations will get you a bit higher. e.g. A wall cannot possibly block a path unless both ends of the wall touch another wall (or edge of board). There might be some sophisticated graph cutting algorithms I am not aware of that could make this tractable, but I haven't found any that mapped too well onto the problem. I think Quoridor is actually really ripe for an AlphaZero type approach (due to the high branching factor and expensive compute needed to determine move legality), and I would love to see a superhuman game played. You can play against someone's javascript AI here: https://danielborowski.github.io/site/quoridor-ai/display.html https://danielborowski.github.io/site/quoridor-ai/display.ht... I think this AI does a depth 2 or 3 search.

Iv 7y ago

Not exactly a board game but I would expect rock paper scissors game patterns to be universal. I think dice combination games are going to be popular as well.

conanbatt 7y ago
And they would be shaped by whatever they could form with their hands. Sickle - Brick - Foil
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  It doesn't even require physical representation. You can play it verbally, or if that results in simultaneity issues, each player separately says their play for the next round to a judge. Hell, if the players are far enough away from each other and shouting out their answers, you can solve the simultaneity issue. By the time you've heard the other player's move you're already halfway through saying your own move, and can't pretend you were going to say something else.
saltyfamiliar 7y ago
These are great answers. In general I think leveraging uncertainty and imperfect information is going to be pretty universal.

jefftk 7y ago

I looked into the complexity of games a few years ago, approximating this as the number of bytes needed to implement the rules as a program: https://www.jefftk.com/p/simplest-interesting-game https://www.jefftk.com/p/simplest-interesting-game Bottom line numbers: 280 gomoku 356 hex 483 dots and boxes 572 go 622 checkers

CydeWeys 7y ago
This is awesome! Any idea where Chess would stack up? I'm assuming it'd be greater than Checkers in that list, but how much greater? And would Nim be simpler than Gomoku (Connect-N)?
- jefftk 7y ago
  If you or someone else would like to have a go at writing one I'd be happy to review and add it! https://github.com/jeffkaufman/game-complexity https://github.com/jeffkaufman/game-complexity
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Nice. I wonder, would it make sense to encode the idea of a square and hex grid with pieces of two different colors as a library of sorts, such that this basic grid implementation doesn't count against each game individually? The boards are very widely reused, generic, mathematical concepts. This would give something like Go or Connect-N a fairer shot of competing against something like a Nim, which only needs a single integer accumulator to represent its game state.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      The compressed Go program gets only 2.3% smaller post-gzip (13 bytes) if you remove the definition of the board: b=[[' ']*19 for x in range(19)] Most of the complexity is in what changes players are allowed to make to the board.
      - 7y ago

samatman 7y ago

I discovered a game in the Go family. It's played on a grid of overlapping circles, without counting the origin as an intersection. Every intersection has exactly four liberties, so it adds an optional move of a stone after each placement. Liberties are counted after both the placement and the move, so a player can't occupy a point with no liberties and then slide to capture. Anecdotally, it's enjoyable. Thing is, I came up with it in the year 2000, and it doesn't appear to have existed before that. This experience has left me skeptical that it's obvious that an alien race came up with Go. They might have.

samatman 7y ago
I meant to say, any given alien race. If there are enough intelligent aliens than it's just a numbers game. But would it be more than half? I doubt this. Sure would be fun to find out.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Yeah, that's the thing, there's likely to be lots of different alien species, so it is indeed a numbers game. I wouldn't want to try giving the odds of each alien species discovering Go, but so long as those odds are non-zero, which seems quite likely, the total number of Go inventions across the universe is likely to be quite large. This naturally introduces the idea of a "universality constant" for any given game, i.e. what percentage of species will have invented that exact game. For obvious reasons this figure is likely to be much higher for, say, Go, Connect-N, or Hex, than for something like Chess.

jdkee 7y ago

Conway's Life?

CydeWeys 7y ago
It's not a game as such, but yeah, I suspect that it's pretty widely known across the universe too.

nitemice 7y ago

The simplest board game I can think of is Snakes and Ladders, which is based on an ancient Indian game. It definitely seems like the kind of thing that could be independently invented. It's so based in random chance.

nwallin 7y ago

If the universe is truly infinite, I would be incredibly surprised if any given thing happened a non-zero finite number of times. Every NxNxN cube of space has a finite state space. Assuming an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of such spaces. If a state is likely enough to occur once, it ought to occur an infinite number of times. This supposes not only a game functionally (if not superficially) identical to chess, possibly with differently shaped or colored pieces. It also supposes a world identical to Earth, called Earth by the English speaking humans who live there, who play a game called chess which functions exactly like chess, with knights that are called knights and bishops that are called bishops. Which leaves us in an interesting conundrum. We can't ask which game is the most common, because many games occur infinitely many times: infinity doesn't let us make comparisons like that.[1] Then we start asking questions like which games occur finitely many times? Of the finitely numbered games, which was the most common? Least? What does the probability curve look like? (This is honestly the most interesting to me. Is the peak at 1 unique copy which then exponentially decreases, or are there very few unique games which grow to a peak and then rapidly drop to zero, or is it a uniform distribution that just... Keeps going, or is it a boring normal distribution?) Which game had the most variations but still recognizable to a player of a middle of the road variation? Are there any ring species [2] of games, and if so, which has the largest ring? Is Star Trek 3D chess played unironically? Other questions we can't ask: are there infinitely many games? There are not. Life is almost certainly bounded in size, which means there are a finite number of states. This gives us a finite number of creatures, and therefore a finite number of unique ideas. Infinity is a fickle mistress. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Gra... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species