He’s been playing this new game called Generals. There’s basically one dominant strategy against all humans, so when he’s playing against a human, he sticks with the strategy, and focuses on execution—implementing the strategy faster and more reliably. This is Rajas—point at the target, and then go after it fast.
But the leaderboard is dominated by AIs and eventually he got to that level. So the important time started being between games; you can’t beat the AI on reaction time. So he thought about how Lee Sedol had beat AlphaGo in one game. Answer: by pushing it into a part of Go-space it hadn’t explored. It turned out that if he tried to play the strategy that’s second or third best against humans, it was totally out of the AI’s experience, so he could wipe the floor with it. This is Sattva—think your way around the problem. Take perspective.
People who are new to online strategy games tend to spend their initial games trying to stay alive instead of trying to accomplish their game goals (destroy the other player). This is Tamas. Just keep your head above water. Enough food in your body. Hide from threats. Live to fight another day. Not very adaptive in online games where death isn’t very costly, but adaptive when facing real life threats.
A relevant anecdote from a friend:
He’s been playing this new game called Generals. There’s basically one dominant strategy against all humans, so when he’s playing against a human, he sticks with the strategy, and focuses on execution—implementing the strategy faster and more reliably. This is Rajas—point at the target, and then go after it fast.
But the leaderboard is dominated by AIs and eventually he got to that level. So the important time started being between games; you can’t beat the AI on reaction time. So he thought about how Lee Sedol had beat AlphaGo in one game. Answer: by pushing it into a part of Go-space it hadn’t explored. It turned out that if he tried to play the strategy that’s second or third best against humans, it was totally out of the AI’s experience, so he could wipe the floor with it. This is Sattva—think your way around the problem. Take perspective.
People who are new to online strategy games tend to spend their initial games trying to stay alive instead of trying to accomplish their game goals (destroy the other player). This is Tamas. Just keep your head above water. Enough food in your body. Hide from threats. Live to fight another day. Not very adaptive in online games where death isn’t very costly, but adaptive when facing real life threats.