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lessdazed comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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I recently contemplated learning to play chess better (not to make an attempt at mastery, but to improve enough so I wasn't so embarassed about how bad I was).
Most of my motivation for this was an odd signalling mechanism: People think of me as a smart person, and they think of smart people as people who are good at chess, and they are thus disappointed with me when it turns out I am not.
But in the process of learning, I realized something else: I dislike chess, as compared to say, Magic the Gathering, because chess is PURE strategy, whereas Magic or StarCraft have splashy images and/or luck that provides periodic dopamine rushes. Chess only is mentally rewarding for me at two moments: when I capture an enemy piece, or when I win. I'm not good enough to win against anyone who plays chess remotely seriously, so when I get frustrated, I just go capturing enemy pieces even though it's a bad play, so I can at least feel good about knocking over an enemy bishop.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don't like to think. (This is most non-nerds, as far as I can tell). Thinking about chess is physically stressful for me, whereas thinking about other kinds of abstract problems is fun and rewarding purely for its own sake.
Learn to play Go, then even if your chess ability is lower, people won't be able to judge your Go ability.
Go is roughly a game based on encircling the other's army before his or her army encircles yours. A bit of thought about the meaning of the word 'encircle" should hint to how awesome that can be.
If your gaming heart has been more oriented towards WWII operational and strategic-level games, Go is the game for you. If chess incorporates the essence of WWI, Go is incorporates the essence of mobile warfare in WWII, if the part of the essence represented by Poker is removed.
Go=an abstraction of mobile warfare - Poker
Chess is battle, Go is war. I don't see how it's very much about mobility rather than scale.
What real scale and era, if any, is even roughly modeled?
Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I'm not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.
Chess: Battle of Chi Bi is exemplary. (I am not sure if that is at all informative to people who don't already know a ridiculous amount about three kingdoms era China.) I don't feel qualified to say anything about Go.
Why did you choose that battle? Subterfuge was prominent in it.
Chess may resemble some other pitched battles from before the twentieth century, but it doesn't resemble modern war at all.
By subterfuge do you mean Huang Gai's fire ships? I think of it more as a subtle pawn sacrifice which gets greedily accepted which allows for the invasion of Zhou Yu's forces which starts a king hunt that forces Cao Cao to give up lots of material in the form of ships and would have resulted in his getting mated if he hadn't a land to retreat to (and if he hadn't gotten kinda lucky). I thought I remembered Pang Tong doing something interesting and symbolic somewhere in there (a counterattack on the opposite wing to draw away some of Cao Cao's defending pieces) but I don't remember if that was fictional or not.