3/4: Before ChatGPT: 3/4: Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
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3/4: Before ChatGPT: 3/4: 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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| 0:45.0 | Oliver Raider, his new book is Seven Games, a human history. |
| 0:49.0 | The story of seven games and the computers who envy the games and are conquering the games |
| 0:55.0 | and maybe the future, especially in chess, were headed to something entirely new in the solar system, |
| 1:02.0 | half human, half the other thing called a centaur. |
| 1:06.0 | But we begin with Oliver at nine years old in Baldwin, Iowa, he tells me, on his grandfather's farm, |
| 1:13.0 | where he is learning the game of chess and at nine, he defeats his grandfather or, as I suspect, his grandfather lets him win. |
| 1:21.0 | Oliver, what was the magic you talk about a prusty and moment? |
| 1:25.0 | It wasn't for you a cookie. It was the game of chess and Iowa. |
| 1:29.0 | How did it first strike you? Can you recover that feeling? |
| 1:32.0 | Well, a small correction, that was a hard fought legitimate victory because my grandfather, Grandpa Jack, |
| 1:40.0 | famously had an inviolable policy of never letting kids win. |
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