Автор: Пользователь скрыл имя, 21 Октября 2012 в 22:12, лекция
Раброта содержит лекцию по дисциплине "Психология"
To maintain mental toughness, you want to stay fresh, be in the moment, and stick with what you know. Focus on your match, and you can hold on to the motivation required to win.
—Seth “s-kill” Killian
by Sirlin
Those who use fire as an aid to the attack show intelligence; those who use water as an aid to the attack gain an accession of strength. By means of water, an enemy may be intercepted, but not robbed of all his belongings.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Sun Tzu spoke of using fire against the enemy, but he was driving at a fundamental tactic: attacking in parallel. One can set fire to an enemy building to drive him out into an ambush. One can set fire to one side of an enemy camp while taking up positions on the other side, again driving the enemy into an ambush. In all cases, the fire is basically used as an extra force of attackers. The fire cannot be reasoned with or bargained with or ignored. The fire has no mercy. While it serves the same function as a band of men would (to attack the enemy and drive him to action), the fire requires no manpower once it is started. It also finds its way inside a barracks without risking the lives of a squad.
Because the fire acts independently, it allows a given group of men to apply more attacking force than would otherwise be possible. Because fire can act as a barrier, it can allow a single group of men to attack from two sides at once without halving their numbers. The lesson is that attacking two times at once is deadly effective.
This is a basic concept in numerous games. In fighting games, projectiles such as “fireballs” are basically independent attacking agents. Once a character spawns a projectile attack, that character is free to move and perform other attacks while the fireball does its thing, allowing basically two attacks at once. The fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 2 takes this to the extreme, allowing a player to attack not only with projectiles and his main character but also by calling another “assist” character into the battle at virtually any time who performs another attack. This ability to attack in parallel (with the main character and with assist characters at the same time) allows for some incredibly nasty pressure patterns. If the opponent is unable to attack in parallel (if his assist characters are dead) and you are, then your advantage is overwhelming.
Two basic tactics in chess, the fork and the pin, are conceptually similar to attacking in parallel. In a fork, one piece is able to threaten multiple enemy pieces. For example, consider a knight that could move one way to take an enemy bishop or another way to take an enemy rook. If the enemy cannot capture the knight, he will be unable to protect against these two simultaneous threats. He may move the bishop, only to lose the rook, or he may move the rook, only to lose the bishop.
A pin is when a piece threatens an enemy piece, but if that enemy piece is moved out of the way, it merely puts the piece behind it in danger. For example, consider a rook that threatens an enemy bishop several squares away. It is the enemy’s turn to move, but behind his bishop is his king! If the bishop is moved out of the rook’s threat, it merely puts the king in harm’s way. (That’s an illegal move: you can’t move into check.) We say that the bishop is “pinned to the king” in this situation. The rook seems to merely attack one piece, but in a way it’s a double threat. Turn-based games are often about sneaking in what effectively amounts to two moves (two attacks) in one move.
A much more direct example of Sun Tzu’s attacking by fire would be the more literal case of HE-grenades (“high-explosive”) or “flashbang” grenades in the first-person shooter Counter-Strike. Since it takes a couple seconds for a grenade to explode once thrown, the attackers can be fully free to act at the same moment the defenders must deal with the damaging effects of an HE-grenade or the blinding effects of a flashbang. Five players and one well-timed grenade can often have a greater effect than ten players without grenades. “Attacking by fire,” or attacking doubly by using a grenade, projectile, or well-placed chess piece can create an overwhelming advantage.
by Sirlin
Introducing Zileas
Although I grew up in the realm of fighting games, my community is a mirror image of nearly every gaming community. The real-time strategy game community even has a bizzaro-world version of me called Zileas (some call him Tom Cadwell). In an odd footnote of history, I was a senior at MIT when Zileas was a freshman, but I never actually met him there. We each knew the other through reputation in our respective game genres, and eventually crossed paths in the incestuous game industry.
Zileas wrote a great deal about how to divide and conquer the enemy and to concentrate firepower—and so did Sun Tzu.
Zileas was talking about StarCraft and Sun Tzu was talking actual war, but since real-time strategy games are (arguably) simulations of actual war, it’s not surprising that great minds thought alike here. What’s interesting is that while Sun Tzu wrote mostly about the large, macro scale, Zileas wrote about the very same concepts on the small, micro scale. Ironically, Zileas made his fame in the StarCraft world by developing and writing about his “new school” approach to the game where he focused on dividing and conquering and concentrating firepower on the micro level, rather than the “old school” approach of concentrating on the macro level. In case you missed the irony, it’s that the old school that Zileas argued against was just another interpretation of the very same concepts his own school was based on, all straight from The Art of War.
On the most zoomed out level, Sun Tzu tells us when to attack, based on the sheer size of the armies involved:
It is the rule in war: If our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two, one to meet the enemy in front, and one to fall upon his rear; if he replies to the frontal attack, he may be crushed from behind; if to the rearward attack, he may be crushed in front.
If equally matched, we can offer battle; if slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy; if quite unequal in every way, we can flee from him. Though an obstinate fight may be made by a small force, in the end it must be captured by the larger force.
On the most zoomed out level, Zileas tells us when (in StarCraft) we are losing:
If your kill ratio multiplied by the ratio of your production to their production is less than 1, you are losing. If their economy is gaining speed, and yours is stationary and this number is close to but over 1, you are still probably losing. When I say kill ratio I do not mean units killed/units lost; I mean resources killed/resources lost both in terms of unit production, miscellaneous upkeep costs (scarabs) and building production/loss.
That last Zileas quote is pretty mystifying, but if you read it about twenty times, you might find some deep StarCraft insights!
Mismatched Forces
One of Sun Tzu’s main points is to attack an inferior force with a superior one. Even if both armies are of the same size and power, this can easily be done by looking at smaller pieces of the whole. If the enemy only defends one piece of his empire—and we know this—then the rest of his empire is wide open. We can send but a fraction of our troops to dismantle any number of his undefended spots. The more spots he defends, the weaker each spot becomes. If he defends all ten of his outposts equally and we concentrate the attack of but half our army at one spot, we outnumber him five to one! We have concentrated our firepower, while the enemy’s has been divided and weakened.
All of this rests upon the shoulders of secrecy and reconnaissance. Without these, Sun Tzu’s method of divide and conquer would not be possible.
The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known, for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few.
Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us. Knowing the place and time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight. But if neither time nor place be known, then the left wing will be impotent to succor the right, the right equally impotent to succor the left, the van unable to relieve the rear, or the rear to support the van.
So Sun Tzu tells us to keep our own positions and intentions secret. He tells us to discover the positions and intentions of the enemy. Through this we can concentrate our firepower on the enemy’s weakest points, even at the expense of our own defense; if our weak points are secret from the enemy, he will not know where to attack and he will likely end up dividing his own forces. Our divided enemy thus conquers himself as he cannot hope to defend against our entire concentrated army with just a fraction of his own.
StarCraft: The “Old School”
Sun Tzu’s ways are the ways of the best StarCraft players in what Zileas calls the “old school.” These players strive to build a strong economy to finance overwhelming hordes of units. When they outnumber the enemy ten to one, they surround; five to one, they attack, you get the idea. Individual battles matter little to these players, since it’s more important to build a large mobile force capable of attacking the opponent’s weak spots.
Most of these players come from the days of Warcraft 2, StarCraft’s predecessor. Warcraft’s interface and units didn’t allow players to gain much benefit from micromanaging individual battles. Warcraft’s units were more homogeneous, meaning you didn’t see kill ratios of 50:1 like Templars and Reavers are capable of in StarCraft. In short, macromanagement was the only way to go. Build a large army. Divide the enemy’s army. Concentrate the firepower of your army.
StarCraft: The “New School”
And then there was Zileas. He came along and pointed out the amazing effects micromanagement of individual battles can have in StarCraft, and he preached the revolutionary ideas of divide and conquer and concentration of firepower—on the small scale, that is.
Lesson 1: Shift queue to concentrate firepower. When enemy forces engage, say ten marines versus ten marines, they will fire at each other in a mostly random distribution, so units will only start dying toward the end of the battle. The better player will select all his marines and concentrate their firepower on a single enemy marine, then (hold the shift key to) queue the next command to concentrate firepower on the second enemy marine, and so forth. All ten of the first player’s marines will kill one of the enemy’s units right away, reducing his firepower. The ten marines will then automatically (through shift queuing) concentrate their fire on the next enemy unit, then the next one, and so on. The enemy is dividing his own fire but the better player concentrates it. If you use this technique but your opponent doesn’t, you’ll probably end the fight with four marines left when he is down to none.
Lesson 2: Use formation to concentrate firepower. When two enemy forces engage, say ten marines versus ten marines, formation can be everything. If one player marches his single file line of marines into a horizontal line of enemy marines, the horizontal line formation will be able to concentrate its fire on the first marine in the single file line, then the second, and so on. The last marines in the single file line won’t even be close enough to fire until all their friends are dead. Even better than a horizontal line is “shallow encirclement,” a crescent-shaped formation that maximizes the firepower one can apply to a point.
Lesson 3: Use choke points (narrow passes) to divide the enemy’s units. When a large enemy force must pass through a narrow choke point (either naturally created by terrain or artificially created by your buildings) he is dividing his own force for you. You can concentrate your firepower on each unit as it passes by.
There are more lessons, but his point is to focus on the concentration of firepower on the small scale of an individual battle. I cannot leave out Zileas’s most extreme and signature use of concentration of firepower: his “Doom Drop.”
Zileas is known for playing the Protoss race, the race smallest in numbers and most powerful in punch. Notice that they are already concentrated before he even got a hold of them. A so-called Doom Drop is when you fill about four shuttles (flying transports that carry other units) with amazingly powerful Protoss attack units such as Reavers, Templars, and Archons. (Heavily armored air units (Scouts) must sometimes accompany the shuttles.) This superabundance of force—this concentration of firepower—is enough to overwhelm nearly anything so long as it is applied instantly at a single point. When one Archon, three Reavers, four Zealots, and three Templars suddenly appear in the middle of your base, the sheer force of it all applied to your surely badly positioned units is usually too much.
Even more devastating is what Zileas calls his “Extra Crispy with Slaw” version of the Doom Drop, where he uses hallucinated (illusionary) units to draw fire. Flying four shuttles into an enemy base is not an easy task, because they’ll probably be shot down by whatever anti-air happens to be scattered about. Four Shuttles accompanied by, say, five Scouts is another matter. Now the anti-air fire has been divided among more targets. Better still if all these targets are accompanied by, say, ten illusionary Scouts. The illusions can’t attack, but they draw enemy fire giving the real units more time to act. In effect, the illusions divide and conquer the enemy’s anti-air fire. Deception at its best.
Micro and Macro
Why not apply Sun Tzu’s teachings of divide and conquer and concentration of firepower on the large scale as well as the small? Must one choose one over the other? The answer in StarCraft, realistically, is yes. One only has so much attention that must be divided between micro Extra Crispy with Slaw Doom Drops and macro economy horde-building.
The Third Resource: Concentration
Zileas explains:
Minerals and Gas are the resources that most players think in terms of. Although these are central to the game, you also need to think in terms of concentration. I define concentration as the time that a player has to spend focusing on a task during the game. Expanding is a high concentration task, especially if you are Protoss. Attacking certainly has a high concentration level, and the more concentration you put into an attack, the higher the effect. Even scouting carries a high associated cost. One big difference between ‘someone who is really good’ and someone who is #1 is knowing when you need to watch a battle and when you don’t, and recognizing that your opponent also has a finite amount of concentration to draw from. There are a number of techniques for minimizing concentration costs (i.e. hot-keying buildings, using magic spell hot keys, queuing attacks, etc.), but everything you do has some intangible concentration cost. I would argue that as you get better at StarCraft, you go into a match with a larger innate concentration income/second. It is very possible when doing multiple coordinated attacks at different locations to use your superior concentration reserve (if you have it) to decimate an enemy who is tied with you in terms of unit control and tangible resources. Although I’m sorry to say this, concentration is basically talent. Playing a lot of games slowly raises it, but it’s something some people have a lot of and some people don’t. It’s kinda like fast sprint ability in running: you can train up and become a great long distance runner, but for sprinting, there’s always that talent based barrier—you can slowly improve it, but everyone has a limit. I’m sure that someone will push me off #1 who has more innate talent, along with the same skills.
The best way to train concentration is to play 2 on 1s and 3 on 1s (multiple opponents vs. you). I can often pull 3 on 1s, and certainly 2 on 1s, and really the only reason I can do this is my ability to multitask. Also, team melee is an interesting game as it involves doubled concentration reserves on both sides . . . well almost doubled since its not one mind thinking at once and they have to communicate.
Whether you, as a player, spend your concentration resources on the large scale or the small depends on which game is at hand and your personal style. In either case, the same principles are at work. On one level or another, thou shalt concentrate thy fire and divide and conquer thine enemy!
by Sirlin
Carefully study the details of the enemy so you can glean his future moves. On this point, Sun Tzu’s advice in war is not so different from Mike Caro’s advice in the game of poker.
Mike Caro, “the Mad Genius of Poker,” is a poker teacher, a poker writer, and one of the best poker players in the world. He uses computer analysis, but he is also famous for his work on the psychology and philosophy of gambling. Let’s compare advice from Caro’s Book of Poker Tells to Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
Weak Means Strong, Strong Means Weak
When the enemy is close at hand and remains quiet, he is relying on the natural strength of his position. When he keeps aloof and tries to provoke a battle, he is anxious for the other side to advance. If his place of encampment is easy of access, he is tendering a bait.
—Sun Tzu
In a poker game, the urge to act strong when weak can be overpowering for most players. Its reverse—weak when strong . . . is also widespread.
—Mike Caro
When players go out of their way to act weak, it’s because they hold strong hands.
—Mike Caro
Sudden Action
The sudden rising of birds in their flight is the sign of an ambush at the spot below. Startled beasts indicate that a sudden attack is coming.
—Sun Tzu
Always be alert for a player who suddenly perks up and plays a pot. Usually it takes a genuine hand to rouse a player from a lethargic condition and get him interested in gambling.
—Mike Caro
Smoke Rising
When there is dust rising in a high column, it is the sign of chariots advancing; when the dust is low, and spread over a wide area, it betokens the approach of infantry. When it branches out in different directions, it shows that parties have been sent to collect firewood. A few clouds of dust moving to and fro signify that the army is encamping.
—Sun Tzu
Players who are bluffing and are therefore afraid will be reluctant to exhale their cigarette smoke in a conspicuous manner. Remember, bluffers try to do nothing to bring attention to themselves and promote a call. Most bluffers would like to be invisible if they could. When a player exhales a huge cloud of smoke, he’s not as likely to be afraid of your call.
—Mike Caro
Clues from Appearances
When the soldiers stand leaning on their spears, they are faint from want of food. If those who are sent to draw water begin by themselves drinking, the army is suffering from thirst. If the enemy sees an advantage to be gained and makes no effort to secure it, the soldiers are exhausted.
—Sun Tzu
Well-dressed people tend to play conservatively. However, a man wearing a rumpled business suit with a loosened tie is probably in a gambling mood and will play looser than he would if that same suit were recently donned and his tie were in perfect position.
—Mike Caro
Order and Disorder
Clamor by night betokens nervousness. Fear makes men restless, so they fall to shouting at night in order to keep up their courage. If there is disturbance in the camp, the general’s authority is weak. If the banners and flags are shifted about, sedition is afoot. If the officers are angry, it means the men are weary.
—Sun Tzu
Glimpses of an opponent’s true nature can often be gained by watching the way he stacks his chips. The very organized manner in which these chips are arranged suggests that this player will probably choose his hands carefully, seldom bluff and won’t display a lot of gamble. Of course his mood may change during the game, but in that case his stacks will probably become less neatly arranged. Notice that there are a few extra chips on top of his large stacks. This could be his profit.
—Mike Caro
Reckless Opponents
When an army feeds its horses with grain and kills its cattle for food, and when the men do not hang their cooking pots over the campfires, showing that they will not return to their tents, you may know that they are determined to fight to the death.
—Sun Tzu
“Certainly, players displaying good-luck charms or showing superstitious behavior tend to be more liberal with their poker dollars than average players.
—Mike Caro
Remember: Weak Means Strong, Strong Means Weak
Humble words and increased preparations are signs that the enemy is about to advance. Violent language and driving forward as if to the attack are signs that he will retreat. When the light chariots come out first and take up a position on the wings, it is a sign that the enemy is forming for battle. Peace proposals unaccompanied by a sworn covenant indicate a plot. When there is much running about and the soldiers fall into rank, it means that the critical moment has come. When some are seen advancing and some retreating, it is a lure.
—Sun Tzu
When players encourage your bet, it’s because they think they have a winning hand . . . . The most common visual methods opponents use to make your bet appear safe are: (1) Looking away as if uninterested; (2) Pretending to pass; and (3) Keeping their hands off their chips.
—Mike Caro
by Sirlin