A board game is a game played on a pre-marked surface or “board” according to a set of rules. Board games have been played in most cultures and societies throughout history. Do you think of yourself as a bit of an expert at board games like chess or Go?

Maybe you’re not quite as good as you think. New research from the University of Manchester and Oxford suggests complex games like these are impossible to learn fully. They may even be too complex for the human mind to understand.

Researchers studied two-player games, to try and understand the strategies which people use to make decisions during the game. Some games with two players are simple, with only a small number of possible moves. Players can quickly work out the best strategy but that means the game soon becomes boring.

It gets more interesting when there are many possible moves. That’s why people are so fascinated by complex board games like chess or Go, or some card games. But what the researchers found was that with difficult games, players find it hard to work out the best strategy and their actions become less reasonable.

This research is part of the field called game theory: the study of human strategic decision-making. Much thinking on how people play complex games is based on something called “the balance point”, which is when players have a perfect knowledge of what they are going to do and of what their rivals are going to do.

When you add more than two players then of course the game becomes even harder to understand. Trading on the stock market is an example of a complex multi-player game.

小题1:Which of the following games belongs to board games?

A．football

B．badminton

C．swimming

D．Mahjong小题2:It can be inferred in the passage that _______.

A．the simpler the board game is, the better it is

B．people dislike board games for the complex moves

C．players are easy to lose patience when in difficult games

D．it’s possible for people to understand complex games thoroughly小题3:If players want to get to the balance point, they should ______.

A．ask other players to work out the best strategy

B．have a good knowledge of the games they are playing

C．figure out the next actions of themselves and their opponents

D．come to a quick decision about what to do next by themselves小题4:In which section can we read this passage in a newspaper?

A．Culture

B．Discovery

C．Career

D．Campus小题5:The author intends to tell us ___________.

A．a new research about board games

B．the importance of playing board games

C．how the players win board games

D．how to learn board games fully