While reading the cribbage pages (which prompted me to start this thread), I came up on a similarly encouraging response from one of the cribbage experts. A difficult cribbage problem was posed to half a dozen top players, and as I read the replies at first I was thinking, "Wow-- some of these folks really do a lot of analyzing! " But then one of the experts sidestepped the analysis with something like, "I don't know. This looks like one of those very close calls that'd take too long to figure out when playing a game of cribbage." At that point I laughed and lightened up. Apparently even top-notch players mentally flip a coin sometimes.

I guess it's like the old question of whether a game is worth playing anymore once a computer has "solved" it. My answer has always been Of course it is: computers are computers, and people are people; and a game that's challenging and interesting for people is still challenging and interesting. But in the back of my mind, I've also doubted my own response. What if players studied the computer's plays and discovered a pattern of play that would always win or draw? Then, just by mimicking the pattern, human players could reduce the formerly challenging game to the triviality of tic-tac-toe.

So, on one hand there's a strong motive for studying probability analyses, computer studies, and so forth. But OTOH, if the analysis becomes exhaustive, it might spoil the game completely.

Which probably just means that games are just social affairs. As long as we just play them and enjoy them, instead of treating them with all the seriousness of trying to map the human genome or whatever, there's no problem at all. Then game playing is just fan, as it should be.