How is a strategy defined? There may be a checkmate from any given position on the board (including the initial one) and so playing that set of moves is optimal, but that's not what one usually means by a strategy, that's a solution. Strategy implies some kind of heuristic weighting of finite look-aheads. So is an aggressive strategy one that assumes your opponent will make a mistake or not as far ahead as you do and so you may make a move that will is poor against an equal player but is good against a player who looks fewer moves ahead or has an inferior weighting function? Brent Meeker On 8/15/2014 5:41 PM, Dan Asimov wrote:
I wonder if there necessarily *is* only one optimum strategy.
Of course in any given game -- let's say chess -- there just might accidentally be several strategies that are tied for optimum.
Even if not, if we define a tolerance vaguely by saying that even 10 moves ahead the best human players could not say which of 2 different strategies is better . . . there might be plenty of strategies like that.
Or, suppose we could eliminate draws from chess -- so everyone is just trying to win -- would there be a theorem that there is a unique optimal strategy?
That's really too vague to answer, but still.
--Dan
On Aug 15, 2014, at 4:37 PM, Dave Dyer <ddyer@real-me.net> wrote:
For games such as chess, the optimum strategy is what it is, there's no choice about it. Attack and defence, aggression and resistance, are human concepts with no basis in reality.
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