Instigator / Pro
30
1469
rating
10
debates
40.0%
won
Topic
#3151
Chess > Board Game Of Your Choice
Status
Finished
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
Winner & statistics
After 5 votes and with 9 points ahead, the winner is...
DeadFire27
Parameters
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- One week
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- Two weeks
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
Contender / Con
21
1702
rating
574
debates
67.86%
won
Description
Chess is my favorite board game. Let's see yours's.
CHESS = a board game of strategic skill for two players, played on a chequered board on which each playing piece is moved according to precise rules. The object is to put the opponent's king under a direct attack from which escape is impossible ( checkmate ).
RULES:
1. No new arguments are to be made in the final round.
2. Definitions are agreed upon and are not to be contested.
3. Rules are agreed upon and are not to be contested.
4. Sources can be hyperlinked or provided in the comment section.
5. A breach of rules 1-5 should result in a 1 point penalty.
6. No Kritiks.
7. Bones cannot participate (Due to me being sick of losing elo XD)
8. A breach in rules 6-8 should result an instant loss.
FRAMEWORK:
PRO: Will argue that Chess is the best board game out there.
CON: Will argue that another board game is better.
R1: Opening Statements.
R2: Rebuttal and Defense
R3: Closing Statements.
Round 1
Thank you RM for accepting this debate.
Prelude:
In the comments, my opponent has pointed out a serious flaw in my rules. As it is not against the rules, I will allow it.
FRAMEWORK:
PRO: Will argue that Chess is the best board game out there.
CON: Will argue that another board game of their choice is better.
R1: Opening Statements.
R2: Rebuttal and Defense
R3: Closing Statements.
Definitions:
CHESS = a board game of strategic skill for two players, played on a chequered board on which each playing piece is moved according to precise rules. The object is to put the opponent's king under a direct attack from which escape is impossible ( checkmate ).
Opponent must provide their own definition for their game.
RULES:
1. No new arguments are to be made in the final round.
2. Definitions are agreed upon and are not to be contested.
3. Rules are agreed upon and are not to be contested.
4. Sources can be hyperlinked or provided in the comment section.
5. A breach of rules 1-5 should result in a 1 point penalty.
6. No Kritiks.
7. Bones cannot participate (Due to me being sick of losing elo XD)
8. A breach in rules 6-8 should result an instant loss.
Argument 1: Pre-Covid Popularity
Chess, before 2020, was a old classic. No one hasn't heard of it, and people all over the world loved it.
Chess originated in India, in the form of Chaturanga(Chaturanga - Wikipedia). It was a influential war game built on logic and strategic planning. You can still play it today. Chess evolved from the old game until it became fairly modern.
1880 was the golden age of chess, where many openings were patented and people started paying attention. Romantic players like Paul Morphy gave chess a whole new likeness and beauty.
Chess is a logic game. It is a war game. It is a classic game. Chess contains all aspects of a game that have changed peoples lives. But Covid really sparked a new era for chess.
Argument 2: PRESENT Covid Popularity
When the pandemic hit, chess fans around the globe was rushing for a new outlet for their love. Luckily, chess.com was here to save the day.
Chess.com is a trending website with over a 100 million users. With a elo system and many variations, chess began to feel alive. Even more so with the rapid twitch evolution of chess, with chess becoming one of the most popular categories. \
Conclusion:
Chess is a good game. It is a classic. I just hope I'm good enough to defend it's reputation.
PS: This was rushed while I was doing Summer homework. Don't bully me :(
The Game
Go is one of the oldest board games in the world. Its true origins are unknown, though it almost certainly originated in China some 3,000-4,000 years ago. In the absence of facts about the origin of the game there are various myths: for example that the legendary Emperor Yao invented Go to enlighten his son, Dan Zhu.
Chess being the ‘ultimate logic board game’ is simply a myth.
There are board games with complete information available to both players and ones with incomplete information. Chess and Go are both games that involve complete information, nothing about the game’s unfolding has a situation where there’s anything mysterious or hidden to any players, of course this is only really true if both players know enough about the game and are equally intelligent and attentive as well as lusting for victory.
Chess is overrated and well known, it’s the ‘logic game’ and most who push for it being supreme tend to think that all other board games are inferior to Chess at exploring logic but the game Go is irrefutably superior to Chess in every level of logic, you may argue it’s a different type of logic though and I’ll go into that in my next point.
Another way to think of it is to compare Go to chess, which in the '90s was hard enough to imagine AI mastering before IBM came along. After the first two moves of a Chess game, there are 400 possible next moves. In Go, there are close to 130,000."The search space in Go is vast... a number greater than there are atoms in the universe," Google wrote in a January blog post about the game.
Chess works via hierarchical/protective strategy, Go works via imperial/territorial strategy.
^ A fantastic brief read to understand the differences and parallels between Chess and Go.
In Chess, you are at the core avoiding defeat as opposed to seeking gradual, flowing conquering of your opponent; you are defending your King with strict hierarchy known to all good players about which pieces are worth sacrificing in order to protect others (or to protect positions). On the other hand, in the game of Go, while of course defense does matter, the entire game is structured offensively, you are conquering the opponent throughout and it is so prone to never end in draws that in almost all tournaments, it is in fact banned to have an ‘agreed upon draw’ between the players so as to force each to push themselves to their physical limits in terms of time pressure and energy such that even if they think it will tie, there’s just no way to know if their brains and attention levels can cope with the game’s pace as it unfolds (plus, it is objectively extremely more complex than Chess so unlike Chess it is usually impossible even for a genius player to truly know it’s going to end in a tie if both play proficiently).
Go revolves around many twists and turns, you are never in a situation where you 100% know for sure what you’re doing is optimal (apart from getting corner spots, that’s usually always optimal). The game of Go flows with many back and forths if both players are good at it, both on the edge of their seats (as are the spectators) since quite literally no human brain quite knows who really is going to win (this is of course only true if both are extremely good or equally poor, if one if very supreme at Go, then you do pretty much know they’ll win but it’s still far more interesting to see it unfold than Chess from a strategic standpoint).
The reason this point matters is that everything about Chess’s very form of strategy is in a format that lets any player pick it up, understand how to go about it, memorise many patterns and win (or tie). In fact, at the highest level of Chess, it’s so plagued with ties and draws that it would pretty much have ‘died out’ had Covid not driven us indoors and the Queen’s Gambit not happened on Netflix. I’ll address this more later if my opponent rebukes it. For now, I’ll assert it without a source.
It is important to understand what I’m saying here, Chess only is suddenly popular due to a series and being stuck at home as well as the fact that its form of strategy is fundamentally easier and more passive to pick up than Go’s is. Even though people were stuck at home, one doesn’t tend to just ‘pick up the game of Go’ from scratch and hit a website ready to play it, it’s insanely complex and when you lose at it, it’s gruelling, brutal and you feel bad because you didn’t just lose a game, you were schooled in raw strategy and intellect itself.
That’s where I’m going with this entire contention/section. Go’s demand on intelligence and unrelenting capturing of territory as opposed to clear hierarchy in both the pieces and structure that indicates where and when to defend mean there is absolutely nothing indicating (except corner pieces being optimal) to a player where and when to place a piece other than their pure intelligence and deep grasp on the game. Go is merciless, it throws both players into an arena where literally only their wits and strategy will win them the game (as opposed to pattern recognition and tactics which matter far more in Chess, especially if it’s a smaller time-pressure game).
This means in Chess, that each game either is small enough time that it pressures people into mistakes (which is pseudo-competitiveness from a strategic standpoint) or it’s so long that it’s a bore and is played so passively and gradually that usually it ends in a tie.
While there appears to be no correlation between the number of games played and the number of draws that occur at high-level chess, draws are still the most frequently seen result in the game of chess. Whether or not tournament directors will be able to change this through shorter time controls or other methods is up for debate. However, it can be assumed that only when there is a lack of information, there is a significantly high number of draws at the highest levels. For the years 1971 until the early 1990s, not a lot of games were collected. While there is a high number of draws, it cannot be assumed that the number of games collected is the cause of the number of draws, because of the lack of data. However, from the 1990s onward, the relative percentage of draws each year stabilizes to around 50%. We can, therefore, conclude that with a higher number of collected games, there will be a more consistent number of draws.
Due to just how complex Go is, some of the most advanced AI ever in our species’ history is being developed to defeat it.
We created AlphaGo, a computer program that combines advanced search tree with deep neural networks. These neural networks take a description of the Go board as an input and process it through a number of different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections.One neural network, the “policy network”, selects the next move to play. The other neural network, the “value network”, predicts the winner of the game. We introduced AlphaGo to numerous amateur games to help it develop an understanding of reasonable human play. Then we had it play against different versions of itself thousands of times, each time learning from its mistakes.Over time, AlphaGo improved and became increasingly stronger and better at learning and decision-making. This process is known as reinforcement learning. AlphaGo went on to defeat Go world champions in different global arenas and arguably became the greatest Go player of all time.
Let’s be clear here, this isn’t some gimmick like the AIs to beat Chess have been, this AI is capable of calculating a game and defeating the world champion of our species where each move has 130,000 possibilities.
This level of AI depth is groundbreaking, it will probably contribute to AI vehicles, construction machines so on and so forth. The technocratic future of our species literally can be revolutionised thanks to what AlphaGo has even proven and meant for AI’s potential to out-calculate human beings in a scenario with many variables.
AlphaGo uses deep learning and neural networks to essentially teach itself to play. Just as Google Photos lets you search for all your pictures with a cat in them because it holds the memory of countless cat images that have been processed down to the pixel level, AlphaGo’s intelligence is based on it having been shown millions of Go positions and moves from human-played games.The twist is that DeepMind continually reinforces and improves the system’s ability by making it play millions of games against tweaked versions of itself. This trains a "policy" network to help AlphaGo predict the next moves, which in turn trains a "value" network to ascertain and evaluate those positions. AlphaGo looks ahead at possible moves and permutations, going through various eventualities before selecting the one it deems most likely to succeed. The combined neural nets save AlphaGo from doing excess work: the policy network helps reduce the breadth of moves to search, while the value network saves it from having to internally play out the entirety of each match to come to a conclusion.This reinforced learning system makes AlphaGo a lot more human-like and, well, artificially intelligent than something like IBM’s Deep Blue, which beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov by using brute force computing power to search for the best moves — something that just isn’t practical with Go. It’s also why DeepMind can’t tweak AlphaGo in between matches this week, and since the system only improves by teaching itself, the single match each day isn’t going to make a dent in its learning. DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis says that although AlphaGo has improved since beating Fan Hui in October, it’s using roughly the same computing power for the Lee Se-dol matches, having already hit a point of diminishing returns in that regard.
Round 2
Thank you RM.
"Chess being the ultimate logic game is a myth."
There are board games with complete information available to both players and ones with incomplete information. Chess and Go are both games that involve complete information, nothing about the game’s unfolding has a situation where there’s anything mysterious or hidden to any players, of course this is only really true if both players know enough about the game and are equally intelligent and attentive as well as lusting for victory.Chess is overrated and well known, it’s the ‘logic game’ and most who push for it being supreme tend to think that all other board games are inferior to Chess at exploring logic but the game Go is irrefutably superior to Chess in every level of logic, you may argue it’s a different type of logic though and I’ll go into that in my next point.
Excuse me for saying this, but I never said chess was the ultimate logic game. In fact, I'd like to quote:
Chess is a logic game. It is a war game. It is a classic game.
My opponent tried to twist my words against me, by calling out a point saying that chess isn't the ultimate logic game. However, seeing as I never said it was "the ultimate" the argument is flawed.
"Too well known"
If you accentuate the popularity of Chess, I'll probably take Monopoly or could even troll and go for snakes/chutes and ladders. - RM
I believe you stated that if I pushed the popularity of chess in the comments, you would respond with another popular game. You have chosen to chase the logic field, and left me open to pursue the popularity field with minimal obstruction.
"Chess works via hierarchical/protective strategy, Go works via imperial/territorial strategy."
Go revolves around many twists and turns, you are never in a situation where you 100% know for sure what you’re doing is optimal (apart from getting corner spots, that’s usually always optimal). The game of Go flows with many back and forths if both players are good at it, both on the edge of their seats (as are the spectators) since quite literally no human brain quite knows who really is going to win (this is of course only true if both are extremely good or equally poor, if one if very supreme at Go, then you do pretty much know they’ll win but it’s still far more interesting to see it unfold than Chess from a strategic standpoint).
I believe that the complexity you refer to in this paragraph can be easily used against you. Go can't be both a logic game and a social game, that's why so many people opt for chess, due to the complexity of Go.
As for how exciting is to watch.....
No one is going to stay watching for 1-6 hrs. Even chess professionally only lasts for 90min maximum.
AlphaGo - The Less Extraordinary Version of AlphaZero.
I admit that AlphaGo is a fascinating piece of AI, but I'd argue that it's chess relative, AlphaZero, is much more fascinating in nature.
Top players have learned from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0zqbO622rg. While AlphaGo has programming much too complex for regular players to learn from it.
Conclusion:
Bottom line - Go is too complicated. It's not simple enough to be enticing to new players, revolving the entire community around one group of dedicated people.
Thank you RM for responding, I was afraid of FF.
Forfeited
Round 3
Thank you RM (or maybe not, I don't know)
My opponent has conceded a round. This being the final round, RM is unable to make new arguments, so I extend all arguments from last round and will make a short conclusion of my statements from R2:
- Go is too complicated to be enjoyable among commercial standards.
- Games are too long to be exciting.
- AlphaGo is inferior to AlphaZero.
- My opponent has not made a point to any of these, so I extend all.
I do hope RM can respond for his conclusion.
Forfeited
My point isn't to make you feel bad, it's criticism which should be able to help you grow.
Oh just had an idea for if doing this again and someone mentions the Netflix movie: twist such around using sexy chess clips from said movie, thereby giving the audience a reason to prefer Chess (I do strongly prefer chess, but I do my best to check my feelings at the door when reviewing a debate).
Now you're just making me feel bad 😔
He even outright lied about firstly the relative popularity of Go (in the 'Eastern' or mainland Asia it's extremely popular, just as respects as Chess is if not more so) and secondly, Chess tournaments last days, hours at a time, idk where he got the idea it's 90 mins max.
At the point of writing my Round 2 I got too bored to continue. He'd even violated the Kritik rule but explaining that would be a drag and just anger him while maybe also angering voters. His entire case is that popularity can kritik absolutely all other elements of a board game's value, that is his core case.
To be honest though, I have no idea how or why but I think I am finally becoming a less argumentative person. As in, I am changing as a person even IRL. I've begun to understand that proving someone wrong is a largely taxing and futile task if you can't prove them wrong with results/actions. If I have to explain to you why you are wrong and can't quickly 'show' you then far more often than not what will ensue is a waste of my time and energy and even worse can leave you respecting me and my outlook less than before.
Here is a round by round development of my analysis...
R1:
I.
Pro: Chess is old and popular.
Con: Go is also old.
II.
Pro: Chess is popular.
Con: Chess would have died if not for Covid and Netflix.
III.
Con: Chess is not the "ultimate logic board game" (pro did not make that claim, as much as he probably should have). This is because Go has vastly more possible moves, resulting in it being much harder; and subsequently better AI's are developed for it.
R2:
I.
Pro R1: Chess is old and popular.
Con R1: Go is also old.
II.
Pro R1: Chess is popular.
Con R1: Chess would have died if not for Covid and Netflix.
III.
Con R1: Chess is not the "ultimate logic board game" (pro did not make that claim, as much as he probably should have). This is because Go has vastly more possible moves, resulting in it being much harder; and subsequently better AI's are developed for it.
Pro R2: Never spoke so highly of chess, and some replies to the comment section? Then an assertion that complexity marks an inferior game... Ah the complexity of the AI means players aren't able to learn from it as well with a YouTube blogger a source (seriously, this is against an explanation of chess computers using brute force instead of on the spot learning which Go computers use).
R3:
I.
Pro R1: Chess is old and popular.
Con R1: Go is also old.
II.
Pro R1: Chess is popular.
Con R1: Chess would have died if not for Covid and Netflix.
III.
Con R1: Chess is not the "ultimate logic board game" (pro did not make that claim, as much as he probably should have). This is because Go has vastly more possible moves, resulting in it being much harder; and subsequently better AI's are developed for it.
Pro R2: Never spoke so highly of chess, and some replies to the comment section? Then an assertion that complexity marks an inferior game which takes longer to play... Ah the complexity of the AI means players aren't able to learn from it as well with a YouTube blogger a source (seriously, this is against an explanation of chess computers using brute force instead of on the actual learning which Go computers use).
Con R2: Forfeiture.
Pro R3: Extend... (while new arguments were not allowed, expansion of the computer point to put the chess point into the lead would have been ideal)
Con R3: Forfeiture.
Kinda disappointed that RM forfeited two rounds. When I saw the debate's resolution my first thoughts were on Con bringing up Go and RM did just that.
Thanks!
Of course RM picks a game that few people know about.
**************************************************
>Reported Vote: Intelligence_06 // Mod action: Removed
>Voting Policy: info.debateart.com/terms-of-service/voting-policy
>Points Awarded: conduct to con
>Reason for Decision: forfeiting most of the rounds is not something to do in a debating match.
>Reason for Mod Action:
The voter scored points to the inverse of their own analysis. The vote has been removed to enable them to revote at their discretion.
**************************************************
Well, it seems like I have voted incorrectly. I think it would be just to remove my vote in place for a better one.
You voted for the wrong person, I think. RM = CON, Deadfire = PRO. RM forfeited most the rounds, so you should have given PRO the conduct point.
Chess is the ultimate logic game. Logic is a skill that belongs in every other skill
Checkers is better only cause I'm too lazy to memorize all the piece's moves.
Nope. Monopoly.
Chess unreliable represents war in the past that doesn’t make sense now because we have tanks and stuff.
Monopoly actually represents normal-day capitalism. At least better than Chess representing anything.
Fair enough. I'll find a way to outmaneuver you
There is no rule saying I need to say the board game, if you accentuate the logic of Chess, I'll agree with your points and push for the board game Go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
If you accentuate the popularity of Chess, I'll probably take Monopoly or could even troll and go for snakes/chutes and ladders.
If you decide to go all-round and mention how Chess has even starred in movies, I'll disagree with your points, I'll go for the game of Risk and explore how much more it's affected the world than Chess.
This resolution and the ruleset don't box the opponent into anything that Pro isn't himself further boxed into, which makes this a secure win if I try my best as I'm also sure something like this will actually get votes and be worth my time and effort.
Fair enough, give me some time to make a argument. Also, mind telling me your board game?
Then it should be easy for you
I thought you were bored of formal debating.....