3/4: Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Le Poker 1896
@Batchelorshow
3/4: Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder (Author)
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 pleasurable.
Throughout, Roeder tells the compelling story of how humans, pursuing scientific glory and competitive advantage, have invented AI programs better than any human player, and what that means for the games―and for us. Funny, fascinating, and profound, Seven Games is a story of obsession, psychology, history, and how play makes us human
Transcript
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| 0:33.1 | This is CBSI in the world, I'm John Bachelors. Oliver Raider, his new book is Seven Games, A Human History. |
| 0:39.8 | The story of seven games and the computers who envy the games and are conquering the games and |
| 0:45.4 | maybe the future, especially in chess, were headed to something entirely new in the solar system. |
| 0:52.1 | Half human, half the other thing called a centaur, but we begin with Oliver at nine years old in Baldwin, Iowa, he tells me on his grandfather's farm, where he is learning the game of chess and at nine, he defeats his grandfather or as I suspect his grandfather lets him win. |
| 1:11.4 | Oliver, what was the magic you talk about a prusty and moment? It wasn't for you a cookie. It was the game of chess in Iowa. |
| 1:18.9 | How did it first strike you? Can you recover that feeling? |
| 1:21.7 | Well, a small correction, that was a hard-fought legitimate victory because my grandfather, Grandpa Jack, famously had an inviolable policy of never letting kids win. |
| 1:34.6 | So I had lost to him dozens, if not hundreds of times, from a very, very young age. |
| 1:40.4 | And this was a victory, John years in the making. So I will, I'll just put that out there. |
| 1:46.7 | Yeah, this playing chess with my grandpa and another family members was my first exposure to games. |
| 1:54.8 | And yes, as I write in the chapter that played on this very specific sort of homemade chess board on this farm that had been in the family for decades. |
| 2:05.8 | And that's what I think of without fail when I think of chess. |
| 2:11.1 | And I think sort of what captured me about games and about chess then, I hope I capture in turn in the book, which is, you know, one thing is this sort of democratizing force of games like the, you know, there's not a lot of things with which I could compete with adults on exactly level terms, right? |
| 2:33.0 | There weren't a lot of activities that adults were doing that I was also doing, but games were one of them. And yeah, ways to come to good excuse to come together with family and excuse to get lost in something to read deeply about something. |
| 2:49.3 | And games are, as I write in the book, a number of times games are these sort of small slices of the real world that allow us to practice and to strive and to struggle. |
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