Eshtine

quote of the day

Kriegspiel
Devised as an educational game for military schools in the eighteenth century, Kriegspiel was originally played on a board consisting of a map of the French-Belgian frontier divided into a grid of 3,600 squares. Game pieces advanced and retreated across the board like armies.
The original Kriegspiel spawned many imitations and was ultimately supplanted by a version that became popular among Prussian army officers. This used real military maps in lieu of a game board. In 1824 the chief of the German general staff said of Kriegspiel, "It is not a game at all! It's training for war!"
So began a national obsession that defies belief today. The Prussian high command was so taken with this game that it issued sets to every army regiment. Standing orders compelled every military man to play it. The Kaiser appeared at Kriegspiel tournaments in full military regalia. Inspired by overtly militaristic chess sets then in vogue (pieces were sculpted as German marshals, colonels, privates, etc.), craftsmen produced Kriegspiel pieces of obsessive detail. A pale remnant of these Zinnfiguren ("tin figures") survives today as toy soldiers. Layer after layer of complexity acrreted around the game as its devoted players sought ever greater "realism." The rule book, originally sixty pages, grew thicker with each edition. Contingencies of play that were once decided by chance or an umpire were referred to data tables drawn from actual combat.
Claims that the game was behind Prussia's military victories stimulated interest internationally. Prussia's Kriegspiel dry runs of war with Austria supposedly led to a strategy that proved decisive in the Six Weeks' War of 1866. After that, the Austrian Army took no chances and began playing Kriegspiel. France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870)--allegedly another Kriegspiel victory for Prussia--spawned a Kriegspiel craze there.
Kriegspiel came to the United States after the Civil War. One American army officer complained that the game "cannot be readily and intelligently used by anyone who is not a mathematician, and it requires, in order to use it readily, an amount of special instruction, study, and practice about equivalent to that necessary to acquire a speaking knowledge of a foreign language." Nonetheless, it eventually became popular in the Navy and at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1905) was the last credited to a nation's playing of Kriegspiel. It became apparent that strategies honed in the game did not always work in battle. Germany's defeat in World War I was a death knell for the game--except, ironically, in Germany itself, where postwar commanders fought each other with tin replicas of the regiments denied them by the Treaty of Versailles.

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb, William Poundstone