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Jack comments on A Player of Games - Less Wrong
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Comments (73)
I don't really play the type of games getting mentioned here. But I'd be interested in seeing what four LW regulars would do with Bridge. Much of the game consists of conventions of play and well known strategies (and nearly everyone learns these strategies and conventions while learning the rules). I'd be interested to see how much would be duplicated and what alternative conventions new but very intelligent players would come up with.
Radical experimentation is simply illegal in tournament Bridge.
It was an interesting game a few decades ago when artificial systems were nominally legal, but resulted in judicial harassment. Then you had to balance the in-game advantage against the human factor. (ETA: by "interesting" I did not mean "fun" but "relevant to the post, ie, to exploiting rules in real life")
ETA: my favorite bridge story is that HPF Swinnerton-Dyer was once allowed to bid 8 clubs, a loophole that was quickly closed. My only source is a blog comment
You would not believe how nauseating the thought of playing a game like that is. It's taking a game then removing all the parts of it that are fun. I can see why you would use those sort of rules if you were a bridge club full of old women verging on senility. They could maintain a high level of bridge performance based on heavily crystalised knowledge even though their ability to handle (and remember) novel information is shot to pieces. But why have a tournament at all players are basically primitive bots?
I think I'll pass on that and go play some basketball instead. And use a full court press! ;)
Do you think gender is relevant for wanting to depend on heavily crystalized knowledge?
That doesn't follow from my comment.
I do believe that gender is relevant to the makeup of strereotypical bridge clubs. For reasons including but not limited to the selection effect of mere survival.
An observation that is implied in my statement that you may object is that on average women, particularly old women, are more predisposed to control via social convention than males of a similar age. The nature of human social dynamics is such that it rewards different social strategies differently.
Seconding this: When I worked at the nursing home, men made up about 15% of our long-term resident population.
Also, I expect older men to be less comfortable in situations that are dominated by women than younger men are, due to cultural differences 60+ years ago.
My understanding of the game is that the fun part is trying to determine whether you have the points and suits between you to go for a minor or major slam, and then finessing those extra two or three tricks you need to actually get it. The rest is just window dressing to build tension.
So "A bid of X means I think X is a good bid" is right out, then? :P
You are allowed to use nonstandard conventions, as long as you tell your opponents what conventions you are using.
conventions, yes, "artificial systems," no.
What do you mean by "artificial systems"?
lmgtfy
Thank you for providing a resource you endorse as explaining the technical term you introduced, in a public manner so that all readers can benifet from you efforts. For future reference, it will facilitate civil discussion to not combine this action with a suggestion to use a different approach which does not provide all these benifets.
I don't understand bridge, but I'm sure there's a limit to what would be tolerated.
Example: take an existing convention, and use a format-preserving encryption on it; the FPE should be simple enough to execute with a second or two of thought, and needn't be cryptographically secure, but would almost certainly be beyond anyone's capacity to cryptanalyze in real time without computational assistance.
To extend it further: just use a convention as a n-ary encoding of your hand, and then encrypt it. How specifically illegal is this? Even it all information about the convention is given to your opponents, it does them essentially no good---probably even if they have the key, just because it would confuse them so thoroughly.
You would be expected to explain your conventions to your oppenents in the same way you would explain them to a new partner. The conventions themselves may be complicated, but the explanation should not add complication.
Conventions have the purpose of making in-game actions to reveal information about your hand (to your partner, though your oppenents are allowed to "listen in").
But a convention that requires multiplying points along a discrete elliptical curve, for example, could be done with sufficient practice and initial aptitude, but even the most thorough description wouldn't really help any but the most amazingly gifted if opponents don't get more than a few hours to practice it.
I've actually tried part of this with RSA, and I think ECC would be even easier implement, if harder to learn the underlying group. In other words, public key cryptography is completely possible to do in one's head, given practice and assuming small key sizes (I used 16 bits, which is laughable unless you happen to be denied access to a computer).
Do I think any pair of bridge partners would be able to perform a key exchange after just learning the convention, much less do an on-the-fly cryptanalysis of such a verbal transaction? No.
While that sounds really cool, if computing your convention is more complicated that consulting a giant lookup table, it would be reasonable to expect you to describe it that way.
There are 35 bids, (plus passing, doubling, and redoubling), which are ordered so you cannot make a bid that comes before that last one made, and the last bid made is important for the next phase of the game. You have less than 6 bits with every bid. You want your first bid to transmit info about your hand, not part of a key.
In the next phase, you play one of the cards in your hands in each trick, your hand starts with 13 cards and is not replenished, and you do not know when setting up your convention which cards you hold (the point is to communicate which cards you hold), there are restrictions on which cards you can play, and you also want to play the card that wins the trick (and preparing to win later tricks is why you would be communicating about your hand). You have less than 4 bits in this phase.
Ah, thank you. I've never tried to learn bridge, so I had no idea what the specifications were.
Upon further reflection (and a quick reading of the rules), I realize that I am probably not sufficiently considering the intelligence and dedication of the most intelligent and dedicated bridge players. Given the allotted bandwidth, I suspect that existing conventions are not optimal, but might be surprisingly close.