Seven Games: A Human History
Oliver Roeder
First annotation on .
14 quotes
p 7
- In this fable, the grasshopper is supposed to be a cautionary figure; the ant is the diligent hero. The diligent hero of this book, however, is the grasshopper—the player of games.Feb 20 2024 4:11AM
p 8
- In other words, games offer a space to enjoy agency. When playing games, “we can take up goals temporarily, not because we actually care about achieving them in an enduring way, but because we want to have a certain kind of struggle,”Feb 20 2024 4:14AM
- Checkers allows you to practice basic strategy—but its canvas is limited and its moves often rote. Add different pieces with more complex movements and you produce chess, a game that for centuries has been associated with intelligence itself. Or increase the number of pieces and the size of the board—like managing not just a small tribe but a giant civilization—and you have Go, the mathematically richest game played by humans. But life is random and is always throwing you some unexpected new development; practice for that with backgammon, which relies on chance. Poker models a world of hidden knowledge and deceit. Scrabble demands that a player make intertemporal trade-offs between satisfying desires today and saving up for tomorrow. Bridge, perhaps the most “human” of all the games in this book, offers a world of flourishing language, alliances, communication, empathy—and cheating.Feb 20 2024 4:16AM
p 9
- “Playing chess is like looking out over a limitless ocean,” Tinsley once said. “Playing checkers is like looking into a bottomless well.”Feb 20 2024 4:21AM
- Tinsley was a precocious student—he excelled at math and memorized poems and skipped four of the first eight grades. He attributed this acceleration to his mother’s fear that as a result of “hard farm life,” she might not live to raise her children. Education was seen as a path out of poverty. By age fifteen, he was enrolled at Ohio State University. In the library, a beginner’s text called Winning Checkers caught his eye. “Having acquired a dislike for losing and a love of books, this discovery set the stage for a lifelong fascination,” he’d recall.* For the rest of his college years, he devoted eight hours a day to the game.Feb 20 2024 4:22AM
- Humans stare up at the tree and are reminded of trees we’ve climbed, trees we’ve seen, and trees our friends have told us about before. We have an innate, primal sense about which limbs can bear our weight and which branches will bend under pressure, and we know which twigs seem hardy. We remember the times we fell, and how we made it to the top. We write down which branches are safe and which are risky, and we share this knowledge with our fellow humans. We climb trees—that is, we play games—through our intuition, experience, community, and literature.Feb 20 2024 4:23AM
- Computers, on the other hand, have no such intuition for the tree. But they can climb all over the place, very fast, like a colony of ants. This is called search. At each point on the tree that they happen to arrive, they perform a small calculation, assessing that location’s quality and awarding it a score. This is called evaluation. Before any move in a game like checkers, a computer’s ants might climb to millions of places on the tree, collecting calculations. If one route upward returns higher scores, that’s where the computer will head. Computers climb trees—that is, they play games—by searching and evaluating, searching and evaluating, searching and evaluating.Feb 20 2024 4:23AM
- Certain rare and powerful moves can sometimes evade the accumulated human knowledge. They haven’t appeared in any of the books; they are small blind spots in the literature. When checkers players find them, whether via rote study or divine intervention, they cling to them like loose diamonds. Checkers players call these moves “cooks”—meaning that the opponent’s goose is cooked. Something like percent of games between master checkers players are draws. Masters hope to unleash a cook on an unsuspecting opponent now and again to turn a familiar draw into a rare and valuable victory.Feb 20 2024 4:26AM
p 10
- Garry Kasparov, one of the all-time greats, contends that “chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.”Feb 20 2024 4:30AM
p 11
- Checkers and chess are games of destruction: players capture their opponents’ pieces in a war of attrition. The players’ armies start on opposite ends of the board and march toward each other, with many pieces moving in only one direction. A polar gravity reigns. The image of the final position of a chess game is typically uninteresting: a few surviving pieces—a king, a few pawns, and maybe the odd rook—survey an emptied battlefield.Feb 20 2024 4:36AM
- Go, however, is a game of creation and effervescence. The stones create their own radiant gravity, rippling in every direction across the space-time of the board. The final position of a game of Go is the stuff of rich narrative, of production, of achievement.Feb 20 2024 4:36AM
- Good saw in Go an elegance that might make it intriguing and pleasurable to any kind of intelligence—artificial or otherwise. He wrote, “The rules are basically so simple that perhaps a game very much like Go is played in many extra-terrestrial places, even within our own galaxy.”Feb 20 2024 4:38AM
- Broadly speaking, the Monte Carlo method, named after the famous casino in Monaco, uses the results of random events to solve deterministic problems—that is, problems where there is a fixed, true answer.Feb 20 2024 5:17AM
- Feng-hsiung Hsu, the Deep Blue scientist, put it this way in an article in 2007: “In a typical [Go] game, we may easily have more than ten such problems on the board at the same time, and the status of one group can affect that of its neighbors—like a cowboy who points a revolver at another cowboy only to find himself covered by a rifleman on a roof.”Feb 20 2024 5:18AM