FIGURING POKER ODDS IS MUCH LIKE FIGURING PRESIDENTAIL CONTEST ODDS: 4/4: Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2024
⏱️ 6 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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Baster. I am with Oliver Rader. His new book is Seven Games, a human history. |
| 0:08.0 | We turn to Checkers because Checkers always struck me as a young person easier than chess. |
| 0:15.0 | For example, all the pieces look the same so I could stack them up and all you |
| 0:19.3 | do is get to the back and something magical would happen in the back row. But turns out there is someone we all need to remember when we play |
| 0:26.4 | checkers his name was Tinsley he's gone now he's born in 1927 he left us in 1995. Who was he, Oliver? |
| 0:35.0 | Marion Tinsley was the best checkers player there's ever been and indeed I would argue the best competitor at any competitive pursuit in the history of the world. |
| 0:47.0 | There was a 40 year stretch of competitive checkers play where Tinsley played thousands of games and lost exactly three times. |
| 0:56.4 | So this was sort of his prowess at the Checkers Board. |
| 0:59.4 | And in real life he was a minister and a math professor and it was sort of checkers and his Christian faith that sort of occupied his life and in equal measure it seems and insights into the game of checkers would come to him out of the |
| 1:15.4 | clear blue sky he said just like his insights into scripture so this this is the |
| 1:20.5 | man and this man Marion Tinsley caught the attention of a man in |
| 1:27.5 | Jonathan Schaefer who was a computer scientist at the University of Alberta who got |
| 1:32.2 | it into his mind that he wanted to conquer the game of |
| 1:34.3 | checkers and he wanted to beat the great Tinsley and I don't want to spoil too much of my opening chapter but what ensues is this great, for the most part, friendly, epic, heartbreaking |
| 1:46.9 | battle between Marion Tinsley, the human checkers player and Jonathan Schaefer the human computer programmer and I would inject |
| 1:54.8 | one thing into this story which is oftentimes these battles are built as man |
| 1:59.7 | versus machine or human versus machine but I'm careful to note that you know that there is really |
| 2:04.8 | no such thing. I mean there there were humans that built these machines so these |
| 2:09.3 | human versus machine battles are really human versus human just just human in two different guises. |
| 2:14.5 | And Tinsley versus Schaefer is one of the greatest of such battles that we've seen. |
| 2:20.4 | These computer programs that are written to play games. |
| 2:23.4 | We've mentioned the fact that you can do one for chess, one for certainly one for poker, |
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