Hi ,
There is no hidden information in chess. At each point in the game, all important information is known, and it is up to the players to make the best decisions given the layout of the board.
To win at chess, the best strategy is to develop the most comprehensive set of decision rules and follow those at each decision point. It's for this reason that the highest-ranked chess player in any game will almost always win.
Chess is a game of logic.
Poker, on the other hand, is all about hidden information. Although there are best practices for how to play any hand, they can't ever guarantee a win.
Each poker game commences with the shuffling of the deck of cards, which means that each hand is subject to uncertainty – which could result in an amateur beating an expert.
Poker is a game of probability.
Here's the thing...
Sometimes real life is like chess, but more often than not, it's like poker. The trick is to
understand what you're playing.
If you're building a phone app or the latest release of Windows, everything can be coded as logical rules - which means you're playing chess.
But if you need to build a tool that go beyond logical rules to deal with life’s inevitable uncertainties, then you're going to be playing poker.
Software development is all about helping people to make better decisions based on logic. Data science is about making better decisions given uncertainty.
Software developers are playing chess. Data scientists are playing poker.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
p.s. The poker and chess analogy in this post comes from Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.
