Playing ChessThink you’ve got a solid strategy for Puerto Rico? Think again. A pair of professors from the University of Manchester and University of Oxford claim that, other than the simplest games, most games are just too complex for the human mind to fully comprehend. After simulating thousands of two-player games, Drs. Galla and Farmer concluded that with games such as Chess and Go, human behavior is irrational and players will have a difficult time finding optimal strategies.

Their paper, “Complex Dynamics in Learning Complicated Games“, is published in the January 7th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.