sixes_and_sevens comments on Secrets of the eliminati - Less Wrong

93 Post author: Yvain 20 July 2011 10:15AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 22 July 2011 11:23:22AM 4 points [-]

Just to underscore a broader point: recreational games have various characteristics which don't generalise to all situations modelled game-theoretically. Most importantly, they're designed to be fun for humans to play, to have consistent and explicit rules, to finish in a finite amount of time (RISK notwithstanding), to follow some sort of narrative and to have means of unambiguously identifying winners.

Anecdotally, if you're familiar with recreational games, it's fairly straightforward to identify victory conditions in games just by watching them being played, because their conventions mean those conditions are drawn from a considerably reduced number of possibilities. There are, however, lots of edge- and corner-cases where this probably isn't possible without taking a large sample of observations.