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Games you've grown in or out of
There was a time when RPGs could hold my attention. I might start thinking of other things but letting my mind wander didn't make me want to do something else.
Some time after Pokemon Silver, I lost whatever it is that lets you play games that make it feel like you're working for some kind of pay-off eventually, I think this has something to do with my improved understanding of games and realisation that all my team was was values in a machine.
Does anyone else have games they used to enjoy and now can't or once couldn't and now can?
Some time after Pokemon Silver, I lost whatever it is that lets you play games that make it feel like you're working for some kind of pay-off eventually, I think this has something to do with my improved understanding of games and realisation that all my team was was values in a machine.
Does anyone else have games they used to enjoy and now can't or once couldn't and now can?
Comments
That's mostly it I believe.
I also, as George pointed out, play to win. If you want to win, you must find the optimal path to victory and execute a strategy that leads to said path. The better your strategy is, the earlier it hits the path to victory. Eventually, you hit it before the game begins. At this point, you have solved the game. Becoming good at something brings you closer to solving said thing.
American board games are largely pre-solved: victory is either random, or random if you play the pathetically obvious optimal strategy. You've probably already solved Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry, etc... There are no interesting or meaningful decisions to make in these games if you have even basic understanding of the rules.
I just have played enough games to have solved more of them.
1) Don't be smart enough to solve the given game.
2) Play an unsolvable game (NP)
3) Not play the game enough times to solve it.
4) Don't actually think about the game you are playing, and don't try to win.
If you you play a game repeatedly, and none of those factors are in play, solving the game is inevitable.
Another problem is that you don't solve games one at a time, you solve exponentially more games over time. Many games are extremely similar. Many games are identical to others, or are different combinations of mechanics from other games. Once you've mastered a given mechanic in one game, you've come pretty close to mastering it in every game in which it appears. If you play lots of games, and you start to figure them out, you will start solving brand new games before you even finish them for the first time.
Keep in mind there are also two levels of game solving. There's the true algorithmic solving of a game. That means we have an actual mathematical proof for the solution to the game. Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers fall into this category. Computers have solved both those games. If you were to play against a computer programmed with the solution, it would almost always win. If you played a perfectly optimal game, it would result in a draw. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game
There's also the colloquial solving of a game. For example, Settlers of Catan is not a mathematically solved game by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is effectively solved because we have effectively figured out rules to follow that result in near optimal play. When playing a game like this, we make no actual decisions, because we already know the best course of action. We also know what every other player will do because they also know the best strategy. If anyone deviates from the strategy, they will lose horribly. The game enters a state of Nash Equillibrium, and the winner is determined by the luck of the dice and cards.
Most people think that in Jenga you want to remove a piece and leave the tower as stable as possible. Oh no. After you remove a piece and lay it on top, you want it to be as unstable as possible, without actually falling over. There is a very strong left-right mechanic. If the player to your right is very good at leaving the tower unstable, then you are probably going to lose.
if your friends always remove the middle piece, just keep removing side pieces down low. Then remove the opposite side piece from that one. Make it as unstable as possible. As you keep playing and playing, eventually shit will get real no matter how wussy they are. Odds are, the person to your left is going to lose.
For example, the game of Go is solved for very small grids. We know the answer. The problem is that when the grid gets large the number of strategies increase exponentially, so you can't truly solve it. The same goes for games like Flood-It!
These are the two possible outcomes of the P=NP? problem. The class P contains all problems which can be solved on a deterministic machine in an amount of time which is polynomial to the length of the input for the worst case scenario. NP (which stands for Non-deterministic Polynomial) problems are a bit different. Their solutions (or certificates as they are called) can be verified in a time which is polynomial to the length of the input, but the solutions themselves are found in polynomial time on non-deterministic machines. NP is actually a generalization of class P. What you are talking about actually falls under the NP-Complete class of problems, which consist of problems that are in NP and which can be reduced to the boolean satisfiability problem (SAT).
The issue lies in the fact that we know there exist problems in NP which can be solved efficiently (Greatest Common Division is in P and is easily solved with Euclid''s Algorithm). But these problems either haven't been shown to be reduced to SAT or been shown to have all NP problems reduce to them. That is the great question, if you could take a problem in P and have all of NP problems turing reduce to it, then P=NP and you would have an efficient solution to all NP/NP-Complete problems.
Also, there are fairly efficient algorithms to approximate solutions for NP-Complete problems to the point where they give you a solution within something like 5-10% of the optimal solution.
But this all deals with computers. I suppose the real question is, does your mind operate in a deterministically sequential fashion or is it non-deterministic? Only then could you really place some sort of complexity classification for when you wish to solve it with your mind.