FTR Games Thread

There have been threads for video gamers and the like, but what about one consolidated thread for all games? Post here if you wanna start any online games on any sites you know. I play a lot of online Settlers of Catan, Risk, Stratego and can be talked into other things (even silly things like Draw My Thing).

ConquerClub.com (Risk) is a really impressive site and has like 100 different Risk maps and several gaming modes, and it made me really wanna start a Risk league where players have "homefield advantage" to where they pick the board and such, and it made me excited in ways I shouldn't admit to.

Anyway, there you have it.

Everyone plays League.

Open challenge to everyone to play a game of chess.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

Open challenge to everyone to play a game of chess.

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My money is on Spoon

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Originally Posted by jyms

My money is on Spoon

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Didn't Ong beat him a couple of times?

More on topic, the board game I have probably played the most, next to settlers of catan, is Axis and Allies. A complex version of Risk basically which is very tactical. There are different kinds of units, soldiers, tanks, fighter planes, submarines etc.

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Originally Posted by jyms

My money is on Spoon

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To beat me or to take on the challenge?

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Originally Posted by jyms

My money is on Fritz

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fyp

No way I can beat Fritz. It even ruined the allure of chess for me that computer programs are stronger than the best grand masters. I've been asked to teach kids a few weeks ago which I am considering, but playing competitively again doesn't interest me.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

No way I can beat Fritz. It even ruined the allure of chess for me that computer programs are stronger than the best grand masters. I've been asked to teach kids a few weeks ago which I am considering, but playing competitively again doesn't interest me.

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Will you feel the same way iffen an unbeatable poker computer is developed?

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Originally Posted by surviva316

Will you feel the same way iffen an unbeatable poker computer is developed?

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That is different because I never played chess for money. I only played til 16-17 years old, so mostly symbolic rewards. Trophees, poker books etc.

In poker the endgoal is making money. If poker would still be profitable for me, it'd be ok for me. It would change things for me though. I'm an IT guy, with a specialization in AI, and I'd probably try to get on the AI boat, or atleast try to specifically counter-act bot play.

It would absolutely kill online poker btw. If bussinessmen can pay minimum wage to let idiots play winning poker, even if sites can 100% prevent bots from playing the game, by just copying the moves another computer tells them, the game is dead. Or atleast it changes to a new dimension of being able to have the most adaptable bots that can beat other bots, leaving actual skill to live games.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

In poker the endgoal is making money.

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Nah, the end game of poker is to beat the game. Just like the end game of chess is to beat the game. The whole point of any game is to be able to beat it. Making money playing poker is just a by product.

As soon as people beat any game it becomes boring to play. Luckily for me the only game I've ever put enough work in to beat is noughts and crosses :lol:

If that was true then you'd stop playing if you broke the game. But I know I wouldn't stop playing if I broke poker.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

It would absolutely kill online poker btw. If bussinessmen can pay minimum wage to let idiots play winning poker, even if sites can 100% prevent bots from playing the game, by just copying the moves another computer tells them, the game is dead. Or atleast it changes to a new dimension of being able to have the most adaptable bots that can beat other bots, leaving actual skill to live games.

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It'd change things for sure. If for no other reason, some of the mystique of arguing over a hand history would go away because we would have pokerbot2000 to settle all disputes. Understanding the why behind those moves and what it means for your range in general might still be interesting, but it would be different.

It'd probably be possible for the site to block bot usage, even as a 3rd party reference. Blackgammon is an example of a solved game that you can still make money off of, even online. So much of the optimization would be centered on, not only the concurrent hand history, but all hand histories you have on the players in the hand, so that unless you could have it hooked up in some semi-direct way to the software, you'd have to partake in so much data input that you'd never be able to refer to pokerbot in time. They'd maybe have to ban HUDs, though.

Anyway, that's a long way off anyway. Don't mean to derail the thread. I just think it's interesting that people are so soured by solved games, especially when AI is unbeatable. AI can do things that humans can't so that humans have to rely on other, semi-intuitive faculties that still preserves a lot of the gamesmanship in human-v-human games. Even if a computer could assess numbers to devise a range for both players, run the hand out against that range 1,000,000 times per fraction of a second and look at the entire event tree of all of those playouts and determine the most profitable line to take without flaw, it would still be impressive that any human would be able to approximate those results by using whatever process they use because it sure as hell wouldn't be doing all that.

Like, if it so much as took half as long for a human to long divide 02340297-35918359028345 by -239487602938476-2039850293874502983475 in their head as a computer could, you'd be like "How the hell did they do that?" Not so much because there's any mystique in the answer he arrived at, but just you know that since he doesn't have a circuit board specifically programmed to process that problem at the speed of light, it's fascinating that they could have some other mysterious process that does something comparable.

I suspect there isn't much money to be made in online backgammon though, which is why it hasn't been cracked down upon. About saying you have to use a second PC, O' talking about it in the sense that bots are already run these days. Poker sites will scan for bots in your computer's memory (which is illegal btw, but they don't care and it is a good thing). That is why you have to run your poker bot on another computer which controls the client PC with the poker software through remote desktop. Anything your eyes can see can also be interpreted by a computer, so poker sites cannot ever hope to prevent bots from running their software. Only make it exceedingly difficult.

An old colleague of mine for example made a program that instantly solves minesweeper. All you see is basically the mouse going from bottom left to top right and bam even the biggest one is done. This is implemented through pattern recognition, an easier way is through packet sniffing or using API commands (such as being able to read a table's name which your HUD needs to distinguish your tables), this is most common but anything is possible, and if enough money is at stake someone will try to do it.

And sure, the skill element is still there for people, that doesn't change. Becoming a chess grandmaster is still a very impressive feat. But the way top chess matches are played nowadays, is that players have to be completely shielded from external stimuli, otherwise their coach or a friend could simply tell them the absolute best move. There was even a scandal a few years ago where one coach was making suspicious movements with his hands touching his face, making people believe he was signalling his player what move to make. That's why noone can even be in the field of vision of the players anymore, because it can be as easy as making a slight :O face for someone you know in the audience which means move your knight, which he got radio'd in by someone inputting the game on his PC. Online chess is basically voided because Fritz can beat all the grandmasters. I mean it's great for training your own skills and analytical thinking, but if the answer is a simple computer program away and you were only in it for the sport, then it's kinda lame.

I hope you can now understand why I find it unappealing.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

No way I can beat Fritz. It even ruined the allure of chess for me that computer programs are stronger than the best grand masters. I've been asked to teach kids a few weeks ago which I am considering, but playing competitively again doesn't interest me.

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You should check out Go. It's been around far longer than chess, simpler rules, but insanely complex once you get beyond simple tactics. Due to the sheer number of possibles moves, strong amateur players can pretty handily beat even the best computer programs. It has been estimated that there are more possible games of Go to be played than there are ATOMS in the observable universe.

A good wiki resource for learning Go: http://senseis.xmp.net/

I do own a physical game board for Go, but mostly these days I play it on a free app called Godroid. A regular game is played on a 19x19 board, but it is also played more recreationally (and for newbies) on 9x9 and 13x13 boards. The board size changes the strategy considerably, with the smaller boards emphasizing tactics rather than overall strategy. An analogy would be 9x9 = sit n go, 13x13 = MTT, 19x19 = deep stack cash games.

I used to play a bit online when I was a total newbie, but got utterly destroyed by the Koreans. I am drawing a blank on the name. But if you or someone else is interested, we could find it and play some :)

I got into Go a bit after watching Hikaru No Go. Well to be exact I got into it because a friend from my dorm got into it, and dragged me in. I got pretty good at it, in what they say was quite rapid progression. In 3 months of casual play I got to 13 or something, which was at the time to the best bots could play at. Also beat this arrogant fellow engineer student who played the game for years, that was fun. I quit because I was satisfied with having come to a level where I could see all the complexities of the game. Also the people of the go club were kinda losers. Was funny when a year later I did a big project for college, under one of the guys of the go club, a postdoc. I played my small part in optimizing the algorithms used for artificial intelligence that plays go.

Basically go is so complex because of the dimensions, that at that time they were trying to optimize the search tree by using heuristics to cut branches out of the tree. For example stopping the calculations at a certain node when a simple check can tell you that this will never ever be a good move, so no need to waste processing time calculating all the options. The skill in improving GO AI is in finding the best and fastest heuristics to prune the tree now.