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Welcome to MindSports


Acknowledgement
  • We humbly acknowledge that old games are always better because inventing games is one of two human activities excluded from progress. The other one is the brain activity of people who subscribe to that point of view.
  • You can play here for free. The Arena is dedicated to high strategy only, and features a rating system. Our own "collateral damage" can be found in The Pit.
  • Despite the above qualification the games in the Pit are good games and we wouldn't characterise the games of other inventors as collateral damage, but we're forced to make decisions where to put them by sheer numbers.
  • We're more committed to strategy games than to tactical ones. Here's the difference:
    Strategy games allow plans varied enough to give rise to different styles of play, tactics varied enough to induce their own terminology, and a structure that allows advantageous sub-goals to be achieved as calculable signposts along the way.
    Tactical games have strategies that are either fairly obvious (however deep), like Pente, or fairly opaque, like Othello.

Spirit

  • Games have a spirit - the ones of Chess and Draughts have been implemented in one form or another by almost every culture in the world.
  • We're not entirely serious all the time, yet we may bring up that:

    • Having thoughts is not the same as thinking.
    • Opinions are difficult because they're too damn easy.
    • It's hard to recognise tunnel vision if you're inside one.
    • José Raúl Capablanca and Bobby Fischer were great players, not great inventors.
    • Forcing an idea to work will not earn you the gratitude of the result.
    • Draughts players are hooked on opposition - they'll oppose anything.
    • It's easy to make a small fortune with abstract games, just start with a big one.
    • Inventors of abstract games are all the same, but some more so than others.
    • Life is fundamentally futile and great games are a tribute to precisely that.

On programmability

  • AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch
    This is about Go, but AI has taken over all major games now and will be stronger than humans right from the start in any new game in the future. So humans will have superhuman tutors.
  • AlphaZero: Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play
    Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.

GAI game engines

Since Zillions of Games appeared in 1998 generic game engines have been booming. Here we will list them when we find them.

Upcoming / running events

Puzzles

  • In this section you will find a number of combinatorial puzzles in two classes, tilings and 3D.
    All puzzles © MindSports.

Interesting stuff

Side dishes

  • Math: We've discovered a structure of the series of successively better approximations of the roots of natural numbers, and the inherent division of non-squares in two distinct classes: carréphylic and carréphobic numbers.

I Ching Connexion

  • The I Ching Connexion, a divination program based on the one-to-one correlation between the 64 hexagons of the China Labyrinth and the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, is now available online.

Finally

  • We're not democratic, but we welcome suggestions and we do actually answer questions (sometimes).
  • A note on gender: we use pronouns like 'he' or 'him' to exclude awkward constructions rather than women.

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