Why you shouldn't read The Art of War

[Bean]

I've said it before, and I'll no doubt say it again: if you want to be good at 40k--or any war game, for that matter--all you need to do is read the rule book. Literally. Beyond a basic grounding in logic and math, everything that you need to be good at a war game is contained within its rules. Classic military authors like Clausewitz and Sun Tzu have little to offer beyond marginal metaphors that range in value from superfluous to downright harmful to good in-game tactical decision making. If this ever needed to be demonstrated, it was quite clearly by Doug Lenat's Eurisko software that won the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament two years in a row, before being banned from participation. It is described in this excerpt from
Malcom Gladwell's New Yorker article, "How David Beats Goliath."

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”
Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox parc, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.
The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.
Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.
“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

You can read the entire article at,

[url]http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all[/url]

and you should.

[Nabterayl]

I don't think that's actually why people read The Art of War, or talk about applying tactics to 40K - or other wargames, for that matter. They do those things because their goal is not to become good at 40K. I quite agree that if your goal is to become good at 40K, all you need is the rulebook. But that's not necessarily people's sole, or even primary, goal when they play. Reading in military history or military theory is perfectly reasonable if you want to be a better tactician more than you want to be a better 40K player.

[Bean]

I don't think that's actually why people read The Art of War, or talk about applying tactics to 40K - or other wargames, for that matter. They do those things because their goal is not to become good at 40K. I quite agree that if your goal is to become good at 40K, all you need is the rulebook. But that's not necessarily people's sole, or even primary, goal when they play. Reading in military history or military theory is perfectly reasonable if you want to be a better tactician more than you want to be a better 40K player.

A fair point. I would have made the title longer, but it wouldn't fit--I tried to make it clear in the body that I was discussing the value of this type of text with regards to being good at war-games, but it's certainly worth noting that both are reasonably good reads otherwise.

It's just when people become convinced that being a good tactician--in that sense--translates directly into being good at 40k that they run into problems, and I've certainly seen people espouse that position.

Again, the Eurisko case should illustrate that such a problem does exist.

Another amusing quote from Lenat further down in the article:

“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

[Captain Talon]

This story reminds me of something similar. I've forgotten most of the facts, but the main thurst is this:

Guy moves to America from India. His daughters go to school and want to play basketball. There is no coach, so he volunteers. He reads the rules for basketball and learns the game.

In basketball, there is an acceptance that after a team scores, the scoring team retreats back and lets the other team basically move up to the other side of the court for free. But this coach came up with a great idea...legally, you could play defense the whole time. His girls were not top athletes, but they played the game differently, and with this type of defense, they began winning. I believe a college team did the same thing and was very successful...both teams would create turnovers and then score.

They made it to the championships, but basketball purists started to work against them. Refs called fake penalties, and they gave them a bad schedule I think.

The point is, the winners at war don't follow an accepted "code" of how to fight a war. They win by doing it differently. David didn't beat Goliath by going toe to toe...he won by fighting a different way.

Just an aside I think using Napoleon's tactics do work in 40K. Pin the enemy or tarpit them or bait them away, beat up part of his army with the majority of yours, then turn on the other part etc.

[UltramarineFan]

All this really says is that a computer can beat a human at a game (wow..) and that people who don't play in the spirit of the game are *****, again, wow..

[slxiii]

The point is, the winners at war don't follow an accepted "code" of how to fight a war. They win by doing it differently. David didn't beat Goliath by going toe to toe...he won by fighting a different way.

If I recall, David had a little bit of "help" as well.

The problem is, its the Art of WAR. WARgames actually have nothing to do with war, they would more accurately be called battle-games. A war involves economic and human factors that do not fit into the games, currently.

Some principles, however, do apply. Striking only when you have the upper hand, decieving the enemy, refusing to fight fair, etc. All of these, and many more, will help you win a wargame.

[Grailkeeper]

It wouldn't work in real life, no one would get on the ships. However this does have very close ties with the arguements between people with fluff based armies, and those with min maxed cost effective tourniment armies.

[Fellend]

Actually this same thing happened twice in military excercises with the swedish army and the american army. For those of you that doesn't know, David and goliath isn't a fair enough description. It's more along the lines of The deathstar vs that one annoying lite x-wing.

In a naval engagement the swedes basically took every boat they could find and loaded it with soldiers with rpgs. They manage to bypass all the defenses of the american navy and "sink" the carrier.

Our ridiciously small submarines also managed to sneak past the entire american fleet and shoot it's payload on new york. I especially liked the discovery programs quote about it "Luckily the Swedes aren't our enemies"

Anyway. My point: If you forsake everything to win in a battle that has will lead to no consequences of course it's easier to win if you throw away morals and honor. But in reality, how fun is playing a spam army? How many times can you do that to your opponents fluffy white bunny-marines before he gets tired of playing you?

[Bean]

This story reminds me of something similar. I've forgotten most of the facts, but the main thurst is this:

Guy moves to America from India. His daughters go to school and want to play basketball. There is no coach, so he volunteers. He reads the rules for basketball and learns the game.

In basketball, there is an acceptance that after a team scores, the scoring team retreats back and lets the other team basically move up to the other side of the court for free. But this coach came up with a great idea...legally, you could play defense the whole time. His girls were not top athletes, but they played the game differently, and with this type of defense, they began winning. I believe a college team did the same thing and was very successful...both teams would create turnovers and then score.

They made it to the championships, but basketball purists started to work against them. Refs called fake penalties, and they gave them a bad schedule I think.

The point is, the winners at war don't follow an accepted "code" of how to fight a war. They win by doing it differently. David didn't beat Goliath by going toe to toe...he won by fighting a different way.

Just an aside I think using Napoleon's tactics do work in 40K. Pin the enemy or tarpit them or bait them away, beat up part of his army with the majority of yours, then turn on the other part etc.

Actually, that's pretty amusing--'cause most of the rest of the article is about an Indian guy who did exactly that. Almost certainly the same guy.

Awesome.

Anyway, yeah--the point of the article is that when you're the underdog, you can't afford to play by convention--your best bet is to try breaking with convention somehow.

But, nestled neatly within that point is this one: applying convention to a problem just because it is convention is not always a good idea--and that's the message I've been trying to get across fora while, now: just because there are conventions about military tactics and strategies doesn't mean that they resemble the best way to win table-top war-games at all. As Lenat points out, those strategies are designed for a system which is much much more complex and much much less well understood than any system of rules you're going to find--even the famously complicated Traveller ship-building rules.

To come up with a strong strategy, analysis of the actual system in question is a better approach than simply accepting the first appropriate looking convention you can find.

Anyway, I thought it was a neat article, and I enjoy the story of Eurisko, in particular, because I often hear people talk about wargames as through they were immune to this type of "break." They're not. Just like any other game, careful analysis of their rules will always present an optimal strategy.

[Lord Azaghul]

The problem is, its the Art of WAR. WARgames actually have nothing to do with war...

DING DING! We have a winner.

Most games deal in mathmatcis, and dice odds - these don't corrilate directly into 'the art of war'

But yes. I agree, read the rules (not the fluff )