From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jan 09 2002 - 10:51:00 MST
On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 05:37:45PM +0100, scerir wrote:
> the 'kalah'
It is a very nice and minimalist game with nontrivial strategy.
Still, I wonder about the extropian significance of it, beside mental
training?
In general games are useful learning tools - we learn to deal with
various abstractions of the real world, both in terms of adversarial
situations and more neutral ones. While chess and go are most famous
for imparting some measure of wisdom, I don't think we should overlook
"simple" games like snakes and ladders, tag (physical exercise,
pursuit, avoidance), hide and seek (stealth, figuring out what other
people think), counting games (basic arithmetic and combinatorics)
and checkers (visualizing future states).
In fact, overly complicated games are likely not abstract enough to
teach us much - the important things get lost in the specialized
clutter and we tend to learn specialized skills rather than the
general insights that are really useful.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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