3 ms·

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.

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.