Comparing a centuries old board game with completely balanced rules, to an infant video game that still has major balance problems (if you looked hard enough), is silly. Chess is as balanced as it gets.
It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races.
>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
>Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point.
>Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.
As much as I recognize and appreciate the limitations of chess, it pains me physically to see the strategic depth of it compared to something like Starcraft. It's not close by orders of magnitude.
I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.
A 4 pool isn't a sucker punch. It is a highly risky opening strategy that almost always ends the game very quickly. If your opponent does not scout it quickly, he is very likely to lose. If he does, you are very likely to lose. The existence of this early all-in option does much to "keep players honest" during the opening phases of the game and greatly expands the strategic depth of the beginning minutes. Without this option, each player's optimal strategy would always be to sacrifice defense and scouting early in favor of better late-game economy.
I think parent was reading sucker punch (as I did) as not "risky", but unfair -- as you can't see it coming (by definition).
In SC2, 6pooling is certainly quite powerful (Zerg makes Tassadar cry...) but if it is scouted, the Zerg is now fucked.
The thing is, in the current meta, you never bother drone/probe/scv scouting that early, so you'd have to be able to read your opponent and know that he's a kind of player that loves those "Cheesy" build orders!
Like girvo said, I meant that it's not unfair. If you think surprise attacks and imperfect information don't add strategic depth to a game, then we have nothing left to discuss.
It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level.
I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.
Look, I'm not even disagreeing with you. I never said StarCraft is as deep strategically as Chess is. I think Chess is certainly more strategic. I also happen to think StarCraft is a much more interesting game because it has tactical, psychological, and physical aspects totally absent in Chess. These statements are not incompatible.
The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.
Well certainly individual preference is a matter of taste. For me, "4 pooling" and these kind of largely random rock-paper-scissors choices -- which can often be decisive, as is the case here -- put me off Starcraft and a lot of games in general, at least as anything more than casual entertainment. But I do remember enjoying the game before I yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
StarCraft has balance problems? So thats why the new patch got released!
I find it funny that you'd assume that I don't know that. Of course I do. The balance in Chess is what makes it a far more strategic and "complex" (in terms of strategy and tactics) game. I said as much in my post. I like Chess, I just thought it was funny that despite playing chess all throughout school and competing in various tournaments, I'd never made the connection with StarCraft's various terms, ideas, and strategies.
That's what I was expressing. I have no idea what you thought I was trying to say!
Chess isn't close to perfectly balanced. White has a significant advantage, both theoretically and statistically. The win rates between races in Starcraft is closer to perfect balance than the white/black divide. Balance is achieved by alternating colors between players, but one player still gets white more in a BoX. You can't switch from zerg to terrain between games in Starcraft.
But...he didn't even mention balance. He simply was saying how Starcraft helped him appreciate the "nettlesomeness" aspect of professional chess more. It's just a comment about an interesting observation.
Nice one! I'm still working on a better web dev framework for it, basically a really nice, functional wrapper for Slim + ORM's -- taking a leaf out of Haskell's book, keeping it all pure except for where IO operations have to happen (and making sure that that is demarcated in the code itself!). It's so much fun to hack on (although I do crash the REPL constantly. I might have to hack around on that actually, see if I can't get a super REPL going that you can use for actual development).
Now I remember you had a build system that came with Pharen, any plans for that in the future? Mainly because I think using it as a build system with a nice functional syntax would be _amazing_ to use even with normal PHP!
I've been putting some thought into how I might implement some sort of type system that might at least partially help with separating IO and other side-effects. It's probably impossible to guarantee 100% purity, but I was thinking at the very lease I could use reflection to see if any functions called in a piece of code had arguments of or returned values of PHP's 'Resource' type.
What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that...
Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that.
Yeah, just various errors make it crash pretty hard. I've attempted to wrap an error handler into it but had no luck, I might try again and send a PR if I can get it to work.
Phake, that's the one. I was curious about it, as I think a nice LISP styled build system that can be bootstrapped with only PHP and the Pharen runtime-lib would be really awesome as a build system for PHP in general. With Composer and a lot of other projects, tooling in PHP is moving forward at a rapid pace, but we're all hacking together shitty build systems from scratch (or using Phing, which is painful in my experience). Phake could be a nice alternative. For now, I'm using Make and calling into Pharen directly :)
Well, actually, I don't. At high levels of play, white does win more often than black, which points to an imbalance of sorts [1]. But if the SC2 patches were frozen right now, and the game enjoyed 500 years of popularity, with reams of books written by top minds throughout the ages about analysis of the game, do you really think that there would not be one race that would come out ahead? I find that to be implausible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
