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Comment by tmtvl | Hacker News Reader

I could not disagree more, in my opinion the perfect degree of randomness is 0%. Now, of course that is unattainable: if I play a game of Go, for instance, there's the random chance of "did I manage to get a good rest the night before", the chance of "will I know the joseki my opponent chooses", "will I lose my concentration to unforeseeable circumstance",...

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You make a move in Go, it feels good, you mentally play out likely lines of play and they feel good too, but there is a grey cloud obscuring some lines of play. You can't quite see every possible outcome, not even close. Uncertainty lies ahead in that cloud beyond our mental abilities. What do we call that uncertainty? It's quite similar to randomness whatever it is.

Even Go has randomness, no? After all, you need to decide who goes first, usually at random

Between the 5.5 Komi vs 6.5 Komi debate, its not very clear if Go has a 1st-player advantage or a 2nd-player advantage.

Superhuman strength AI-Go has given us more data on this subject (suggesting 6.5 Komi is balanced). Since both players are balanced as far as we can tell (first turn starts off with a 6.5 point disadvantage, and the half-point difference forces a winner. No draws), it doesn't really matter who goes first.

If in the future, a super-super AI performs deeper analysis and determines say... 7.5 Komi is the best, I'm sure that Go players all around would update the game rules as appropriate to the new understanding of what a balanced game is. (After all, 6.5 Komi itself is an experiment, albeit the most successful experiment, for balancing the game).

Komi already ranges from 5.5 to 7.5 in tournaments today, I think. The long-term trend has so far always been upwards; as recently as the 50s 4.5 was standard.

Yeah, Komi debate is still alive. But... with AlphaGo / KataGo available today to perform automated analysis of Komi, I'm thinking that the debate will finally end with 6.5.

Though maybe I'm just being optimistic with regards to the debate. IIRC, engines like LeelaZero / Katago has the following result: 5.5 favors 1st player, and 7.5 favors 2nd player. And 6.5 is just right.

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Komi has trended upwards because it originally was zero, which was obviously wrong.

Note: Chinese rules changes Komi calculations. 6.5 Komi Japanese is IIRC equivalent to 7.5 Komi Chinese.

it's essential for a game to separate the in-game and external factors. otherwise there's no possibility of fairness

Why? A degree of randomness makes games more fun.

I think randomness is mostly used to hide the flaws in an imperfect game. In a sufficiently complex game, the natural cause-effects from play should result in new and interesting game states. The opponents inputs + the game rules should create something inherently exciting and intriguing. A poor set of rules can be made interesting by adding dice rolls. Creating an interesting game without randomness is much harder.

I would very much argue the opposite: having a decent game ruined by luck of the draw is the very opposite of fun. It's bad enough when a winning player loses a game by accidentally making a game-ending mistake, having a winning player lose without even making a mistake simply by having the dice/random number generator/whatever saying "no" is awful.

While I agree, I understand that some people can prioritize the feeling of mastery over all other aspects of gameplay. When there's no randomness, then the game is a pure test of skill. If you want to get into a single game as a hobby, then having low chance and a high skill ceiling is a feature that allows for continuous fulfillment of that need.

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