even in the past dice might have just been background noise... one had to be a lot better to win in spite of that noise. just stretching concepts.
what is the difference between dice altering moves in some way, and the unknown opponent move quality...
Do people really believe randomness exist in absence of an observers, trying to "predict" the future from a current state?
I think uncertainty is a way better natural language word, because it acknowledges the observer presence.
In any case.. it might be about proportions more than absolute.. the difference between poker strategies and chess ones.. The amount of hope-chess component in various time controls versus knowledge and digested experience and calculation.
one might say that in poker, the strategies are in sets of games.. in chess it is, in theory, sets of moves.. That in a locally random game like poker one is shaping luck... in chess uncertainty in shallow calculation is not something to worry about. it can be improved to a certain limit. so in that sense chess is not a game of luck.. this is different from saying there is no uncertainty or luck with respect to making a move in spite of uncertainty about its long term win odds, and finding out that one is still in the game in spite of that, further down the game.
@sicariusnoctis said in #20:
yes the basins of attraction of the dice resting states, being a fractal most likely, is what i meant by mapping initial conditions to the dice outcome uniform "probability" distributoin.. each faces would be "mapped" to is basin, and the boundaries between all 6 basins, would be of fractal nature. No need to have a complex plane involved.
and the uncertainty i am talking about is exactly that exponential expansion upon each decision being composed after each other, with some modulation of the expansion rate by quality of move. I think people assume that perfect chess is only one sequence of moves, subconsciously. That there is always one unique best move. But even if it was, we humans are never going to follow it for long. And that is enough for eventually exponential expansion... As I think you are referring to sensitivity upon initial conditions.
Your examples and mine are about locally deterministic systems. we lose the global version of that when there is high sensitivity on initial conditions exact values... chess being finite in space and factors to updates, the sensitivity is not instantaneous.. but it is still there and the legal divergence, can be tamed only so far...
My statement about chess probably having evolved to be beyond our ability to forcast with certainty, is about that.. even best human has a limit.. The thing is that we build intuition about such long term non-determistic associations (non-long term deterministic).. This is similar to the statistical order that one can get out of low dimension noise locally deterministic systems. like spherical gaz layer under temperature gradiens of various intensity (weather, earth atmosphere fluid dynamics). El nino maybe.. we kind of know what goes on , but we have a hard time being very precise about, but we can prepare for it. We use our own statistical brain to find out what remains that is roughly helping our decision beyond in-game horizon. And that is that process that takes take to build "accuracy" with. but it is not determinism between propagated. it is many games patterns emerging from the local mechanics.. A bunch of claims i just made.. more like analogy bourne suggestions.. At least such paradoxal looking or conflict notions of local predictability and global uncertainty, do exist in nature and in mathematics already.. outside of chess apparently (or absolutely) finite local rules.
patterns discovery, memory, recognitiion, and expression. are statistically learned.. another claim.. probably less news.
I have a slight different view on luck. Most comments mainly discuss about single games, so we are even discussing about the existence of luck being involved. But luck definitely played a factor in tournaments, especially the pairing. In odd number games who gets to play white more will definitely have a small edge over the other. If you have a huge participants there's chances you'll ended up with few players having same score, so tie breaker played an important role. This is where luck is heavily involved. Depending on the organizers, players might get paired purely off their names (I mean OTB tournaments here, so in unregistered tournaments organizers tend to register player names without rating.) If players have similar strengths who lost earlier will have huge disadvantage because most likely you'll have a lower tie breaker. If there's a huge gap in player strengths who plays weaker opponents will most likely have lower tie breaker down the line.
If we're talking about individual game wise, I agree that it is very difficult to see how luck is involved. Situations like lack of preparation, thinking too slow, blunders or even player's current playing condition can be categorized as the strength of a player.
We have definitely seen some news like a random amateur managed to win a GM somewhere. Does that means the GM who blundered and lost is weaker than the amateur? Definitely not. In that single match, something could have happens and distract the GM which caused the blunder. If the amateur does not have enough strength to take advantage of the blunder, the GM will most likely recover his position and won the game later on. But if the player managed to capitalize the blunder and win the game, do you give the credit to the amateur's strength, or he just got lucky to have met a chance of his lifetime for a GM to blunder?
Luck factor is definitely involved in the game of chess. Sometimes heavily. But in order for luck factor to be significant, strength has to come first. So from that perspective, no, chess is not a game of luck in my opinion.
@AntipasTang said in #23:
>
ratings are a statistics based on probability models using WDL outcomes... over populations of players pairings games outcomes.. It is not a direct measure of accuracy. if we had true accuracy measure, we could even just play few moves on random position proposals. and a fix set of those per tournament players. the one with best cumulative (not averaged) score would win champion. but we don'T have such real absolute move accuracy measure.. why is that... because we don't have the complete tree of legal chess.. i think.
So i think others have touched the human factors too beside the limitation in calculation. Yes many non-board related factors affecting the administration of games are also be noise sources... So i guess there are many ways to understand is "chess a game of luck"
is tournament chess events also having their own noise factors. I would say the more parts in a mutipart desing, the more wobble the whole is gonna get... when human trajectories outside the board are involved.. you multiply the sources..
but the question i understodd is whether the core single game is. (one can make repeats of that, and could even approximate tournament chess to be some good way to samplng that, but your point was about this not being just a repeat of the unique, game that tournament factors like preparation using uncertain information about limite certainty gamut of oppoents, etc...).
I did not think about that. but yes.. preparation (which i never did but am beginning to understand) has a gambling aspect directly in it.. But the error within games, that is also there with the one game question. Sure time controls can press on accelerator of some of those factors.. Good points though. there is no reason to restrict the question like i understood first.
Chess is not a game of luck. We can say that only 1/4 of chess is built up on our luck. Chess is a fight between two players. Chess is built up on 99% of hard work and 1% of talent. Please support me by giving me a thumbs up if you feel this a right message.
Thank You.
WHY ARE YOU READING THIS.STOP READING!!!NOW!!!
Just want to add that not being able to see past a "horizon" is something different then luck. While it might "feel" like luck to get an obscure defensive move in an otherwise lost position thanks to something you played in the opening, it's not luck no matter how it feels. You can call it a new word if you like, but luck is something that is otherwise outside of your control usually with some probability of happening. In other words your "luck" was created by your opening without you knowing it, not given to you by hitting a 1 out of 30 chance.
Thanks for this topic, an interesting one. Of course, it's partially a question of definition.
I don't want to try a theory development here, but just want to share when i felt i was lucky - or my opponent was lucky - in a chess game during 40 years competition.
But first, my synthetised opinion : chess is of course not a game of luck, there is definitely few place for luck, comparaed with other games, but there is a part of luck as in every game,,,, and in fact in many aspects of life.....
Luck elements :
a) The type of opponent : some type of character ; -for example agressive player or frightened-type opponents- gave me a statistically very good result - When solid with no or few initiative player was facing me, my results where under my rating...
b) the choice of the variation ; one main stream of luck : i was a lot stronger in some types of positions than others..... as a football player would be stronger in some type of organisation than others....
c) the physical or mentally status of my opponent / or myself : having slept good or few.... feeling positive or having personal problems to deal with .... of course, there is a part of luck if my opponent or myself is not in a good palying mood this day...
d) over - underquoted opponents,especially young players coming from USSR at the time, with few opportunities to raise their international elo.
e) old opponents (as i am now) going down in performance and young killers, still not particularly good technically, but with killer's instinct and energy
e) opponent missing a continuation - or finding -, such type he would miss - or find - only 1 out of 5 or 10 times in games...
f) playing a good move which was decided by bad calculation or bad comprehension......
g) time winning in lost position... ; or blundering on a way he would done rarely (i lost 2 games by mate in 1, without great time's problem, in winning positions...)
h) by team events, player who must play for a win or a draw when the position requires an other treatment....
i) ... may be others.... i don't try deeply to be exhaustive
Luck and strategy play a role in both chess and poker. It's easy to see how luck plays a much smaller role in a single game of chess versus a single hand of poker. I think backgammon is another example where luck causes variance.
But both in poker and backgammon, people never play a single game. I believe the backgammon world championship is a best of 35. In poker most players play thousands of hands.
To define backgammon as a game of luck is then simple nonsense. I predict you would have trouble winning a single point against the world champion.
So probability defines the territory, but good players think about all possible outcomes and have to to win.
So the question is not if it's a game "of luck", but if it's a game of skill. And for both backgammon and poker that is a positive.
[edit: As a somewhat relevant note, I highly recommend watching the world championship of backgammon)
Just curious... who is that in the picture? It looks like Magnus (especially because of the hair), but I can’t be totally sure. :)
