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Deep strategical analysis certainly fits within the realm of "Board and Card Games" but these questions and their resulting discussions tend to drift into a different style of Q/A. Is there an unofficial line that defines how far into this realm we should be going?

Topics I consider relevant to this question:

Statistics/Math/Chance

  • Data gathering/mining (Where/how do I get X?)
  • Turn/game format discussion (What/how should I store X?, What turn formats are available for X?)
  • Probability (What are the odds of X occurring?)
  • Player strength terminology/format (ELO, TrueSkill)

Simulations

  • Specific strategies (How do I simulate opening X?)
  • Specific games (How do I simulate games for X?)
  • AI development (How do I create an AI that plays X?)
  • AI competition (Where can my AI compete at X?)
  • Help with specific AI (How do I beat X?, How do I get X to work?)
  • General AI discussion (What type of AI would be best for X?)

And so on. The main question here: Are people interested in analyzing game-theory, AI and the mathematics of board games encouraged to post those questions here? Or in a more relevant area of stackexchange? Or... ?

4 Answers 4

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The general rule of thumb is this

What happens when you ask these questions on the site?

In other words, it's easier to proceed based on data from "we tried this, and ..." compared to asking what ifs.

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    I am more asking from a "What is our intended audience/voice?" standpoint. Are we looking for an informal collection of questions about games? Are we looking for a place to ask very specific questions that only the deep geeks would care about? If your answer still applies, cool. I am just double-checking. :)
    – MrHen
    Commented Mar 11, 2011 at 13:54
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    @MrHen - I think what Jeff is saying is - "Ask Questions, see what happens, then discuss if necessary" The community definitely has some leeway to define the audience/voice. We're still in Beta and need to stretch and find our boundaries. Trying to reach a consensus in meta is difficult and not necessarily representative of what the actual users will do when presented with a question that would seem to be on a topic previously OK'd in meta.
    – Pat Ludwig Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 6:34
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All the topics you mention in your question sound potentially interesting to me. I think questions on all of those should be allowed/encouraged, but if particular questions are very [maths/programming/stats] oriented then it would be worth suggesting the questioner also posts on the relevant stack exchange site.

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FWIW, I am exceptionally happy to see quantitative questions and responses here. Of course, having the ability to cross post a thread about boardgames and statistics to both a boardgames and a statistics stackexchange would be very interesting (to me).

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I do play board and card games for the social aspect but I cannot turn off that part of my mind that loves AI. My primary question during and after a game is: "How must an AI be designed to solve the problems involved". I also love to find simple algorithms that I can use to find better solutions during the game.

So yes, I would love to see more discussion about the mathematical aspects, algorithms and AI.

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