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From the article a criteria often missed in the discussion is "...of all the world’s perfect information games..." Virtually all tabletop grognard games are pe
by VLM 13y ago
From the article a criteria often missed in the discussion is "...of all the world’s perfect information games..."
Virtually all tabletop grognard games are perfect information games. I say virtually because there might be one I can't think of at this time, maybe a card driven game. I suppose the COIN series is partially imperfect information... Even a noob player can crush an AI trying to play grognard games so usually the computer cheats or is given a massive handicap, like, say, your human controlled division is up against two, maybe three AI divisions. I've played a lot of grognard games both computer and tabletop and I've never found a worthy evenly matched AI opponent although humans can kick my butt. Some computer implementations implement a fog of war which would certainly be imperfect information, but not tabletops or faithful reimplementations of tabletops. A "good" grognard scenario/game doesn't depend on FoW anyway, or at least many people share that belief.
You can model a stereotypical grognard game as "chess with a large hex board, more pieces, and wider variety of pieces". I guess that gives some idea what a computer-proof abstract game would look like. "GO" on a 171x171 grid, perhaps, or chess with 50 kinds of pieces.
- icegreentea 13y agoI'm not sure what exactly a grognard game is - but if it's just wargames, off the top of my head Stratego is a game without perfect information. A lot of fun too. The traditional board version takes three participants to play, but computer/electronic versions gets ride of the referee.
- gwern 13y ago> Even a noob player can crush an AI trying to play grognard games so usually the computer cheats or is given a massive handicap, like, say, your human controlled division is up against two, maybe three AI divisions. I've played a lot of grognard games both computer and tabletop and I've never found a worthy evenly matched AI opponent although humans can kick my butt. How hard have people tried? I've never had the impression that tabletop wargames had a lot (or any...) programming/AI talent working on them. Too many, too unpopular.
- hibikir 13y agoYou must have a very restrictive definition of grognard games. There are hundreds of wargames out there that would not qualify as perfect information. For instance, anything made by Columbia Games. If you study them mathematically, many of those games are actually quite a bit simpler than chess or go, because despite the large number of pieces, turn limits, order limits and very limited setup options will shrink the decision space in a major way. Those games are also easier to solve because, often to provide a light semblance to how history actually turned out, the rules are set up so that entire avenues of approach are restricted. So why are AIs worse? because when you make a videogame, getting the hardest AI possible is not really a selling point. We worry instead about not taking too much time, or, in case of a mobile game, not eating the processor alive. Those limits make entire sets of approaches to AI unworkable altogether. If a machine was allowed to think as long as the human does, and we had a reason to actually built said AI, you'd see humans losing a whole lot in wargames. You'd get a similar thing in Euros too, as entire avenues of playing just go away because they are mathematically inferior.
- ulisesrmzroche 13y agoStrong AI is for sure a selling point, though. Who wants to play an easy shooter, for example? I believe you when you say if we threw the amount of power required at it, it would work, but then why not? We don't have that amount of computing power available at all?