27 ms·

Taikyoku Shogi

230 points by Hooke 6y ago

Raphmedia 6y ago
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 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ve8xo
- jakobmartz3 6y ago
  Awesome!
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  This is a smaller variant.
PaulHoule 6y ago
I think that article wants to compete with "List of People Killed By Dog Attacks in the United States" for longest Wikipedia article.
- kibwen 6y ago
  According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_records#Articles_with_the_longest_titles 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 Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles (253 characters) - Longest article title without spaces: Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon (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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages
  - inasio 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure parent was talking about longest article.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
    >> Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon 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.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages
29athrowaway 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  > And, you are expected to recognize a checkmate and resign Is that different from chess?
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkmate
    - jandrese 6y ago
Apocryphon 6y ago
This game belongs on a listicle of the most complex and possibly time-consuming board games and tabletop wargames ever conceived.
- hinkley 6y ago
  You could still fit this in the Twilight Imperium box and have enough room left over for Gloomhaven.
jonbaer 6y ago
Good luck DeepMind.
- ogogmad 6y ago
  Deep Mind have already beat this game with AlphaZero.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmontra 6y ago
    The standard version of shogi. I wonder if the extra space and pieces would increase the length of training polynomially or exponentially.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      Go was considered to be difficult for computers because of the high branching factor compared to chess. DeepMind still beat the best humans there pretty comfortably, with similar amounts of training to what allowed it to compete with the best engines in chess and shogi. I'd expect AlphaZero to hammer the best humans given a similar amount of training (~100,000 2017 TPU-hours) in this shogi variant, so no increased training time at all by that metric. Maybe a more meaningful metric is how closely it approaches perfect play, but we don't have a good way to measure that.
      - jonbaer 6y ago
        I am also more curious about the 9-dimensional Space shogi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shogi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shogi ... "Black starts the game occupying levels 1 through 3; White starts on levels 9 through 7."
        dmurray 6y ago
        Isn't it just 3-dimensional (9x9x9)? That's a smaller playing space than taikyoku shogi, it's again a game equivalent to chess (in the von Neumann sense) and a computer wouldn't find anything more conceptually difficult about moving through a 3d array than a 2d one. So I'd expect the computer's advantage to be even larger here.
SetTheorist 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
        6y ago
blouzada 6y ago
I learned Shogi in Hunter X Hunter
- tyrust 6y ago
  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 https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Gungi
systemvoltage 6y ago
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.
- bserge 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.)
- ketzo 6y ago
  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?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thisjepisje 6y ago
If anyone wants to give it a try: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Taikyoku%20Shogi https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Taikyoku%20Shogi (download the player from here: https://ludii.games/download.php https://ludii.games/download.php)
mxcrossb 6y ago
Speaking of Shogi variants, I found an app awhile ago called “Kyoto Shogi”. In this variant you have just five pieces. And the twist is that every time you move one, you flip it over, do it now has a different set of moves. A very fun concept!
neetrain 6y ago
Around 2003-2004 IIRC, there were a thread on the web forum 2ちゃんねる talking about this game. Then some one made a functional Taikyoku Shogi flash game, and they started playing a match, by posting each moves on the thread one by one. It took about a year or so to complete. That may have been a first time the game is actually played in history. The second time may be on the TV show トリビアの泉, by using real restored pieces mentioned in the article, and two professional Shogi player. It was around 2007.
slmjkdbtl 6y ago
Looked up a youtube video and I like how people commenting this looks like a real war, the de-abstraction side of this variant is so interesting. I really want to make a modern digital version of this (localization for non Japanese / Chinese users will be a problem tho, maybe another standalone themed / graphics version?). The pieces reminds me of Pokemon Wack [0], which has more than 3000+ pokemons, and 49 types, including Sound, Food, Meme, Plastic. [0] https://pokemonwack.fandom.com/wiki/Pokemon_Wack_Wiki https://pokemonwack.fandom.com/wiki/Pokemon_Wack_Wiki
Kosirich 6y ago
I like the movement pattern of "Chicken general and pup general"... it reminds me of something..
ValentineC 6y ago
> 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. As a problem solver, I'd like to think that I'm always subconsciously working on unsolved problems at the back of my mind. Taking my mind off a problem for a bit might help me get a fresh perspective on things, and lead me to eventually solving it faster. Mental energy distractions like board games and TV might help in similar ways.
kwargs 6y ago
My theory holds true on HN, that is, not a week goes by without a japan related article.
hellokaushik 6y ago
Nice

230 points by Hooke 6y ago

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 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ve8xo

jakobmartz3 6y ago
Awesome!
lern_too_spel 6y ago
This is a smaller variant.

PaulHoule 6y ago

I think that article wants to compete with "List of People Killed By Dog Attacks in the United States" for longest Wikipedia article.

kibwen 6y ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_records#Articles_with_the_longest_titles 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 Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles (253 characters) - Longest article title without spaces: Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon (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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages
- inasio 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure parent was talking about longest article.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
  >> Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon 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.
Apocryphon 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LongPages

29athrowaway 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
> And, you are expected to recognize a checkmate and resign Is that different from chess?
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkmate
  - jandrese 6y ago

Apocryphon 6y ago

This game belongs on a listicle of the most complex and possibly time-consuming board games and tabletop wargames ever conceived.

hinkley 6y ago
You could still fit this in the Twilight Imperium box and have enough room left over for Gloomhaven.

jonbaer 6y ago

Good luck DeepMind.

ogogmad 6y ago
Deep Mind have already beat this game with AlphaZero.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pmontra 6y ago
  The standard version of shogi. I wonder if the extra space and pieces would increase the length of training polynomially or exponentially.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Go was considered to be difficult for computers because of the high branching factor compared to chess. DeepMind still beat the best humans there pretty comfortably, with similar amounts of training to what allowed it to compete with the best engines in chess and shogi. I'd expect AlphaZero to hammer the best humans given a similar amount of training (~100,000 2017 TPU-hours) in this shogi variant, so no increased training time at all by that metric. Maybe a more meaningful metric is how closely it approaches perfect play, but we don't have a good way to measure that.
    - jonbaer 6y ago
      I am also more curious about the 9-dimensional Space shogi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shogi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shogi ... "Black starts the game occupying levels 1 through 3; White starts on levels 9 through 7."
      - dmurray 6y ago
        Isn't it just 3-dimensional (9x9x9)? That's a smaller playing space than taikyoku shogi, it's again a game equivalent to chess (in the von Neumann sense) and a computer wouldn't find anything more conceptually difficult about moving through a 3d array than a 2d one. So I'd expect the computer's advantage to be even larger here.

SetTheorist 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      - 6y ago

blouzada 6y ago

I learned Shogi in Hunter X Hunter

tyrust 6y ago
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 https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Gungi

systemvoltage 6y ago

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.

bserge 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.)
ketzo 6y ago
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?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thisjepisje 6y ago

If anyone wants to give it a try: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Taikyoku%20Shogi https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Taikyoku%20Shogi (download the player from here: https://ludii.games/download.php https://ludii.games/download.php)

mxcrossb 6y ago

Speaking of Shogi variants, I found an app awhile ago called “Kyoto Shogi”. In this variant you have just five pieces. And the twist is that every time you move one, you flip it over, do it now has a different set of moves. A very fun concept!

neetrain 6y ago

Around 2003-2004 IIRC, there were a thread on the web forum 2ちゃんねる talking about this game. Then some one made a functional Taikyoku Shogi flash game, and they started playing a match, by posting each moves on the thread one by one. It took about a year or so to complete. That may have been a first time the game is actually played in history. The second time may be on the TV show トリビアの泉, by using real restored pieces mentioned in the article, and two professional Shogi player. It was around 2007.

slmjkdbtl 6y ago

Looked up a youtube video and I like how people commenting this looks like a real war, the de-abstraction side of this variant is so interesting. I really want to make a modern digital version of this (localization for non Japanese / Chinese users will be a problem tho, maybe another standalone themed / graphics version?). The pieces reminds me of Pokemon Wack [0], which has more than 3000+ pokemons, and 49 types, including Sound, Food, Meme, Plastic. [0] https://pokemonwack.fandom.com/wiki/Pokemon_Wack_Wiki https://pokemonwack.fandom.com/wiki/Pokemon_Wack_Wiki

Kosirich 6y ago

I like the movement pattern of "Chicken general and pup general"... it reminds me of something..

ValentineC 6y ago

> 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. As a problem solver, I'd like to think that I'm always subconsciously working on unsolved problems at the back of my mind. Taking my mind off a problem for a bit might help me get a fresh perspective on things, and lead me to eventually solving it faster. Mental energy distractions like board games and TV might help in similar ways.

kwargs 6y ago

My theory holds true on HN, that is, not a week goes by without a japan related article.

hellokaushik 6y ago

Nice