jeffwOn self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
HucklebeeIt really is an insult for checkers as a game. It is a common misconception that it’s simple. The game has surprising amount of depth, and the saying “x is playing chess while y is playing checkers” should really die.
X is playing chess while Y is playing tictactoe would be a better analogy.
Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.
That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.
Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.
In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.
Maybe the should compare playing chess with playing Go.
The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10^170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 10^80.