The chess scene from one of the early episodes always bothered me. Spock is playing Kirk and Kirk checkmates him, and then Spock complains, “The logical move was the Rook!”. What kind of logic...
The chess scene from one of the early episodes always bothered me. Spock is playing Kirk and Kirk checkmates him, and then Spock complains, “The logical move was the Rook!”. What kind of logic system has the winning move not be the logical move?
Playing chess, I would suppose, is not entirely about logic. It also involves rote memory of situations, and poker-like psychology, and guts, and maybe luck, and probably much more. A logical move...
Playing chess, I would suppose, is not entirely about logic. It also involves rote memory of situations, and poker-like psychology, and guts, and maybe luck, and probably much more. A logical move is a weak one, in that it can logicaly be anticipated by the opponent.
I don't remember this precise scene, but I do feel the gist of it as defining the character of Spock, whose impeccable logic can be a handicap when not complemented by Kirk's bravado. Spock's mission is also to serve as an excuse for our own foolishness and a reminder that life itself isn't a logic system, or at least not one that we mere humans could grasp.
It sounds like you're right about the intent of the scene, but it's pretty goofy to anyone that's played chess. Chess--like tic-tac-toe, Nim, or Go-- is a combinatorial game. All combinatorial...
Exemplary
It sounds like you're right about the intent of the scene, but it's pretty goofy to anyone that's played chess.
Chess--like tic-tac-toe, Nim, or Go-- is a combinatorial game. All combinatorial games are either "boring" or "unfair", which means that when both players play perfectly "boring" games always are ties and "unfair" games will always result in the same player winning.
For tic-tac-toe or Nim it's very easy to brute force the entire game tree and work your way up from the bottom, choosing moves for Minnie/Max that would lead to a preferred game state.
Games like chess or Go are significantly more complicated. The "branching factor" for chess is ~35 and for Go it is ~250, which means each move deeper you're considering, you have to consider 35/250 times more resulting states. In a game that might take hundreds of moves that quickly becomes impossible to brute force.
The ending of a game of chess is something that can be brute-forced, though, and beginners may be taught different patterns of end-game play (e.g., "can you checkmate with X pieces left" or "how do you move to force checkmate with a Queen and King").
When you're left with only a handful of pieces and definite ending game states in sight, there aren't that many resulting game states to consider. When there is a checkmate-in-1 that is even simpler. In the tic-tac-toe game state linked it's the equivalent of asking "can you find where it says -1 in the bottom row".
If Star Trek wanted to make a consistent scene they could have shown a situation in the mid game where the opponent made an unconventional/illogical move that later ended up winning them the game. Traditionally human players excelled at heuristic/big-scale strategic plays like that. That advantage may be a thing of the past with things like AlphaGo, but previously it was shown in "centaur chess", where a team of a human and AI compensate for the weaknesses of the other.
Instead the scene had Spock as the AI analogue making a short-sighted blunder, which is what you would expect an AI to excel at avoiding and a human to occasionally slip up with.
I thought this sounded a bit like the popular Spock bashing that used to go on in LessWrong. Turns out this podcast author that the article is about is indeed a LessWrong user. Kind of a fun...
I thought this sounded a bit like the popular Spock bashing that used to go on in LessWrong.
Turns out this podcast author that the article is about is indeed a LessWrong user.
Kind of a fun throwback.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
...
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
His logic isn't bad, it's just that humans are insane and defy logic.
Doyle made it pretty clear that he was an eccentric, though. There was that bit about not caring whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa, because it wasn’t useful for solving crime.
Doyle made it pretty clear that he was an eccentric, though. There was that bit about not caring whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa, because it wasn’t useful for solving crime.
The chess scene from one of the early episodes always bothered me. Spock is playing Kirk and Kirk checkmates him, and then Spock complains, “The logical move was the Rook!”. What kind of logic system has the winning move not be the logical move?
Playing chess, I would suppose, is not entirely about logic. It also involves rote memory of situations, and poker-like psychology, and guts, and maybe luck, and probably much more. A logical move is a weak one, in that it can logicaly be anticipated by the opponent.
I don't remember this precise scene, but I do feel the gist of it as defining the character of Spock, whose impeccable logic can be a handicap when not complemented by Kirk's bravado. Spock's mission is also to serve as an excuse for our own foolishness and a reminder that life itself isn't a logic system, or at least not one that we mere humans could grasp.
It sounds like you're right about the intent of the scene, but it's pretty goofy to anyone that's played chess.
Chess--like tic-tac-toe, Nim, or Go-- is a combinatorial game. All combinatorial games are either "boring" or "unfair", which means that when both players play perfectly "boring" games always are ties and "unfair" games will always result in the same player winning.
For tic-tac-toe or Nim it's very easy to brute force the entire game tree and work your way up from the bottom, choosing moves for Minnie/Max that would lead to a preferred game state.
Games like chess or Go are significantly more complicated. The "branching factor" for chess is ~35 and for Go it is ~250, which means each move deeper you're considering, you have to consider 35/250 times more resulting states. In a game that might take hundreds of moves that quickly becomes impossible to brute force.
The ending of a game of chess is something that can be brute-forced, though, and beginners may be taught different patterns of end-game play (e.g., "can you checkmate with X pieces left" or "how do you move to force checkmate with a Queen and King").
When you're left with only a handful of pieces and definite ending game states in sight, there aren't that many resulting game states to consider. When there is a checkmate-in-1 that is even simpler. In the tic-tac-toe game state linked it's the equivalent of asking "can you find where it says -1 in the bottom row".
If Star Trek wanted to make a consistent scene they could have shown a situation in the mid game where the opponent made an unconventional/illogical move that later ended up winning them the game. Traditionally human players excelled at heuristic/big-scale strategic plays like that. That advantage may be a thing of the past with things like AlphaGo, but previously it was shown in "centaur chess", where a team of a human and AI compensate for the weaknesses of the other.
Instead the scene had Spock as the AI analogue making a short-sighted blunder, which is what you would expect an AI to excel at avoiding and a human to occasionally slip up with.
I thought this sounded a bit like the popular Spock bashing that used to go on in LessWrong.
Turns out this podcast author that the article is about is indeed a LessWrong user.
Kind of a fun throwback.
I always thought Spock was really bad at logic, so this kinda confirms an old suspicion.
One of my all-time favourite headcannons and posts on the internet:
...
His logic isn't bad, it's just that humans are insane and defy logic.
If you haven't read Redshirts then I think you might like it.
.... so basically humans in Star Trek are like Orks in 40k but with slightly better grammer. Got it.
This is absolutely brilliant and I love this. Makes me want to rewatch TNG just so I can see it with this context in mind.
Trust me, it's better knowing this.
Wasn't Sherlock Holmes also supposed to be a caricature of an overly rational person?
I don't think so, Sherlock really is an excellent reasoner. His observation abilities are kind of supernatural, though.
Doyle made it pretty clear that he was an eccentric, though. There was that bit about not caring whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa, because it wasn’t useful for solving crime.
Richard Feynman was famously horrible at spelling, not liking English because "it didn't have to do with anything real, anything from nature".