= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
orthonormal comments on How David Beats Goliath - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (25)
Reminds me of the Playing to Win essay linked here a few weeks ago.
That doesn't make sense, though. If playing "cheap" in this way benefits David against Goliath, then evolution would favor a whole lot of Davids playing "cheap".
The most important part of the article, I think:
"“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged. ".
Lenat, Lawrence, David, and the basketball girls all 'played' in a way that emphasized their own strengths and took advantage of the limits of the situation; they refused to accept the conventions everyone else held, and so they were able to beat them.
This was my first thought, as well. These "Goliaths" sounds like scrubs who complained loud enough to get favors from the people in charge.
deleted
Not sure what you mean by "cheap".
"Cheap" is a term used in the Playing to Win essays. It generally refers to a tactic that is uninteresting or repetitive but successful.
The example used in the essays is repeating the same move over and over in Street Fighter.
(Edit) The example from Eurisko is that making ships that sink themselves is "cheap" because ships in a real war wouldn't do that. It is a valid strategy according to the rules of the game but invalid according to extraneous rules that have no bearing on the game.