Life In 19x19

illluck wrote:I suspect Robert also thinks it's silly to claim Go is objectively superior to Chess due to complexity

Complexity has several aspects. For some complexity aspects, Go is superior to Chess (among them: it requires more AI techniques to let a program beat a top player) - for others, the two games are equal. Complexity is just one of the topics that can make games interesting.

The number of first move possibilities is 361, but please keep in mind that most people do not play on the first line or second since it generally does not lead to a good outcome. So just quoting numbers does no good. Chess has 20 possible opening moves. But some are not used because of the weakness thereof. Both games have a complexity that dwarfs the human minds ability to fully grasp. And that is why we have GO and Chess tournaments and not tic tac toe....

I think that the problem is now dead. It was the case that Go players would overstate this complexity aspect, lumping in the pants-on-a-stick ability of the state of the art software alongside. Such days are past.

Something which narked me slightly in all the AlphaGo press was the "Go is so complex, there are more games than atoms in the universe" spiel. I seem to recall Demis Hassabis said this in his presentations as well as being reported in newspaper/website articles. That atoms in the (observable) universe number is about 10^80, which is less than chess complexity (about 10^120) so it's rather a naff comparison. If every atom in the universe was replaced with a copy of the universe, and then every atom in those copies was replaced with another copy of the universe and then every atom in those copies of copies was replaced with a copy of the universe and you then counted all the atoms in those 4 levels of universes, then you'd have about 10^360 atoms which is Go's complexity. Exponentiation makes big numbers!

• There are more Go games than atoms in the universe;
• There's more money in the US national debt than a penny;
• There are more grains of sand on earth than one grain of sand.

biggie