Well, it’s not entirely unrelated, since jkaufman says:
Go is the most interesting of the three, and has stood up to centuries of analysis and play, but Dots and Boxes is surprisingly complex (pdf) and there used to be professional Checkers players.
The interest here is not provided by the complexity of the rules themselves, but by the complexity of solving the games (or, rather, playing them well, but this is probably related). One can easily imagine games with very complex rules that nonetheless admit simple strategies and are thus boring.
We seem to agree: if I tell you the length of two pieces of code but nothing else, you won’t be able to tell me which of them is more likely to terminate. It could be the one, or it could be the other. The relationship may not be strictly orthogonal (e.g.: longer code could contain more unintended infinite loops), but enough to call it mostly unrelated.
Same with complexity of rules versus “solving the games”. Go compensates for the simplicity of its rules by blowing up the search space (it’s a big board), which doesn’t take any noteworthy additional complexity. The rules of a Go variant played on a 5 x 5 board would have about the same complexity as if played on a 3^^^3 x 3^^^3 board.
Some of the easiest-to-play children’s board games have some of the hardest rules, compared to Go.
Yes, but we can generalize the games (which is what Hearn and Demain do), and see how the solving complexity changes with the size of the board. This is the only reasonable way to talk about the computational complexity of games.
You mean as another, mostly unrelated task.
Well, it’s not entirely unrelated, since jkaufman says:
The interest here is not provided by the complexity of the rules themselves, but by the complexity of solving the games (or, rather, playing them well, but this is probably related). One can easily imagine games with very complex rules that nonetheless admit simple strategies and are thus boring.
We seem to agree: if I tell you the length of two pieces of code but nothing else, you won’t be able to tell me which of them is more likely to terminate. It could be the one, or it could be the other. The relationship may not be strictly orthogonal (e.g.: longer code could contain more unintended infinite loops), but enough to call it mostly unrelated.
Same with complexity of rules versus “solving the games”. Go compensates for the simplicity of its rules by blowing up the search space (it’s a big board), which doesn’t take any noteworthy additional complexity. The rules of a Go variant played on a 5 x 5 board would have about the same complexity as if played on a 3^^^3 x 3^^^3 board.
Some of the easiest-to-play children’s board games have some of the hardest rules, compared to Go.
Yes, but we can generalize the games (which is what Hearn and Demain do), and see how the solving complexity changes with the size of the board. This is the only reasonable way to talk about the computational complexity of games.