Helen DeWitt writes:
Suppose I grow up in a family where people obsessively play Hearts. We switch around between different versions of the game – sometimes we play Black Maria, where the Queen of Spades costs you 13 points and you pass on three cards to the left before you begin play, sometimes we invent twists of our own. I also have four friends: A lives in a family of chess fanatics, B lives in a family of bridge fanatics, C lives in a family of go fanatics, D lives in a family of poker fanatics.
What I see at once is something remarkable. Languages are translatable, more or less; it may be more or less tricky, but it’s intelligible to speak of Chinese being translated into Turkish AND Arabic AND English. Games are not translatable. Chess is a game for two players with complete information; you can’t “explain” what’s going on in a chess game in terms of bridge, which is a game for two sets of partners with imperfect information, a mixture of skill and chance which depends on skilful sharing of information between partners. And you can’t “explain” either in terms of poker, which is a game for an indeterminate number of players, a mixture of skill and chance in which sharing of information between players would in fact be collusion and outlawed. A game is intelligible on its own terms – which means, paradoxically, that you can play a game with someone whose language you don’t know, provided you both know the rules of the game.
You don’t understand a game in terms of some other game, you understand it by learning to play it – but the more games you play, the more you will understand about the radical otherness of games.
I suppose that I am missing the point.
To me, a game involves
1) rules
2) an algorithm and
3) a goal
whereas language is more about communication, right?
Example: I could easily solve a calculus problem that a German professor gave me if the problem were written in mathematics (e.g, the integral of x^2 is …)
I suppose that a game could be explained in terms of another game if the algorithms were similar (e. g., Canadian rules football vs. US football, softball vs. baseball, etc.)
There is a Church-Turing discussion to be had here, by people smarter than me.
I don't disagree with anything that the author says, but I also don't think I "get it."
At its core, language is meant to describe things that are relevant to us as humans. Insofar as the relevant objects and concepts are common across cultures, then it makes sense that we'd be able to translate Chinese into Turkish.
If there were some animal that only lived in China that no Turkish person had ever seen, then it would be quite difficult to translate its Chinese name into Turkish, though you might be able to make some progress by describing its constituent parts (e.g. furry, black and white, bear-like). Alternatively, in the language of Bridge, you could translate the concept of cards and chance quite well into the language of Poker, and maybe you could translate some core strategy like minimax search from Chess to Spades.
So can we reduce this post to say, "We can translate between languages when they're describing the same things," and "Games are played in very restricted worlds"?
I don’t think I get the point either.
Evidently, when two people don't share a common language; they will have hard time communicating. They probably still can interact with each by playing some games. Well, if I am playing a game with a Russian, I will be strategizing in my native language in my head though.
Yet, people who are good at one game tend to be good at others.
Some are phenomenally good at more than one –
Irina Levitina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Levitina is fantastic at bridge and chess, having been world champion in both.
But many are good at more than one.
So, there is clearly some 'strategy game' skill.
I think that is the point. Most language describes our common experience, so it translates.
Alonzo Church and Alan Turing would liken an algorithmic strategy to a succession of linguistic transformations. The 'languages' are specific to the strategies and the metaphors of one game are likely inapplicable as metaphors to another. This is why:
I'm also missing the point, on at least two levels.
Level 1: communication versus the thing communicated about: You can translate my description of E.Coli from English into Chinese, but you can't really translate a description of E.Coli into a description of rhinoceros. These are both animals, just as chess and poker are both games, but at some point the analogies stretch too far.
Level 2: I don't think she's entirely right about games. If you could fully translate one game into aanother, wouldn't it be the same game (just as a t-test can be seen as an F-test)?
But different games share common elements.
Last week while exercising I found a public television station showing an Australian rules football game. I'd never seen this game, but found it fascinating. The game is pretty much sui generis, but has some aspects that are similar to soccer, American/Canadian football, even basketball.
So let's look at the similarities among the games she mentions.
Bridge, hearts and chess involve notions of capture.
Bridge and poker involve notions of rank.
Go and chess involve notions of areal control.
Go and hearts involve counting points as a way to win.
Most card games involve some attempt to discern what the other players are holding.
All four of these games involve "turns in order", not playing simultaneously or having a turn continue as long as you had a play.
Mark Liberman at Language Log has an interesting comment on this.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=892
I have a rather different view. When I was growing up, I learned a game called '42', played with dominoes.
http://www.pagat.com/tile/wdom/texas42.html
According to that page, it was created as an attempt to translate a game from one format to another. I can't vouch for the facts of the story, but it is culturally true. My father is a Baptist preacher.
I later learned to play 'Spades' and then Bridge. The idea of the otherness of games is a bit foreign to me. I see connections between bridge and poker, even though poker isn't remotely in the family of games that includes ruff, whist, bridge, and 42. On the other hand, I'm familiar with a lot of languages used for very different purposes and that are non-translatable. You can't translate between human languages and computer programming languages. Indeed, there are computer languages that can't express the same concepts.