Traditional games: Besides CHESS: What are the best in the world?

originally posted by: Tekaran
D&D for me. For me, no other game made me think about playing a game, when I wasn't playing it. You can be anything and do anything. If you enjoy just a little bit of fantasy and imagination, then you MUST give it a try.

Personally, I have never played the game.

My niece that I raised from infancy, recently got married. I found it extremely interesting that though she is now almost 30 years old, she still has the same group of friends. I used to call them her D&D friends, but you can't find a group that is tighter. The love, respect, and joy that they have for each other, is so easy to see. They are also very diverse, but when you see them together, they look like one family.

Hanafuda is a old asian card game.

Playing cards were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the mid-16th century. The Portuguese deck consisted of 48 cards, with four suits divided into 12 ranks. The first Japanese-made decks made during the Tenshō period (1573-92) mimicked Portuguese decks and are referred to as Tenshō Karuta. The main game was a trick-taking game intermediate in evolution between Triunfo and Ombre.[10] After Japan closed off all contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned.[11]

In fact most people don't realize that Nintendo dates back to 1889.

The history of Nintendo traces back to 1889, when it was founded to produce handmade hanafuda. Nintendo Co., Ltd. (任天堂株式会社, Nintendō kabushikigaisha) is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue.[1]

a reply to: TheAlleghenyGentleman

I do not know how to play it but its a fascinating game. It has nothing to do with luck other than your opponent having a bad day or having a sudden local instant brainfart. I believe its the last challenge for programmers making it play stronger than humans. Being a chess player myself but because of its reputation this game should be up there with chess if not on top when it comes to greatest classic games of all time..

That reminds me of Pente, a Greek game of 5 with a jump function like checkers that takes the others pieces.

originally posted by: TheAlleghenyGentleman
There is only one greatest game and it is not chess


It is GO. The greatest of all board games

a reply to: zatara


This is good tutorial. It is also my favorite website to play on

Go tutorial

Here is alpha go the movie about AI finally beating the top GO players in the world back in 2016

a reply to: GuitaristRob

OMG I remember that game from my childhood and I loved the card design, the game was a little over my head for the time, but I have fond memories. I wondered what that game was called all these years, ATS is and remains a treasure trove

Paranoia or blood bowl.

Neither are board games.

Chess is a marvellous thing, knock down drag out violence on a square.

a reply to: JamesChessman

a reply to: JamesChessman

I am sure it has been said somewhere in this thread but the best besides chess is the Asian game of

Go - japan
Wei chi - china
baduk -korea

same game

So complex with so many permutations makes chess look like a preschool game. And it makes you dizzy sometimes with so many options.

a reply to: chris_stibrany

Scroll up and look at my posts and my avatar 😸😸😸

Mah Jong has that magic moment when you win that is quite satisfying. ! a reply to: JAGStorm

originally posted by: zatara
a reply to: TheAlleghenyGentleman

I do not know how to play it but its a fascinating game. It has nothing to do with luck other than your opponent having a bad day or having a sudden local instant brainfart. I believe its the last challenge for programmers making it play stronger than humans. Being a chess player myself but because of its reputation this game should be up there with chess if not on top when it comes to greatest classic games of all time..

I'm not 100% sure everything you meant, but in terms of chess and AI: The fact is that computers officially surpassed human intelligence for chess, at a very specific point: 1997, the "Deep Blue" event, was the historic first time that the world's best chess player, was defeated in a tournament, by a computer (named Deep Blue).

So ostensibly, it's a very specific time-marker, and since then, all digital chess could POTENTIALLY be smarter than all humans.

However... Deep Blue is not crystal-clear that it really did happen, that way that it was presented. It's... possible that instead of a supercomputer defeating the human world champion: Maybe, there was a group of secret chess players who were group-thinking of the best moves, and then feeding them into Deep Blue.

In which case, the official version of events, didn't really happen at all, lol. (Getting defeated by a group of humans, is entirely different from being defeated by a solitary computer.)

But even if Deep Blue itself was a doubtful event, then since 1997, I think everyone accepts that at some point, computers definitely did surpass human intelligence, in chess.

...


So, no, computer programmers are not struggling to overcome human players. That's been ostensibly settled in 1997.

But computer guys ARE still working on finding new, better AI understanding of chess. It just never ends.

Most games in the world, are "solved" by AI at some point, but chess has never been solved, nor do I think it ever can be. Because increasing the complexity of skill & gameplay, just always leads to even more complexity. I think it's impossible to be solved.

So it's fascinating itself, that computers are just forever chugging away on better learning chess, even right this moment, and yet they never stop learning more & more. Even after surpassing human minds, nearly 25 years ago, lol.

There's magic and transcendence in that chessboard.

You say traditional games I get it. But when I think of what you are saying with that two games come to mind that I believe fit the category even though they are video games and those two are…

Tetris

And

Columns

I used to have a thing for both of these games an awful lot and not surprisingly one of my favorite board games as a kid was connect 4 and another being a forgotten game called kerplunk which is kind of like jenga only using marbles and a tube filled with sticks through the side.

Just my $.02

a reply to: Brotherman

Your post made me think of mikado, that was some love/hate relationship.

a reply to: JamesChessman

Klax.

It triggers my anxiety but it's more addictive than Bejeweled. Plus it rhymes with my name and I'm fortunate enough to have actually played the arcade version.

Also Uno.

a reply to: JamesChessman

I too had that issue when I was younger, their was only 7 members of the chess club out of near 1200 kids in my school and 2 of the members were teachers, non of them were good either. To be frank they weren't good at cards or darts either. I've got some funny stories of me and my friends slaughtering the nerds at various games, I say nerds but they were just the smartest in our year and I happened to be in registration with the idiots and what Americans would call jocks.

I had a gf who was pretty good at chess an old chap I used to volunteer with was once an established chess player, he always mocked my game because I don't really have a style and I always played somewhat spontaneously I'll say. He always tried to teach me to play several moves ahead and I guess it put me off eventually... I should start playing again.

Chess boards can be strikingly beautiful and it shows, the amount of people I've asked for a game when I saw their board but they didn't play is quite funny tbh. I think it's the furniture equivalent of wearing glasses for cosmetic reasons.

Nice thread btw, I've got a passion for strategy games and I was curious how much that love extends to other ATS members when I saw this thread.

a reply to: JamesChessman

What do you mean by chess may never be solved?

Look into DEEPMIND AI, the point of playing chess is to win right? That software will do 1000's of calculations per move something that would take a human 100's if not 1000's of hours to replicate. We can't beat that and the longer it runs the better it gets.

Machines don't take breaks or get fatigued like we do, the way I see it actual AI should always beat humans at individual tasks because once it grasps the concept and what "winning and losing" is it'll calculate in minutes things it could take a human a lifetime to learn.

Actual AI is actually terrifying imho.

a reply to: RAY1990

What do you mean by chess may never be solved?

I meant that... Computers have "solved" nearly every traditional game, which means that they've figured out the perfect solution of the entire game.

This applies to nearly every game, that has ever existed.




But not chess. Computers have never solved it, after all these decades of computers analyzing chess, they just keep learning more about it, but they never find a final solution, and they never run out of new things to learn about it.






Computers did surpass human intelligence in chess, in 1997, officially (Deep Blue).

But now it's nearly 25 years later, and computers are still grinding away on studying chess, even right now.







(I should look for an article I read about this a few months back, explaining: there are NEW computers studying chess, in 2021, which are the absolute smartest computers yet to study it, yet there is still no hope of finding a solution... and these very-smartest computers have the most unpredictable chess gameplay, because it's the hugest leap of intelligence, over us, so we can barely understand their gameplay, and a lot of moves seem random or pointless.)









I don't think chess will ever be solved, because I don't believe that a perfect solution exists in chess.

Rather, I think that the complexity of gameplay could be increased infinitely. Supercomputers could just think more and more moves ahead, and build more+more complex strategies. Each game could take longer+longer, and could pack in more+more moves, to infinity lol. I don't think there's an end...

^Also if someone can explain that better than me, then please do, lol.

Someone with more of a computer background than me, could definitely explain that side of it, better than I can...

a reply to: JamesChessman

This webpage, a favorite resource of mine has broken down mathematically the scale of moves in a go game. Sorry. Eat your heart out chess.

A favorite resource of mine

The number of possible go games is extremely large. It is often compared to the number of atoms in the universe ([ext] around 10^80), but it is in fact much much larger. In this article, we will first explore the question from a mathematical perspective, and then also give some information on bounds for realistic game lengths.

Peolpe love to use the expression 3D chess. 3D 19x19 go. That would be something to comprehend

originally posted by: Dionysaur
Mah Jong has that magic moment when you win that is quite satisfying. ! a reply to: JAGStorm

I think Mah Jong was the original ASMR, the clicking of the tiles!!!