Mind sportA mind sport, is a game of skill based on intellectual ability. The first major use of the term was as a result of the Mind Sports Olympiad in 1997. The phrase had been used prior to this event such as backgammon being described as a mind sport by Tony Buzan in 1996; Tony Buzan was also a co-founder of the Mind Sports Olympiad. Bodies such as the World Memory Sports Council use the term retrospectively. It is a term that became fixed from games trying to obtain equal status to sports.
Zero-sum gameZero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is equivalent to player two's loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero. If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.
Chinese cultureChinese culture () is one of the world's oldest cultures, originating thousands of years ago. The culture prevails across a large geographical region in East Asia with Sinosphere in whole and is extremely diverse, with customs and traditions varying greatly between counties, provinces, cities, towns. The terms 'China' and the geographical landmass of 'China' have shifted across the centuries, before the name 'China' became commonplace in modernity. Chinese civilization is historically considered a dominant culture of East Asia.
Shogi, also known as Japanese chess, is a strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, and janggi. Shōgi means general's (shō 将) board game (gi 棋). Shogi was the earliest historical chess-related game to allow captured pieces to be returned to the board by the capturing player. This drop rule is speculated to have been invented in the 15th century and possibly connected to the practice of 15th-century mercenaries switching loyalties when captured instead of being killed.
Sequential gameIn game theory, a sequential game is a game where one player chooses their action before the others choose theirs. The other players must have information on the first player's choice so that the difference in time has no strategic effect. Sequential games are governed by the time axis and represented in the form of decision trees. Sequential games with perfect information can be analysed mathematically using combinatorial game theory. Decision trees are the extensive form of dynamic games that provide information on the possible ways that a given game can be played.
BackgammonBackgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back nearly 5,000 years to the regions of Mesopotamia and Persia. The earliest record of backgammon itself dates to 17th-century England, being descended from the 16th-century game of Irish. Backgammon is a two-player game of contrary movement in which each player has fifteen pieces known traditionally as men (short for 'tablemen'), but increasingly known as 'checkers' in the US in recent decades, analogous to the other board game of Checkers.
Go and mathematicsThe game of Go is one of the most popular games in the world. As a result of its elegant and simple rules, the game has long been an inspiration for mathematical research. Shen Kuo, an 11th century Chinese scholar, estimated in his Dream Pool Essays that the number of possible board positions is around 10172. In more recent years, research of the game by John H. Conway led to the development of the surreal numbers and contributed to development of combinatorial game theory (with Go Infinitesimals being a specific example of its use in Go).
Four artsThe four arts (四藝, siyi), or the four arts of the Chinese scholar, were the four main academic and artistic talents required of the aristocratic ancient Chinese scholar-gentleman. They were the mastery of the qin (the guqin, a stringed instrument, 琴), qi (the strategy game of Go, 棋), shu (Chinese calligraphy, 書) and hua (Chinese painting, 畫), and are also referred to by listing all four: .
Perfect informationIn economics, perfect information (sometimes referred to as "no hidden information") is a feature of perfect competition. With perfect information in a market, all consumers and producers have complete and instantaneous knowledge of all market prices, their own utility, and own cost functions. In game theory, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred, including the "initialization event" of the game (e.
AlphaGoAlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by the London-based DeepMind Technologies, an acquired subsidiary of Google (now Alphabet Inc.). Subsequent versions of AlphaGo became increasingly powerful, including a version that competed under the name Master. After retiring from competitive play, AlphaGo Master was succeeded by an even more powerful version known as AlphaGo Zero, which was completely self-taught without learning from human games.
