This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batser with Oliver Raider, who's delightful new book,

Seven Games of Human History. Takes us not only into the games that we played as young

people play today, but also how artificial intelligence has entered the games to improve

or challenge or humble or make us doubt the word think. I do after reading Oliver's

books that we go to the game of bridge and scrabble simultaneously. I learned from Oliver

that bridge isn't really very old. It's about Victorian era before that there was a game

called Wist, which is similar, but different. And I learned that bridge may be not

comfortable by computers. How to put this Oliver? Because I wrote down here that there

are 53 billion, billion, billion parts of a possibility of a hand. So is AI 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. You're 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 is what you've just mentioned, bridges

unbelievably complicated, mathematically, the possibilities of dealing a deck of 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 a hand. And

these are multiply all these enormous numbers together, and you get sort of an incomprehensibly

enormous number, which is difficult for a computer to sort of work its way through. That's

one thing. And another thing is bridge. I think the more romantic explanation is that bridge

has these features that sort of seem extremely human. Like bridge requires communication. It's

unique among the games in the book that you play with a partner. And this is a partner

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