1/4: Before ChatGPT: 1/4: Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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1/4: Before ChatGPT: 1/4: Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder.
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Games-History-Oliver-Roeder/dp/1324003774
Checkers, backgammon, chess, and go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasing.
Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as the evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost only three games of checkers; Shusai, the Master, the last gochampion of imperial Japan, defending tradition against “modern rationalism.” and an IBM engineer who created a backgammon program so capable at self-learning that NASA used it on the space shuttle. He delves into the history and lore of each game: backgammon boards in ancient Egypt, the Indian origins of chess, how certain shells from a particular beach in Japan make the finest white go stones.
Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. He introduces an early philosopher of games, the aptly named Bernard Suits, and visits an Oxford cosmologist who has perfected a computer that can effectively play bridge, a game as complicated as human language, itself.
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Royal Mail, the UK's Greenest Delivery Company. |
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| 0:26.6 | parcel delivery companies who currently publicly report these statistics. |
| 0:30.3 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:38.7 | Games, a new book about games, historical, accurate and at the same time challenging games, |
| 0:46.0 | played by humans and now by artificial intelligence. |
| 0:49.9 | The book is entitled Seven Games, a human history. Oliver Raider is the author. |
| 0:55.7 | He is a former staff writer at 538, editor of the column The Riddler and the Book The |
| 1:02.4 | Riddler. |
| 1:03.4 | Now we speak of Oliver the Poker Player. It is 2019 before the pandemic and our hero |
| 1:10.3 | is walking through the doors of a chamber built for the World Championship Poker Game. |
| 1:17.7 | This poker game takes place in a variety of games. We're going to play one particular |
| 1:23.4 | kind. Oliver is going to take us to that game. |
| 1:26.7 | But poker is also a game that you can apply game theory to, the history of poker, how |
| 1:32.2 | it's played now and how computers can enter into examining poker games and making the world's |
| 1:39.5 | best players even better. |
| 1:41.4 | Oliver, a very good evening to you. Your book is fun. |
| 1:45.1 | And it's good to have fun about a game that I played as a young person, haven't played |
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