I don't follow everything, of course, since I'm pretty bad at math, but I think Lipton and the others do a great job motivating their examples and explaining them. (It's like the difference between reading a bunch of complexity papers and Aaronson's popularization _Quantum Computing Since Democritus_.) I also started off in CS and philosophy, so GLL is inherently more comprehensible to me than Egan's alt physics.
Given the many strange or silly things people do competitively professionally, the lack of meaningful professional play for karuta shows, I think, that the line I'm drawing is hardly idiosyncratic to me.
As for chess: well, maybe not, but it's not like checkers was solved through brute force either. It took a lot of algorithmic refinement and optimization to make it weakly solved. That could happen for chess someday. The endgame databases have gotten very comprehensive already. It could also be solved in a looser sense that the chess AIs have gotten so close to perfection that it may become difficult to do any rankings because all matches will be nearly even and getting reliable differences will take too long, at which point one can get a very likely answer about which side wins with perfect play. There's a lot of interesting discussion of chess on the blog "Godel's Last Letter", some of which touches on this ceiling. Striving for something is admirable, but why not strive for something in a way which has real depth? (Or better yet, is useful. I'd love to see a shonen anime on, say, clinical drug approvals :)
"Granted the level of training required may be different in the two cases, but it's the same principle."
No, the quantity is the whole point. It's the depth which matters. Tic-Tac-Toe and the lottery are shallow because there is little to learn and top performance demands little. Tennis involves a whole range of physical skills and conditioning, and comes with meaningful levels of strategy, even if it's not as deep as, say, fencing or Go. Karuta involves no strategy because the optimal move is always obvious to all players and it comes down to nothing but reflexes.
"Tic-Tac-Toe is a trivial sport not because it only involves reflexes, but because it allows the first player to always win."
That's unimportant. A lottery allow the second player to win, too, but that doesn't make it a good game. Nor does a guaranteed win make a bad game either: perfect-information strategy games often do not draw in perfect play and so have a guaranteed win for one player, yet chess would not stop being an excellent strategy if tomorrow a proof came out that (as long speculated) White wins, and checkers is not the best strategy game ever just because it's a draw.
I think I explained fairly clearly why karuta fails totally as both a sport and a game: it has no depth beyond a bundle of memorized reflexes. You might as well ask why Tic-Tac-Toe or playing the lottery would make a poor competitive sport. The show can try to present it as interesting, but there's only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.
If you stick to the novels, it's not a problem at all. Lends it more depth, IMO. It's in the short stories where he sometimes gets preachy and there's a touch of 'author tract'. I would definitely recommend _Book of the New Sun_ to anyone who enjoys SF & fantasy: even if the mysteries and esoteric story go totally over your head, the actual plot and writing are still well worth the price of admission. (My problem with the later Wolfe books is that the surface plot and writing increasingly feel like they're not worthwhile, while the esoteric story remains inaccessible to everyone.)
I have, but it's really more of the same: reading a textbook to understand a novel is a lot of work! When I have the wherewithal to be reading heavily mathematical textbooks, I need to spend that on stuff more relevant to me like statistics & behavioral genetics textbooks.
"Egan does maintain that he need not tone down the scientific content of his books in order to interest people"
It is pretty idealistic, but like Gene Wolfe, he's earned his way to the point where he doesn't need to appeal to more than a few people. (It's a valid comparison because even as a formerly avid Wolfe fan who reads all the discussion on urth.net, it's clear that Wolfe's last 5 SF/F novels are incomprehensible to literally everyone - no one has proposed correct or satisfying interpretations of _An Evil Guest_, _The Land Across_ etc. If he wasn't Gene Wolfe, he'd never be able to publish these books.)
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As for chess: well, maybe not, but it's not like checkers was solved through brute force either. It took a lot of algorithmic refinement and optimization to make it weakly solved. That could happen for chess someday. The endgame databases have gotten very comprehensive already. It could also be solved in a looser sense that the chess AIs have gotten so close to perfection that it may become difficult to do any rankings because all matches will be nearly even and getting reliable differences will take too long, at which point one can get a very likely answer about which side wins with perfect play. There's a lot of interesting discussion of chess on the blog "Godel's Last Letter", some of which touches on this ceiling. Striving for something is admirable, but why not strive for something in a way which has real depth? (Or better yet, is useful. I'd love to see a shonen anime on, say, clinical drug approvals :)
No, the quantity is the whole point. It's the depth which matters. Tic-Tac-Toe and the lottery are shallow because there is little to learn and top performance demands little. Tennis involves a whole range of physical skills and conditioning, and comes with meaningful levels of strategy, even if it's not as deep as, say, fencing or Go. Karuta involves no strategy because the optimal move is always obvious to all players and it comes down to nothing but reflexes.
"Tic-Tac-Toe is a trivial sport not because it only involves reflexes, but because it allows the first player to always win."
That's unimportant. A lottery allow the second player to win, too, but that doesn't make it a good game. Nor does a guaranteed win make a bad game either: perfect-information strategy games often do not draw in perfect play and so have a guaranteed win for one player, yet chess would not stop being an excellent strategy if tomorrow a proof came out that (as long speculated) White wins, and checkers is not the best strategy game ever just because it's a draw.
"Egan does maintain that he need not tone down the scientific content of his books in order to interest people"
It is pretty idealistic, but like Gene Wolfe, he's earned his way to the point where he doesn't need to appeal to more than a few people. (It's a valid comparison because even as a formerly avid Wolfe fan who reads all the discussion on urth.net, it's clear that Wolfe's last 5 SF/F novels are incomprehensible to literally everyone - no one has proposed correct or satisfying interpretations of _An Evil Guest_, _The Land Across_ etc. If he wasn't Gene Wolfe, he'd never be able to publish these books.)