FIGURING POKER ODDS IS MUCH LIKE FIGURING PRESIDENTAIL CONTEST ODDS: 2/4: Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
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.
1315 FRANCE
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Oliver Rader, whose delightful new book |
| 0:08.0 | Seven Games of Human History takes us not only into the games that we played as young people play today, |
| 0:14.0 | but also how artificial intelligence has entered the game to improve or challenge or |
| 0:22.0 | humble, or make us doubt the word think. I do after reading |
| 0:27.1 | Oliver's books so we go to the game of bridge and Scrabble simultaneously. I |
| 0:32.0 | learn from Oliver that Bridge isn't really very old. |
| 0:35.7 | It's about Victorian era. Before that there was a game called Whist, which is similar but different and I learned that bridge maybe not |
| 0:46.4 | conquerable by computers how to put this Oliver because I wrote down here that |
| 0:50.4 | there are 53 billion billion parts of a possibility of a hand so is AI |
| 0:59.0 | ready for that? Yeah it may come as a relief to hear that Bridge is the only game in the book at which humans are still better than computers. |
| 1:10.0 | You are exactly right. Computers have not yet I think conquered is a fair word conquered the game of bridge why in this age of you know high technology can that possibly be true one One is what you've just mentioned, Bridge is |
| 1:24.9 | unbelievably complicated mathematically the possibilities of dealing a deck of |
| 1:30.7 | cards, the possibilities of how the auction might go that occurs at the beginning of a bridge hand, the possibilities of how you play the cards in the card play portion of the hand and use there |
| 1:42.5 | multiply all these enormous numbers together |
| 1:45.4 | and you get sort of an incomprehensible enormous number, |
| 1:49.4 | which is difficult for a computer |
| 1:51.9 | to sort of work its way through. That's one thing. is |
| 1:55.0 | a bridge, I think the more romantic explanation is that bridge has these features that |
| 2:01.0 | have these features that sort of seem extremely human like bridge requires communication |
| 2:06.4 | It's unique among the games in the book that you play with a partner and this is a partner |
| 2:11.6 | that that you're talking to essentially during the auction trying to tell him or her what you have in your hand and vice versa. |
| 2:18.0 | Bridge requires empathy for both your partner and for your opponents. |
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