Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

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Restitution
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#41 Post by Restitution » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:56 am

You're aware that linguistic prescriptivism is basically a debunked view on language, right?

Anybody else I would talk to, if I said "RPS is largely random", they would agree with me. They would charitably interpret what I am saying and not assume that I am retarded. You're only... being confused... on purpose? To "win an argument"?

Words mean what people interpret them to mean. Your refusing to engage with language as a tool, rather than a bludgeon for establishing intellectual dominance, is a problem with you and you alone.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#42 Post by RoganJosh » Tue Jul 23, 2019 1:07 am

swordsman3003 wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:31 am
Resitution wrote:Two players playing RPS optimally will each win 50% of the time. That's not to say that there's no skill involved (like a coin flip), just that even in optimal play, there are going to be random outcomes of the game.
If the players played RPS optimally, the outcome would be random. But they don't, so it isn't.
The distinction between inherent properties of a game, and the way people play the game in practice, has been brought up on a few occasions already.

If, in ten years time, people have computer chips in their brains that can spit out random numbers. And, say, people use those random number to play RPS. Would RPS then suddenly become random? The game itself wouldn't have changed. Only the way people play it would have changed.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#43 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 1:17 am

Since you accuse me and others of failing to come to class having read the material, let me go through the first of your essays and spell out some of my objections.

> If your belief is that your opponents’ freedom of action counts as “luck” then you’re defining “luck” as congruent with playing a game against another person. In your mind, what games don’t involve luck? Sudoku? Coloring Books?

>To describe your rivals’ autonomy as “luck” dilutes the meaning of an easy-to-understand word. ...



I am not describing my rivals' autonomy as "luck." I am describing my successful or unsuccessful guess of my opponent's decision as the consequence of "luck" in certain specific contexts in which I have no reasonable way of predicting a rational opponent's decision any better than a coin flip would. Faced with two equally sensible moves, my rational opponent is just as likely to move to one way as he is to move the other way. My opponent could sensibly use a coin to decide which way to move. "Luck" in this context is meant to describe a success or failure wholly unrelated to skill as a player. The most skillful and the least skillful player are equally likely to accurately predict my rational opponent's decision.


>In Diplomacy, the ability to outguess your opponents is a skill. If you truly believe that understanding your opponents’ intentions and predicting their moves is random, then I am certain that this belief is holding you back as a Diplomacy player. In Diplomacy, it is absolutely possible to read and predict your rivals’ intentions. I have played the 1v1 variants of Diplomacy against certain (skilled!) opponents who have never defeated me because I “guess” their moves with incredible accuracy.

This is not inconsistent with Diplomacy involving some luck. Win or lose, in any given game, be it 1v1, or full press, or gunboat, if you correctly predicted more than 50% of your opponent's true 50/50 decisions, there are two possible explanations:

1- Your opponent was sometimes irrational. Less politely, your opponent was sometimes a moron.
2- You got lucky.

> Diplomacy’s dependency on the actions of the players (as opposed to luck) . . .

I dispute your repeated assertion that predicting the action of another person and predicting the outcome of a coin flip are always distinguishable. The action of a rational player making a 50/50 guess in which neither he nor you has any rational reason to trust the other or to share his intentions with another party is indistinguishable from a coin flip. If you accurately predict rational players' decisions under these circumstances more than 50% of the time, you are getting lucky.

I don't even get the sense that you are framing the matter hyperbolically with the true intention of expressing how little of a role luck plays. You state plainly in your essay that, "Of all the games I have played, I am certain that Diplomacy involves only the slightest amount of luck. The countries are randomly assigned as the match starts. That’s it! Other than that initial set up, nothing else in Diplomacy is randomized or left to chance; everything depends on the players." You leave no room for acknowledgment of ANY luck other than country assignment, and that is why I so vehemently disagree with your writing.

A decision that depends on a player that could rationally be decided by a coin flip is a decision you require luck to predict correctly if your opponent is indeed rational.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#44 Post by jmo1121109 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 1:51 am

@Your Humble Narrator, see your implication that I only win guessing games against bad players is wrong. I've played in top tier games where I win them too, or manipulate the board to make sure I won't end up in them at all. I don't really understand how you can argue that a scenario is absolutely a coin flip where a single turn will make or break a solo run. Do you have examples to back that up? I get why you believe that those situations are all luck...but I'd argue that's probably why your solo rate in classic press is 1/3rd mine and a number of other players who make a habit of winning those situations or avoiding them altogether.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#45 Post by swordsman3003 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:00 am

Restitution wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:56 am
Anybody else I would talk to, if I said "RPS is largely random", they would agree with me. They would charitably interpret what I am saying and not assume that I am retarded. You're only... being confused... on purpose? To "win an argument"?

Words mean what people interpret them to mean. Your refusing to engage with language as a tool, rather than a bludgeon for establishing intellectual dominance, is a problem with you and you alone.
The majority of people are wrong about RPS, and I think you are among them. They believe the game is random, and that belief is false. It’s not some novel, or shifting, or modern definition of “random.” People understand what random means, and then incorrectly ascribe that property to RPS. I have shocked many people by teaching them the truth that RPS is not random.

People are mistaken all the time regarding what is random and what is not. An argument of whether a given phenomenon is “random” is an argument people have all the time; read a scientific debate. It’s not a struggle about definitions; it’s a struggle about knowledge.

I have presented evidence that your belief is false and that this false belief is shared by many. Your response is to say “everyone thinks I’m right,” which is non-responsive; I already explained that this is a common misconception, so of course you think people agree with you. That’s neither here nor there.

Some statements are accurate, and some are not. Most people think Pterodactyls are dinosaurs, and they’re wrong. They’re not stupid; they’re mistaken.

I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t have to, to make a case why you are wrong.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#46 Post by peterwiggin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:06 am

First of all, if we're policing language here, random and uniform are not the same thing.

Second of all, I wish more of you unlucky people would join my games.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#47 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:26 am

Jmo, I don't have a perfect example on hand, but here's an ODC game I played recently that I felt at the time involved a lot of luck at a critical juncture:

http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameI ... #gamePanel

Go to Autumn 1911 and turn your attention to Tunis. The fleet in Tyrrhenian could have moved to Tunis or to Gulf of Lyon. My Western Med fleet was faced with the choice of support holding one or the other territory. I correctly guessed two times in a row which territory Tyrrhenian would attack, and in so doing was able to set up a stalemate line in the Mediterranean and hold onto Tunis. I went on to win the game, no doubt in part thanks to my two successive correct coin-flip guesses.

My example is flawed because we can imagine scenarios in which I was able successfully to influence the decision of Italy or Austria, and maybe a player superior to me could have just carefully yanked on a few of his puppeteer strings and avoided having to make any guesses at all. But if we assume that Italy and Austria could not have been swayed by any player to betray one another or to leak information about their intentions (which I think it's fair to assume will sometimes be the case with some players), then it is my sincere conviction that my guesses were entirely attributable to luck. If Tyrrhenian had successfully entered either Gulf of Lyon or Tunis, I would have lost and been unable to reclaim Tunis, and I probably would not have been able to win. Gulf of Lyon and Tunis were equally sensible avenues by which to wrest Tunis from me. Italy could sensibly have used a coin to decide whether to move to Gulf of Lyon or to Tunis.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#48 Post by jmo1121109 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:59 am

Your Humble Narrator wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:26 am
Jmo, I don't have a perfect example on hand, but here's an ODC game I played recently that I felt at the time involved a lot of luck at a critical juncture:

http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameI ... #gamePanel

Go to Autumn 1911 and turn your attention to Tunis. The fleet in Tyrrhenian could have moved to Tunis or to Gulf of Lyon. My Western Med fleet was faced with the choice of support holding one or the other territory. I correctly guessed two times in a row which territory Tyrrhenian would attack, and in so doing was able to set up a stalemate line in the Mediterranean and hold onto Tunis. I went on to win the game, no doubt in part thanks to my two successive correct coin-flip guesses.

My example is flawed because we can imagine scenarios in which I was able successfully to influence the decision of Italy or Austria, and maybe a player superior to me could have just carefully yanked on a few of his puppeteer strings and avoided having to make any guesses at all. But if we assume that Italy and Austria could not have been swayed by any player to betray one another or to leak information about their intentions (which I think it's fair to assume will sometimes be the case with some players), then it is my sincere conviction that my guesses were entirely attributable to luck. If Tyrrhenian had successfully entered either Gulf of Lyon or Tunis, I would have lost and been unable to reclaim Tunis, and I probably would not have been able to win. Gulf of Lyon and Tunis were equally sensible avenues by which to wrest Tunis from me. Italy could sensibly have used a coin to decide whether to move to Gulf of Lyon or to Tunis.
So to give you some thoughts on that turn. It's pretty well observable in diplomacy games, even among skilled players, that players have a predisposition to protect their centers over positioning with other areas on the board. And opponents generally recognize this, which is why in the scenario you're pointing out, it's generally safe to assume that the first attack coming at you is going to be going at the Gulf. It's something I've lectured on in SoW games. So I would argue pretty strongly there that most 50/50's are going to be impacted by an initial preconception about how players in general operate in regards to positioning. For the exact same reason I would argue you could have safely moved Mar to Gas before builds without concern because your 2 units adjacent to Piedmont presented a threat that required a support hold as well as the assumption you would be foolish to not guard those centers. Now where this gets fun is that any rational player looks at that first turn of you *not* guarding your center over another position and thinks along the lines of "there's no way he has the guts to do that a 2nd time". Even good players do this, fully rational players will have that thought slip into their head and it makes an attack on the Gulf again seem even more tempting. Which makes taking that approach again, oddly safer then you might expect.

Now consider sending press like this to only Italy. "There is no way in hell I'm going to let Austria have Tunis. He's in an amazing position to stab you, heck he even went to Warsaw last turn. You're going to give away the solo to him if you keep this up."

Tell me that press like that isn't going to have an impact on where Italy attempts next.

The other argument I'd make is that finishing off England was not the right choice over sending Liv into Irish and then MAO, cutting down the concerning situation by a turn.

My point here is that in any situation like this where you or someone else calls it a coin flip, I always look at the board and see multiple other factors at play that have massively varying tactical likelihoods of playing an impact, and that through manipulation of the press at a key turn, you can increase chance those factors have of going in your favor. To me, that is the essence of skill based play over luck based play. Especially in press games when you have a game's worth of press interactions with someone to gauge someone's predisposition to be influenced by different factors in the game.

Other possible factors like that are, how did I react to a similar situation earlier in the game. Did I defend my center or go for the positioning win. Have I been securing centers or slowing my center gain to take better positioning at the expense of more units? Has my press style been defensive or aggressive, etc. All of those can and should weigh into how someone decides what to hit, and they're what I use to decide how to attack. Never a coin toss/guess.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#49 Post by swordsman3003 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:16 am

Your Humble Narrator wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 1:17 am
a rational opponent's decision
my rational opponent
predict my rational opponent's decision
The action of a rational player
predict rational players' decisions
...
Your opponent was sometimes irrational.
if your opponent is indeed rational


If.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#50 Post by jmo1121109 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:23 am

swordsman3003 wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:16 am
Your Humble Narrator wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 1:17 am
a rational opponent's decision
my rational opponent
predict my rational opponent's decision
The action of a rational player
predict rational players' decisions
...
Your opponent was sometimes irrational.
if your opponent is indeed rational


If.
That's another interesting take on the idea of rational opponents. Rational and skill have nothing to do with each other. I have played some top players before, and have made them barking mad...intentionally. Because I would much rather face a barking mad Balki or MadMarx or Babak then a cool, calm, and collected unrivaled press master. Breaking minor agreements, getting others to do the same, leaking press, etc. Everyone has a breaking point in a game and "chainsawing" someone to the point of not making rational choices in the game can be amazingly effective too. It's a big part of why luck shouldn't have an impact. If your opponent is calm and rational and not speaking to you, something has gone horribly wrong in your press.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#51 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:26 am

Swordsman, what are you trying to say? That my hypothetical is impossible because Diplomacy players are never rational? If that's the case, we're at an impasse and we'll just have to disagree about agreeing.

Jmo, I get what you're saying, and it's reasonably persuasive, but I still think Italy would need to be silly to actually allow press like that to influence his decision. And your analysis of players being inclined to cover their own centers and so on sounds awfully similar to divining whether someone is the type of man to put poison in his own cup or the cup of his opponent.

If Italy, Austria, and I were all as good as you at Diplomacy, do you think the decision to move to Gulf of Lyon or Tunis (or to cover Gulf of Lyon or Tunis) would be a coin flip?
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#52 Post by Squigs44 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:29 am

Re: Coin Flips

First off, has anyone actually flipped a coin or used RNG to determine their moveset beyond maybe the first set of moves in a gunboat game?

Let us assume that someone actually does this and flips a coin in a Berlin/Munich scenario, where this one, seemingly equal decision will determine the outcome of the game.

To say that the player wins or loses the game based on the outcome of the coin is wrong. Why? Because that player chose to follow the outcome of the coin. That player was not forced to flip a coin. The game rules never called for a coin flip. The game did not introduce chance into the game, a player introduced chance into his own decision. Therefore, it is not the fault of the coin that the player won/loss, it is the fault of the player who chose to flip a coin and enter in his orders based on that outcome.

This is ultimately what "Luck plays no part in diplomacy" means to me. Every outcome after country selection is dependent on a players decision, not on a coin flip or a dice roll.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#53 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:33 am

Let me add just to clarify:

I didn't TREAT the decision like a coin flip. I did indeed try to divine whether Italy was the type of person to put poison in one cup or the other. I did indeed try to nudge Italy and Austria one way or another.

But I feel that if Italy and Austria were playing optimally, which in at least this specific context I think is interchangeable with "rationally", my efforts and predictions would be irrelevant and that my success would turn on the coin flip. The possibility of Italy and Austria playing optimally suggests to me that coin-flip decisions, and luck, do play a role in Diplomacy.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#54 Post by jmo1121109 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:37 am

Your Humble Narrator wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:26 am
Swordsman, what are you trying to say? That my hypothetical is impossible because Diplomacy players are never rational? If that's the case, we're at an impasse and we'll just have to disagree about agreeing.

Jmo, I get what you're saying, and it's reasonably persuasive, but I still think Italy would need to be silly to actually allow press like that to influence his decision. And your analysis of players being inclined to cover their own centers and so on sounds awfully similar to divining whether someone is the type of man to put poison in his own cup or the cup of his opponent.

If Italy, Austria, and I were all as good as you at Diplomacy, do you think the decision to move to Gulf of Lyon or Tunis (or to cover Gulf of Lyon or Tunis) would be a coin flip?
I don't, I think the mental press games would be hilarious in absurdity, but I do still think it would be skill based. No 2 players are ever playing exactly as well as each other in a game. I'm a good player, and there are games where my press has been GOD like, some of the site's best (who were easily better then me) did exactly what I wanted even though it made no sense for them because I pressed their buttons just right and I have 0 doubt that in that game I could have easily gone multiple turns blocking them in a scenario like this. And I've had games where less skilled players have thoroughly kicked my ass for the exact same reason, where I strongly suspect I would have lost one area or another the first round because my game play just was not up to par.

As for divining the poison, it's hard for me to explain because some of it is tactical...which I've continuously proven I'm good at, but the other part is intuition which is naturally harder to explain. I suppose the best example of that I can give is that I like proposing scenarios in press to everyone at some point or another. "What do you think of doing this, with this support, or we could do this instead, which do you prefer?" I won't always do that, but if I am having a hard time getting a read on why someone is making the moves they do, I go out of my way to understand it, to get a better feel for what they're doing. It isn't always scenarios, it varies in how I'll work to feel someone out to get a sense of their playstyle. Once you can think like someone else, you're pretty well set in how to manipulate them and their decisions.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#55 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:46 am

> I don't, I think the mental press games would be hilarious in absurdity, but I do still think it would be skill based. No 2 players are ever playing exactly as well as each other in a game. I'm a good player, and there are games where my press has been GOD like, some of the site's best (who were easily better then me) did exactly what I wanted even though it made no sense for them because I pressed their buttons just right and I have 0 doubt that in that game I could have easily gone multiple turns blocking them in a scenario like this. And I've had games where less skilled players have thoroughly kicked my ass for the exact same reason, where I strongly suspect I would have lost one area or another the first round because my game play just was not up to par.

After a certain number of layers of deception, I feel like it's self-deluding to think discerning the depth of the deception is any different from predicting a coin flip. And again, I mean, it would be perfectly sensible to decide which of Tunis or GoL to attack by flipping a coin. Is it so outrageous to think that a player might be able to mimic the randomness (hope I'm using that word right) of a coin? To Squig's point: yes, there's a conscious decision to follow the coin, but, if the player DOES follow the coin, any efforts by the opponent to predict his decision are futile. If Italy DID follow a coin, any efforts by me to predict his move would have been futile.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#56 Post by Squigs44 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:15 am

Your Humble Narrator wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:46 am
To Squig's point: yes, there's a conscious decision to follow the coin, but, if the player DOES follow the coin, any efforts by the opponent to predict his decision are futile. If Italy DID follow a coin, any efforts by me to predict his move would have been futile.
Yes, you could not have predicted his/her moves, but you both still would have made decisions, and you could have changed the outcome with a different choice, and your opponent could have changed the outcome with a different choice. You would not have won/lost the game because of the coin toss, but because your opponent chose to follow the coin and you decided to make the decision you did. Maybe choosing to use a coin against a Jmo is your optimal move, since you know that he can outguess you more than you can outguess him, so you would rather make a 50% success rate decision than a 40% success rate decision. That is still a decision you are making. (Note to self: If I ever get into a game versus Jmo and I somehow get into a 50/50 situation with him I am definitely flipping a coin)

There is no inherent luck in the game, which is the claim being made. Luck being inherently in the game would be something like if every time you got to 18 SCs a coin was flipped and if you lost the toss, then you had to give one of your SCs and units to another player. In that case, there would be no alternate decision you could make to prevent a loss of a SC. In diplomacy there is always an alternate decision you or an opponent can make to change the outcome.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#57 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:22 am

I contend that no inherent luck is not the same as luck playing no part.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#58 Post by swordsman3003 » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:23 am

Your Humble Narrator wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:26 am
Swordsman, what are you trying to say?
I'm playing at laconic drama. :lol:

Your Humble Narrator, please let me thank and compliment you for answering my call for a direct criticism of my essays.

It seems to me that you are taking up the cause of the "Nash equilibrium" camp, no? You didn't use that phrase, but that sounds like what you are driving at. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

First, can we agree that 99.999% of all Diplomacy decisions are not 50/50 guesses? Consider:

* There are several, sometimes dozens, of reasonable moves each player can make on a given turn. Not only that, but players often make seemingly un-reasonable moves for diplomatic/strategic reasons. Players also disagree about what constitutes a reasonable move, meaning a player truly considering all options (e.g., hold with everything just to throw everyone off, which I have seen and seen work) may have a wide range of possible movesets indeed.

* Even when the guess is "A or B," the outcome of each guess is almost never weighted 50/50. That is to say, if you were to totally dictate the outcome, you WOULD have a preference for one or the other. And if you don't, the other player does. So it's usually more like 20-80, 35-65, or maybe 55-45, but never perfectly 50-50.

* Putting the two together, most situations aren't "A or B" but more like choosing between a dozen options -- options that you or the other player might even forget to consider -- and then assigning weights to those options subjectively (if at all!).

* The very best players rarely agree on what "optimal" moves are. Even if you were 100% certain of what the opening moves would be in a gunboat game, would you open London to English Channel or to North Sea? (Who cares; the point is that the players would disagree about what the best move is even if they didn't actually have to guess at all.)

* Putting together the complexity of the movesets with the impracticality (if not impossibility) of assigning appropriate weights to each moveset EVEN IF they could be figured out, there's no way a human being can rationally assign a weight to how to make all of those guesses. A human being is using some other kind of decision-making process, probably the same one they use for nearly all their other decisions: intuition.

* Even if a player were to assign arbitrary weights to each moveset and choose their moves using a random-number-generator, that would not be a "rational" method of decision-making; the weights were assigned arbitrarily and not according to any mathematical deduction.

I'm hoping that you will understand and believe what I'm saying, and from these premises agree with the statement that 99.999% of Diplomacy decisions cannot be deemed "luck." And if so, then our disagreement is about the 0.001% of situations where there is truly a 50/50 guess (e.g., support Munich or Berlin) or some equivalent that can actually be figured out by a player in the middle of a match (like a 33/33/33 guess).

Do we mostly agree and you think my conclusion is just going too far, or is there no overlap in how we're thinking about this?
Is your 50/50 example a "case in point" that you're using to prove a broader conclusion, or is the 50/50 example actually the thing we really disagree on?

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#59 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:57 am

We mostly agree that Diplomacy is more skill than luck, and I think claims of a particular decision turning on luck are typically refutable through the analysis you have laid out. We disagree on the rarity of luck (which you initially presented as completely impossible, and I don't know if I've yet or will ever convert you to accepting even that .001% you're speculating about now). I also disagree about the motives you assign to plenty of players who feel that luck plays a part. You paint a broad brush and stereotype us as sore losers eager to distance ourselves from accountability for our failures. I hope by bringing in an example of a game that I won due to what I consider luck that I have made you less likely now to lean on that characterization of naysayers in an effort to bolster your argument.

>* Even when the guess is "A or B," the outcome of each guess is almost never weighted 50/50. That is to say, if you were to totally dictate the outcome, you WOULD have a preference for one or the other. And if you don't, the other player does. So it's usually more like 20-80, 35-65, or maybe 55-45, but never perfectly 50-50.

I don't think this is always--or 99.999% of the time--the case. In my Gulf of Lyon/Tunis in Autumn 2011 example, I am completely impartial as to whether Italy moves to Gulf of Lyon or to Tunis. I just want to support-hold the territory to which he is moving. Similarly, the ultimate outcome for Italy (taking back Tunis) would be identical whether he successfully took Tunis or Gulf of Lyon, his only hope is that I do not support-hold the territory to which he moves. If either of us could dictate the outcome, we would have no particular reason to favor one path to the same end over the other. Even if Italy would favor getting into Tunis one turn earlier, he ought to know that I do not prefer he moves one way or the other other at all so long as I correctly guess the territory to which he moves, and he ought to govern himself accordingly.

> Putting the two together, most situations aren't "A or B" but more like choosing between a dozen options -- options that you or the other player might even forget to consider -- and then assigning weights to those options subjectively (if at all!).

My GoL/Tunis example is a perfect binary. I might have taken steps to avoid arriving at the situation in Autumn 1911 (JMo thinks I should've turned away from England--I'm not so sure, but that's neither here nor there), but once I'm there, there was no option I neglected to consider, no subjective weighing to be done.

> * Putting together the complexity of the movesets with the impracticality (if not impossibility) of assigning appropriate weights to each moveset EVEN IF they could be figured out, there's no way a human being can rationally assign a weight to how to make all of those guesses. A human being is using some other kind of decision-making process, probably the same one they use for nearly all their other decisions: intuition.

I think I accurately assigned appropriate weights to the two options in my example, but I think you're right that intuition is what made the decision. I support held GoL two times in a row at least in part because I intuited that Italy wouldn't think I had the balls to leave Tunis undefended two turns in a row. But I also figured that Italy might expect me to intuit that about him. I posit that any appearance of my intuition being more reliable than a coin flip is illusory in cases where my opponent is equally aware of the potentially infinite series of intuitions of intuitions of intuitions. I readily concede that many players, maybe most players, aren't thinking of it as deeply as all that, and that maybe there's some reliable intuiting to be done to identify the level of intuition and counter-intuition my opponent is practicing. But if Italy and I are both aware of the infinite series, and we both accurately surmise that the other is aware of the infinite series, then we have as good of a chance as a coin of predicting the other's move. Some kind of skill got us to the point that only a coin could resolve the tie, but a coin resolved the tie all the same.

Thought I'd something more to say, but it's getting late so I'll have to call it quits for now.
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Restitution
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#60 Post by Restitution » Tue Jul 23, 2019 5:04 am

swordsman3003 wrote:
Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:00 am
Some statements are accurate, and some are not. Most people think Pterodactyls are dinosaurs, and they’re wrong. They’re not stupid; they’re mistaken.
Pterodactyls are dinosaurs.

Nobody lives in a scientific conference and most people have never been to one. So Pterodactyls are dinosaurs and a tomato is a vegetable and RPS is random.

You're not arguing with a belief, you're policing language as if the entire world is an essay on formal logic. It's not. When people say "x is random" it's up to you to use your brain to figure out what they meant to say, and not try to pick apart their use of language as if that constitutes a refutation of an argument.

When people say "no, you are misrepresenting me, I meant X", you can't just be a snide nerd and say "But ackshually, the words you use have a formal mathematic meaning, and if I purposefully misinterpret you to be using the formal, mathematical defitiions of your words, you're wrong!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
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