 Thank you for joining us for our program online at Mechanics Institute for seven games a human history with author Oliver Rotter who will be in conversation with our chess club staff Judith Sartere who's the general manager of youth outreach and events and Paul Whitehead who's our chess coordinator. I'm Laura Shepherd director of events at the Mechanics Institute. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. And we feature our general interest library of an international chess club which many of you know about our ongoing author and literary programs and our Friday night cinema let's film series so please visit our website for all of our events. Chess Tournament schedules and also know that the library is open so please come on downtown and enjoy being with us in person. Our conversation today will be followed by a Q&A with you our audience and that will be in the chat. And also if you're interested in purchasing seven games a human history. It's available through Alexanderbook.com or at an independent bookstore near you. So I'd like to introduce our program checkers backgammon chess go scrabble and bridge. These are seven games ancient and modern, which fascinate millions of people around the world. In Oliver wrote his new book seven games. He charts the origins and historical importance, as well as the myriad of rules and the ways that they're designed make them pleasurable to us. So whether you go to a game for social engagement for pleasure for entertainment intellectual challenge or perhaps your competitive edge. I think Oliver's book will give you some wonderful insights about these seven games, and also about the people who made their mark and made these games famous. It's an incredible read it's beautifully written, and there are incredible anecdotes about the history as well as how to play, and what makes it important to human human experience. So I'd like to introduce. First of all, Oliver rotor has been a senior writer at 538 and editor of the Riddler a collection of the sites math puzzles. He's an artificial intelligence as a Neiman fellow at Harvard University, and he holds a PhD in economics, focused on game theory, and he's here on zoom from his home in Brooklyn, New York. So, with us, Paul Whitehead is our chess coordinator at the mechanics Institute. He is the FIDE master, a US CF life master and former US junior chess champion, and also part of our chess staff. Judith satire is the general manager of youth outreach and events here at mechanics Institute of course. She was voted the 2017 organizer of the year by the US chess Federation, and has been an international arbiter elect, as well as an FIDE arbiter and developmental instructor of the FIDE associate and a national tournament director of US chess Federation, and she's organized and arbitrated thousands of tournaments in person and online, and both Judith and Paul keep our chess club active and engaging every day with various classes for all ages, and all levels. So, please welcome Oliver rotor, Paul Whitehead and Judith satire. Hello, thank you for having me. Yes, we're so thrilled to have you Oliver, and you know when you're in, when you're out West we really will welcome you in person here at mechanics Institute. Just to begin, you know with your background. Tell us about how you got started with this book what inspired you and what motivated you to take a look at these seven games. And, you know, partly their board versus card games. And what spurred you on in this direction. Yeah, happy to. And first of all, thank you for that very warm introduction and thank you everyone for enduring two years of zoom fatigue and still being here this evening. As everyone sort of popped up on my screen I was looking for my parents because they've been sort of cyber stalking me through my book events but I didn't see them so mom and dad if you're there hello. Yeah, I'll tell you, sort of a bit of biography which I think will will serve to answer the question so before I was a journalist and an author I was an academic. I was an economist doing a postdoc at NYU. And I had this sort of classic academics problem which they're in every academic is thoroughly convinced that what they're doing is very important. I was also thoroughly convinced at the same time that not nearly enough people know about it. So I pitched 538 version of the research I was doing with the idea of getting it in front of in front of more people. And the editor at the site said no, we're not interested in that right now. However, he noticed online that I played competitive tournament scrabble, which I did at the time. And instead of writing about all this serious stuff you've pitched us how would you like to write about scrabble instead. And I said sure why not. And my first piece I ever wrote was a sort of profile of the world's best scrabble player, a man named Nigel Richards. And sort of from that very unexpected beginning in this career sort of carved out a beat of covering games and that's games, pretty broadly defined so scrabble of course chess video games, crossword puzzles, sort of modern board games and the sort of golden age of board game design. And I sort of yeah carved this out as something I could cover and try to cover seriously and well which I felt not a lot of people were doing for a popular audience. And sort of there were two, two sort of big themes that emerged almost no matter what game I was reporting or writing about and one was the passion and dedication of the subculture that favored that game sort of the time the energy the intellectual the love that you could find without fail in every subculture. That's thing one. And thing two is technology. In almost every game there was the creep of technology in one form or another, often in the guys of artificial intelligence so in chess obviously you have the chess engines or in poker. They call them solvers, even in scrabble, this artificial intelligence or digital learning tools. And I was really fascinated by the collision between sort of thing one and thing to which leads us to the book. And so I wanted to tell, tell a story with with two main strands, which are what I've described sort of what is the importance, what has been and what is the importance of games to human culture. And what has been the importance of games and the development of modern technology specifically modern artificial intelligence, and what happens when these two collide. So that was sort of the broadly speaking the impetus for the book. Well, I feel obligated to address the title seven games. There are seven chapters each on a game, but I'm not, I'm not with this title and organization trying to make an argument that these are the only games about which we should care. Rather they served some useful narrative purposes and they have some nice features in common. They're fairly well known. I think to most readers which saves me a bit of time. They have very dedicated subcultures very rich histories and indeed have been the focus of very concentrated computer science research so that's, that's sort of a broader overview of the recent history and motivation for the book. Also, can you, can you describe us a little more about what game theory is. Sure. So game theory, at least when an economist or former economist like me talks about it is essentially the study of interactions of small groups of people. And what do I mean by small, well I mean small enough where what I do might affect how you feel or what you want what you want to do so we call this say strategy or tactics. And this is, as opposed to say something like macroeconomics which studies uncountably large numbers of people and prices and things like this. A game theory studies of very small groups of people and it could be groups of people like to playing a game of chess say or famous games like the prisoners dilemma doesn't need to be a classic board game but basically studies that the mathematics of strategic interaction. And in many cases tries to solve for what are the best strategies or sometimes called equilibrium or Nash equilibrium after the famous mathematician John Nash to try to sort of predict almost how a given game that we write down might turn out using applied mathematics and half the audience has now logged off. I'm teasing. The beautiful mind guy. That's right, Laura might have frozen there. And I wanted to know if, if through this research that you did on the games that you, you found through your research, something that really changed your mind about one or other of the games. Yeah, I think, I think there's a laundry list of things I discovered that changed my mind about the games to to most prominently come to mind, and I can describe those one is, I think check checkers gets a bad wrap. I had always thought of checkers as a sort of child's game something sort of relegated to the elementary school cafeteria during you know indoor recess when it's raining outside. It's one of the richest and most triumphant and most heartbreaking stories in the book, if, if I may say so myself has to do with checkers and the deep, deep love and passion that checkers players have and that an early computer science project in the game so without spoiling too much of chapter one. There was an early computer science project out of the University of Alberta called Chinook footnote Chinook is a wind that blows through Canada and checkers is sometimes called drafts so draft wind. So we had Chinook, this very important early computer science AI project on the one hand, and you have Mary and tinsley on the other, and Mary and tinsley was the best checkers player that humanity has ever known. Let's go further and say he's the best competitor at any competitive pursuit that our species has ever produced. And you can sort of guess what happened the computer scientists wanted to beat this guy and what what ensued occupied both of these parties, for two decades and resulted in very fascinating human stories and and seminal AI research and another brief side note, one thing I'm careful to say in the book is oftentimes these contests that I'm describing our build as man versus machine contests are human versus machine contests and I would argue that's a misnomer, essentially, because behind the machine are equally dedicated human beings. All of these contests are human versus human just human in different guises. So that's the first thing that comes to mind the second thing is personal, more personal I had never played much backgammon. Before I started reporting the book and when I was reporting the book I was careful to play all the games you know to get to get a flavor and have them in mind when I was writing, and I am now a deep deep backgammon obsessive and the only thing that's disappointing about that is that I didn't discover the game 30 years before I did. But the, again, those are just just two of many things, others of which I'm sure I'm sure we'll get to. Thanks. I'm going to turn this over to Paul to ask. Okay. Well, backgammon requires deep pockets so it's good you're an economist maybe you can figure out a way to fund your, your obsession. At least I've known a lot of backgammon players as well as chess players and other people involved in in these games. So what interested me most about the book was the games that you are interested in the most and why those particular games fascinated you the most. I think it's for me it seemed to be two particular games. But I'll leave it open to you and other people to interpret that. But it seems to me that it was poker and scrabble that drew you the most. And why. Yeah that's, I think that's about right. But you know one question I often get when sort of doing doing these events and answering questions about the book is put put much more bluntly than you did which is which are your favorite games, right. And you put it in a much nicer and subtler and richer way but you know that's it's similar to asking someone you know to pick their favorite child, for example, it's difficult or it changes based on the day or the context or sort of what you know for me lately sort of considerations. But yeah I think I think scrabble is absolutely a game that fascinates me. More than most, more than most even in the book, I think it's fair to say why. Well, for reasons I sort of hinted at earlier I used to be a very obsessive scrabble player and devoted in like an insignificant chunk of my of my life. You know this game. So that's that made it. I wanted to do, you know, as thorough and faithful a job writing about it as I could. Why did but then the logical follow up questions well why did it obsess me in the first place. I found to scrabble is interesting because a lot of the games in the book chess go back back and checkers. They have very few rules like the rules can roughly speaking be sort of written down on one page. In scrabble, the rules are the scrabble dictionary, right the dictionary is not a dictionary in the traditional sense, where you would look up, you know usage or spelling. It's a rulebook and a words appearance a words existence in the dictionary signals that words validity in the game and a words absence from the dictionary signals it's invalidity. To learn scrabble rules, you have to learn roughly 200,000 words to play the game to play the game well. And I found this sort of study, like wrote, though it may be may have been time consuming though it may have been to be meditative. Essentially, I found it very sort of calming in a sort of occasionally on calm period of my life that was one thing. I found scrabble study to be the sort of oddly democratizing experience so you have this set of 200,000 things. These things could be insects, foreign currencies, medieval weapons, colors, you know, obscure, whatever. I'm all presented to you on equal terms, and you ought to learn them all if you want to play scrabble well and I found this sort of equal presentation, really really fascinating and just became devoted to memorizing the rules of scrabble. So when it came time to write about scrabble. I was, I was motivated and animated and I played in the North American scrabble championship as part of reporting for that chapter which provided, I think a lot of color, I hope provided a lot of color. So that's, that's scrabble and poker. I mean I'm glad you think that about poker I was, I was happy with that chapter similarly, poker is democratic in a different sense, which is that anyone can play in the most celebrated poker tournament all you have to do is fork over some money to the person in the cashier's booth. And indeed that's what I did a chunk of my book advance to the friendly lady in Las Vegas who happily took it. She gave me a small slip of white paper which I gave to a poker dealer and I got a seat in the World Series of poker, and, and anyone can do that you know I can't play in the world chess championship, for example I certainly can't play in the elite go event, but I can play in the World Series of poker which again provides a lot of color, and just, I mean, just a sea of humanity, I mean Las Vegas is a dream for a journalist because everywhere you look there's something interesting to write about. And I felt in playing in the World Series, a certain sort of camaraderie. Like I'm playing ostensibly or nominally like against the other people in my tournament. But you know how often do you play in a, in a competition where there's 8000 concurrent competitors I think very rarely. You know, we're kind of all in this together and I sort of felt, I felt very buoyed by that fact so what's the common denominator here. People and color I guess and the sort of tournament structure that exposed me to like all manner of fan and enthusiasts of those two games. And I just add that both of those games contain a bit of imperfect knowledge as well right, which I thought was an interesting thing. So there's an element of luck there that doesn't exist in go chess, or is not supposed to exist in go chess checkers even. So, yeah, that was that was, I felt your passion in those chapters. Yeah, I think that's that's a great point about randomness and hidden information, both both games have both of those things and the randomness is nice because you. Well, because I the sort of aspiring journalist can arrive with like some sliver of hope right that this chapter might end with me winning a million bucks, or the North American scrap of course it didn't happen. I couldn't have contained that this long and talking about it but but yeah it's one of the things I love about backgammon to is sort of every you start. You start off with a chance, and there's this sort of romantic notion like regardless of your baseline skill level and of course skill, enormously important in all of these games. But you know you can crack the window open for delusion in some of them more than others. That's great. That's great. I have other questions but go ahead, go ahead and then we'll turn over to Judith for a few questions as well. This really changes direction. You know anything that's funded in academia and so on and so forth. You know, I don't know much about that world, but there you know with game theory and think tank, you know, I'm not gonna say think tanks but people putting their brains to use and so on so forth. I just want to hear about military intelligence interested in these kinds of quest in these kinds of endeavors, academic endeavors, and while the practitioners think that they're, you know, just going along and, you know, getting your hands dirty. You know I don't want to say that that you're getting your answer, but is there any oversight or input or use by military intelligence of data that's collected by game theorists, or in this AI world of you know figuring out how to crush humanity you know are they trying to figure out better other ways to crush humanity. Period. Yeah, no I take your point I mean the answer is yes, but I will quickly follow that up with I'm not an expert in this area. I do know, I mean I can point to a couple things that I do know about I do know that PhDs who studied what I studied were often recruited by governmental agencies sometimes explicitly branches of the military who have their own sort of think tanky sort of offshoots. And on the technology side, there's a very specific example which I believe I talked about briefly in the book. So there's been in the last say five or 10 years of flurry of successful AI activity and poker and poker was one of these final frontiers because it brought together a lot of things that were difficult for computers to sort of handle like hugely mathematically complicated hidden information uncertainty in common forms of poker lots of players i.e. not just to like eight or nine. And can computers are finally successful at basically being better than the best human at kind of any form of commonly played poker. And one of these programs was, I believe it was called the broadest it's kind of hard to keep all these like quasi Latin, AI names, right but I believe it was the one called the broadest was literally licensed to the Pentagon for, I guess, not publicly explicit reasons because one can imagine why the Pentagon would be interested in strategy and grappling with uncertainty in a context that wasn't explicitly poker. So I don't know how much I can sort of reliably say beyond that other than I think like, there's something, there's something to that. Interesting. I find that interesting. I basically have one more, you know, throw out question, which was, um, I always as a chess player I very competitive in terms of, you know, of course, and, or, or as a person who plays chess has been around a lot of games players, but I always felt a close analogy to sports to physical sports. And I know the Russians, for example, you know, or the Soviet Union, they really, you know, play chess as a sport. So our game theorists interested in physical sports is that part of, you know, I know we're talking about board games but to me there's a, because of the, you know, one on one competition like in tennis or something like that, or on, you know, winning and losing and all of this kind of stuff. And strategy and tactics, you know, is it's outside your book but is it. No, it's, it's a fair question. Yeah, I think the short answer is yes and I'll try to expand on that in a somewhat more interesting way. I think, yeah, I think, I think that the border between what are most often called games and what are most often called sports is more porous. So for example is, I oftentimes get asked the question is chess a sport. Sure, why not, like, it's physically, especially sometimes physically difficult to sit somewhere for hours concentrating like, you know, and I don't see any for just to start out I don't see any why not label chess a sport that's completely fine with me. Do we see the tenants, the tenants and analytical tools of game theory being applied to sports capital S. No, I think I don't know if we see game theory proper we certainly see mathematical tools and probabilistic and statistical tools applied to sports indeed in ways that I think we can observe like the example that comes most immediately to mind is basketball. The three point shooting has gotten so good that you might as well shoot a lot of three pointers and the game just is aesthetically utterly different because of, I think fairly, fairly straightforward statistical analysis I think you know baseball has been subject to deep deep empirical statistical analysis and I don't know that I would term this game theory per se, but I would say that sports are admit lots of lots of mathematical statistical analysis which is, which have changed them, like another sort of, I guess this is a game sort of with Jeopardy. There's been a lot of Jeopardy has changed before I vary eyes. I mean starting in part with Watson, and sort of exemplified by James Holtzauer was that last two years ago, and just as wildly aggressive double daily double bidding strategy just changed the way Jeopardy is played. So, analyses, whatever sort of specific discipline from which they come I think have deeply changed sports, there is one interesting sports related kind of computer project that I mentioned in the book on curling the winter ice stone sliding very strategic game sometimes even called chess on ice. And I guess you could quibble with this curling a sport but yeah, I mean, I think so. And the same man one of the same men who was a huge pioneer in computer poker at the University of Alberta, also a pioneer in computer curling which have used these AI techniques to teach the Canadian national curling team sort of shot selection right now is going to look good three shots three stones four stones from now. And you know in Canada, this is work of great national importance. That's, that's a joke. It's a great job. Great. I don't know if Judith is still here. Are you, Judith are you still on the zoom you may have wand off. Judith was having some internet. Some internet problems. Okay, we'll come back to her. I think one of the questions that she wanted to ask is the research by Bernard suits and the computing with the bridge and all the challenges of that could you could you talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I'm happy to. I understood those as pretty distinct questions is that right. In any case, I'll start with Bernard suits. So one of opening the book. I sort of grapple with this question. What is a game and related to what kind of think what Paul and I were just talking about like our game sports our sports games like what is a game like I encourage you to take a couple seconds and think about how you would start to define this because it seems a like a very huge class of things and be a sort of slippery class of things like they can be played by essentially any number of players. They can be played with kind of any equipment with no equipment at all in a short amount of time and a long amount of time, you know there's sort of across any dimension you can think of games seem to almost span it. So let's talk about this sort of philosophical even question, if you like, and talk about some early or earlier philosophic attempts by philosophers to answer this question and you know people as sort of illustrious as Wittgenstein took up this question and he sort of punted, and he famously pointed to what he called family resemblances so games are a game is a thing that shares with other games certain family resemblances just like members of some extended family would share some resemblances. And this isn't really a proper definition this is kind of resigning that question. But along in like the 5060 70s. Excuse me, comes a far far lesser known philosopher named Bernard suits. Who wrote this lovely beautiful hilarious profound very very short book called the grasshopper. And the grasshopper comes from the ASAP fable the aunt and the grasshopper. So for ASAP. The aunt is the hero the aunt is the one who scurries around all summer gathering seeds knowing that the winter is looming and stockpiling them. And the grasshopper is the dummy who whistles through the meadow plays games all day collects no seeds and winter is here and has to sort of beg off the amp. For suits surprise surprise the grasshopper the player is is the hero and suits offers like a, I don't know how many words 10 word definition says a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles full stop. A voluntary attempt. You also may be familiar with the like the idea of loose illusory attitude or illusory mind this idea that we're willing to enter into a playful situation. So that's that's the voluntary attempt you and I have chosen under no duress to play this game. And the involuntary obstacles are the rules essentially the rules of the game so we've agreed to play basketball and we've decided to do this silly thing where I have to bounce the ball along the floor as I walk down the court and we also did the silly thing where we put the basket up really high for no good reason and so on and so on. And same with chess right like we've decided that I'm not allowed to knock all your pieces off of the board in the middle of the game and so on. So that's a game that's a game for Bernard suits. And I, if I recommend any book today that's not my own, the grasshopper is fantastic. What was the question, the question was about Bernard suits. So yeah, that's Brent that's Bernard suits. I think the sharpest sort of philosopher who worked on games and he sort of the culmination of his sort of research project on games was a paper called his life, a game, we are playing. And his conclusion was, maybe. Bernard suits is a really interesting guy. And I'm happy to talk about more of this kind of once we open it up later I guess. The second question was about bridge is that right. Bridge and AI. AI has not been able to the right right sure. Yeah, I'm sorry yeah yeah exactly right so as as you go as you go through the book. There's sort of common theme which is computers are better than us, even the best of us at all of these games, until you get to bridge, and you may be by that point quite relieved to learn that the best humans are still better at bridge than the best computers at least as at the kind of holistic game as played by by humans and tournaments and so on. I think there's sort of two, two reasons for that I should note that this is changing like, like literally like this weekend last week this might be changing with new work that I don't know enough about to really talk about but there's ongoing developments anyway. Let's assume that's not the case, and that we're still better. Why, why is that true. I think there's two to a two pronged answer one is sort of the romantic version of the answer, which is that bridges this very human game that requires communication and partnership and empathy for friend info and sort of all these like capital age human characteristics on top of which it's incredibly mathematically complicated and deep and and so on so maybe that has provided a sort of shell of resistance against the computer. The other reason and unfortunately probably the more convincing reason is that bridges sort of a dying game and sort of lacks the popularity at least in the sort of popular imagination to incentivize an enterprising computer scientist or an enormous company like Google who conquered go and chess in its own way to sort of, you know, at the end of the day a lot of these AI games projects part of their purposes as PR stunt. And I think the idea as well if you, if you do that with bridge a lot of people will say what's bridge. Like I said, there's, there's work on going and, and even indeed in this sort of quote unquote failed AI project on bridge one finds very colorful characters, including man named Matt Ginsburg, who is a large focus of the bridge chapter of my book and he is the closest thing to a mad scientist I have ever met in real life. So, even, even though the computers don't win the computer scientists provide a good deal of entertainment, I guess, great. Before we open it up to our audience, I have two quick questions, and one is, you know, there's some wonderful, your wonderful discoveries of and research into the ancient gains, you know, Senate, the Egyptian Senate. For example, I just wanted if you want to share any of those anecdotes with us, or even do a short reading. If there's anything that you'd like to read from above. That's an interesting idea. Let me let me take a quick glance at what I have in mind and see how long this is I don't want to like drone on too long, but I'm sure I do have a page or two in mind. Give our audience a little bit of a taste of your writing stuff with with with humans being bested by all these AI programs. Perhaps the, the human response of knocking the pieces off the board is our last. You know, this is what it shows to be a human being. Yeah, let's let's see what the computer does about that. This is the irrational. Dostoevsky's irrational man. Well, how about this, I'll just start reading at the beginning of backgammon. And if I feel like I'm boring myself then I'm pretty confident that I'm boring others, and I'll stop. This is inspired by Laura's question about the ancient sort of origins, and then I have something else I'd like to say about it so anyway here I go. 90 years ago, a team of archaeologists surveyors and dozens of workmen traveled down the Nile on a pair of large sailboats distinctive and magnificent vessels called the hobby is loaded with documents equipment and tins of food. It had recently been decided that the massive aswan dam in the southeast of lower Nubia. I'm sorry, in the southeast of Egypt was to be heightened, a project that would flood swaths of lower Nubia. The team race to excavate and catalog the region's ancient sites before they were engulfed. They embarked during three consecutive winters to avoid the heat. The first two seasons of painstaking work, however, brought disappointingly few discoveries, nothing that would eclipse the earlier archaeological finds to the north. But during the final season in 1931, the group arrived at the Royal Cemetery of Cousteau. In an otherwise empty desert amid only a few scattered palm and acacia trees, they saw a group of earthen mounds some more than 40 feet high. After climbing one and observing its perfectly circular shape, the team began to quote consider the possibility of them being the work of man. Others had gazed upon mounds like these before none had catalogued what was beneath them. With their funds running low the team took a calculated gamble, they outlaid the 200 pounds such work would cost and they began to dig. In the side of one mound they looked upon a passage just two feet tall left by grave robbers perhaps a thousand years earlier. They cleared the debris from the ancient robbers path crawling on their hands and knees and after 50 feet or so smashed through a wall and into a tomb. It turned out to be one of 61 tombs they'd find under the mounds at Cousteau. And in this one the largest of them all objects filled it quote like currents in a cake. The team found an elaborately embossed leather shield. They found a wood and iron spear a quote most formidable weapon. And they found an ivory knife decorated with the image of base, the Egyptian God of fertility. Deeper down still they came upon another object, one that at first appeared something like a picture frame, its elaborate underside was inlaid with ivory, and its corners were bracketed with silver. It was also marked with rows of 12 squares and sported a silver carrying handle beneath the object in a leather pouch they discovered 15 ivory pieces, 15 ebony pieces and a set of ivory dice. And it goes on from there. So this is one of, you know, countless sort of Egyptologist expeditions or other sort of early archaeological work that sort of everywhere. Folks Doug, they found games and in many cases, they were also able to unriddle the rules of those games either by sort of analyzing the physical object itself or finding written some cases of written rules on, you know, tablets or otherwise. And in some cases those games bore remarkable similarity to games that we still play today. So in this case, backgammon. This game in particular is Roman of Roman origin, called the game of 12 signs. So different but remarkably similar to backgammon. And I sort of include these stories, I think, for, you know, they stand alone as interesting stories but I find the longevity of games. Absolutely remarkable. I mean, games that were played in, you know, ancient bygone cities in ancient cultures are played by us today and maybe by me later tonight and this sort of like thick and durable strand through human history. I find deeply fascinating and it makes me very happy. There's no bridging between the ancient to the future there is a wonderful quote that perhaps you could illuminate that games are clues to the future. You talk about that concept. This is this is suits again. Talking there. And so suits is back to my, my hero suits. So the I mentioned the grasshopper, the subtitle of the grasshopper is called it's called like games life in utopia, something like that. And suits has a very specific thing that he means when he says utopia. So suits again writing in the 70s 1970s. Imagine's a near future world where technology has solved many of our sort of immediate problems, ie, we're well housed, we're well fed, we're well clothed, sort of the basic stuff is taking care of. The question is, well, what do we do then. And his answer is games, we play games, and he says that the, you know, the, the, the August institutions of today, which are, for the most part, erected to sort of satisfy these immediate desires that we've now taken care of will be replaced by institutions that foster and promote and improve the playing of games. And so for suits he, this is not my word he calls games, our salvation, this idea that we need to sort of start seeding this idea and seeding these institutions that will take us through past utopia that could run the runs the risk of being very boring, essentially, and like, if we don't have any necessary obstacles, right, we need to gin up unnecessary obstacles as from his definition of what a game is in the first place. So, as a lover of games I find the notion of games being our salvation extremely provocative and appealing I find the impending arrival of utopia somewhat less likely perhaps than suits did. But, but that's his idea that sort of there, there, even if there's nothing else going on, we will be fascinated by games and I'll mention another quote which is Irving Finkel is a famous philologist at the British Museum says the games were so widely played in the ancient world because there was quote bugger all to do, and things were too difficult. And I think that, you know, we can all relate to times that were too difficult and where there was bugger all to do. Right. And indeed more games were played during the pandemic then at any time in human history I think there's a fairly slam dunk empirical case to be made that that's true. So, games are the past games are the future games are the present. Thanks, Oliver. I think we can now open it up to our questions and the audience in the audience we have chess players I see a few go players there and other people who are scrabble lovers so please put your questions in the chat and Pam will be reading off the questions and we'll have a conversation. Well the first question that comes up is, though though is an interesting comment Arlene Baxter points out that the Turk, the famous 19th century chess automaton would sometimes sweep the pieces off the board if the human played an obviously silly or illegal move. So I think that's kind of a apparently that's an important component of games they they the first artificial game player had that reaction programmed in. But George Sifri the first question is George Sifri asks, I'm wondering if there are many diagrams in the book to where it would deter someone from listening to it in audio formats very practical question you just a very good question about which I thought a lot. I tried to only include them when I thought that that they really added something for the sort of lay reader, i.e. the non game expert so it's not Chaka block with chest diagrams or anything I would say on average, maybe to a chapter, and I certainly wrote around the diagrams, so as to make it very palatable and hopefully better than palatable. Listen, but no very good question. And I just want to point out here's the cover of the book fabulous. And as, as mentioned, there are, there are diagrams. Okay, carry on. So Diane asks, do you think the development of unbeatable AI programs has increased interest in games such as chess and go. Yeah, it's a good question. I think one thing that it has done these programs have done unquestionably is democratize, like skill in these games and accelerate its sort of dissemination. So I think just leaving aside the popularity question just for a second. You know, we've seen a sort of rising tide lifts all boats in almost every game and poker 100% chess I imagine I mean please correct me if I'm wrong but chess I imagine just sort of seen the average sort of quality at least that kind of competitive level increase. And why well in the poker example. So you don't need to live near a casino or a card room or you don't even need to have friends right you can you can log on to the computer you don't need to be 21 to get into the casino like all these sort of barriers to entry have fallen in the game and whereas maybe used to have to live near a good teacher or a good club so you had to live in New York or London or whatever. Now you can live anywhere and you just download XG, which is the most popular, the strongest backgammon software these days and you just play it and you get pretty good pretty quickly. You can play a lot more than people used to be able to play because you simply play faster thanks to the computer you don't have to shuffle the cards or even put the chess pieces back in the squares or anything. So, one thing I can unquestionably say is skill level, the human skill level broadly speaking has increased in like democratic and appealing way. Have they directly caused. I mean I think technology has certainly caused increases in in like popularity like as measured by just like number of people playing I mean chess in the pandemic. They're playing online chess streaming like on Twitch live streaming chess just like kids live stream video games, right like chess has sort of transmogrified into eSport for a certain section of like the chess of chess audience chess loving people. Yeah, so technology without a doubt that AI in particular. I'm not sure I mean it's probably didn't, it probably didn't hurt but it's a tough question because like, there's a question about the very pin what happens to the very very pinnacle of the game like the people who used to be actually competing against the computer and what happens to the sort of rank and file. And I would like separate those two questions out because an extreme example would be Lee Seedol, the great go player often compared in the Western press to like Roger Federer, in terms of stature and and skill and popularity. He said go retired early and he said it was because Alpha go this computer program was the best go playing entity in the universe and he was no longer interested in playing so that's, you know, one less go player arguably this answer is becoming way too long. But I think technology, of course has been a huge accelerant to games playing. Donald Trager's question when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s chess was getting really popular to watch on TV. Nowadays poker is televised on ESPN and League of Legends World Championships will sell out the chess, the chase center. 1820 K paying customers has there ever been a period in the past where there was so much passive interest in people watching other people play games. Well, I mean, my mind immediately goes back to the sport versus games question right I mean if if sports or games then we've watched people play games for a very long time. But I don't that's probably not quite what Donald was asking. I don't, I don't know I am pretty fascinated by the like professional esport culture and League of Legends and other games and how many, like exactly like you say sort of passive appreciation there is. There again. I'm not sure always how passive it really is. And what I mean by that is I think like lots of kids who, and I'm no longer kids so I'm speaking out of school but I think lots of kids are watching with the idea that they can they will one day be a professional video game streamer and I think a lot of the professional video game streamers off also do you know like lessons, YouTube lessons and stuff so I think it's almost a kind of like aspirational appreciation rather than passive appreciation maybe there's a little something to that. And then I also I also think and this is just my personal impression that the online audience for like popular chess streamers is are also arriving yes to appreciate this person playing but also for an educational experience. You know, like if you see Hikaru Nakamura, like he'll talk like while he's playing and I don't know if this is the best way to learn chess, but there's a communication happening, which you know I don't think I seek when I watch football like yeah, like Jim Nance is telling me that it's this kind of like coverage that they're running on defense or whatever but I don't I don't think I'm there to like learn. I don't know I'm making this up as I go but I feel like there's a nugget of something there. My question is from a nun. How does game theory as applied to real life events the count for humans being fundamentally unknowable, and do not predictably act out of sense of self interest, as in I have to win. I mean that's a tough one. I think. Well, I'll answer it this way. And while I'm talking I'll try to think of a better answer. The game theory when it was sort of invented, roughly speaking, 70 years ago, sort of held this implicit promise that like we, meaning a few nerds sitting around with like pencils will be able to unriddle the entirety of like human behavior because we've developed this study of the interaction of small groups of humans. And yeah this idea that with game theory we could sort of study anything. And, you know, that's clearly that the field clearly did not live up to that promise, but it has lived up to its promise in in specific domains where humans are are basically incentivized to be rational and acted with self interest so one of those would be just like an actual you know, in the sense that we've been talking about most of the time. And to the example that comes to mind and a famous one are auctions. So auctions is probably the maybe the most studied class of game in game theory. And these aren't just, you know, like silent auctions for charity and these can be like billion dollar auctions for like slices of the broadband spectrum where it's like Google bidding against AT&T bidding against the US government or whatever. So there are this and that's not the only example but there are like slices of the real world that are very accurately captured by the analyses of game theory. But like, also I think what you're describing is a problem for economics as a, as a discipline broadly, and not just game theory, I mean economics, at least like neoclassical economics relies on this idea of homo economic is sort of infinitely calculating and self interested and stuff and you know it's, it's a model, and you know, like all models, it's wrong and like some models it's useful. It's a very deep question, but I appreciate it. I have a question from Echo. I had two questions one about the origin of chess, although it has been said it was in India there are evidence that it was invented in the Persian Empire. Have you ever heard anything about it and what about that gamut. Where was it invented. My dad has been playing it and it's an extremely popular between Kurdish people in all four parts, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Yeah, I don't. What I know about chess is that there's lots of theories, many of them conflicting about its origins. That's what I know. Yeah, that I think the India sort of 1500 years ago is kind of the standard issue history. I don't, I don't know much more beyond. It sounds like what you know already. So I apologize. And I think, I think a twin, a twin problem is when a lot of ancient games like backgammon were racing games and a lot of games like backgammon use dice but you know they weren't backgammon and there's a there's a problem which is like when do you start calling backgammon backgammon, sort of how similar, like how distant of a relative are you willing to say oh this is backgammon how recent. And, you know you find you and you're the victim of like conquest so the game found in Castile and lower Nubia was Roman because Romans arrived, you know, on ships and deposed Cleopatra or whatever they did, and so you find all this Roman stuff there. Unfortunately, my, my archaeology knowledge is not deep and certainly not up to date. But millennia in backgammon's case I think is pretty fair to say, but here's, you know, yet another complicating feature. The best part of backgammon is the doubling cube. And the doubling cube was not invented until by most accounts, the early 20th century in New York City by some unknown genius. So even games, even ancient games can radically change in a certain amount of time, and you know it's still backgammon but not the one like Cleopatra played. Chapin Boyer asks how many of these AIs are designed to present not just the strongest opponent, but the most entertaining opponents. Do the go and chess AIs tend to have settings that allow lower level opponents to engage with them. I think the answer is definitely yes. I think a lot of these systems, especially like commercial systems that sort of derive from the research certainly have difficulty settings. You know, I, and people who know more about this and just should chime in but as I understand it. It's a very difficult problem to make a computer play like a not strong human to make it play believably weekly. This is not, and I see maybe Paul wants to say something, but I think I advise my students or anybody interested in playing chess to not play computers because they they the way they play is illogical and like you said, like, for example, Carlson, the world champion, he won't play a computer describes a computer this way as an idiot that beats him all the time. So that's, and also, like you said, Oliver that they cannot play a bunch of good moves and then because it's supposed to be at a dumb down level it'll suddenly play a completely ridiculous move. So it's, it doesn't have a logic to it it's not playing chess it's playing something else. I don't know how to describe it, but so yeah I think I think certainly not the most sort of entertaining version of the game in many cases certainly not to play against, but I do think that there's a certain sort of aesthetic beauty to be found in sort of the exotic way that that top engines play and sort of unexpected way and indeed go and go sort of this game we've been playing for 5000 years. And in some ways, we turned out to have been playing it wrong, right, like because this computer and this computer played these moves that at the time, AlphaGo was playing Lucy doll, people were laughing literally laughing at the computer, because its moves were so unexpected and odd looking, but possibly possibly the right ones. So, Mr. Hidari has another question. Second question is about complexity. I heard that go could be the most complex one, but my research and bias as a chess player showed because the chess pieces don't have the same values, like bat gammon or checkers, it makes it much more complex, any thought on this. And he also wants you to know I listened to your podcast on perpetual chess pod. It was great. Thank you very much. Yeah, so I think there's a number of ways that we could think of like what do we mean when we say complexity, and the most common one, the most common definition that sort of trotted out in the AI research has to do with how many basically how many positions are there in this game, how many ways could a game of chess play. So if you imagine these games as trees where every branch is a possible move into the future, how many leaves does this tree have. And as measured, thusly, go is just incomprehensibly larger than chess, but I don't think one ought to read too much into that I mean that's a very mathematical definition that I think has relatively little to do with the lived experience of playing it as a human being. It does have something to do with the lived experience of a computer or at least a certain kind of computer playing that game. I think that's that's the source of the this idea that goes to the most complex game that humans play. It's certainly not the most complex and many other definitions of complex like in some ways it's the simplest right. There's one type of piece and there's one type of move there's like two rules in the whole game. Right and it seems discovered rather than invented and more than one commentator has said if we ever discover intelligent extra terrestrial they too surely play go. Like this is just a game that was discovered and not invented so in that sense, it's the starkest and simplest and most beautiful. And I wasn't I didn't quite catch the thing about the pieces being worth different. And that's certainly true in chess. It's also certainly true and go is it not like they're not explicitly different. But like, I think part of the game is identifying the value and various parts of the board and so on. So I don't know that I have a, I feel like I'm over two or over three answering this gentleman's questions. So I apologize, but I'm, I think complexity and simplicity can mean a lot of different things. And I think go is very, very complex and very, very simple. There. Anand Rajarman asks, how much of a grounding in mathematics do you need to understand strategy for certain games like poker. Would you recommend a crash course and combinatorial math, or do you speak the language of us lay persons in your book. In my book, I certainly speak the language of lay persons, very intentionally, because I want you to buy many copies, not because you're specifically lay but because I want you to feel welcomed no matter who you are expert or lay. How much math do you need to play game like, I don't think much. I really don't think much. I think it in math and meaning like in terms of like performing calculations or some sort of linear algebraic thing at the table. I think you, what's more important is is a sort of logical grounding. Yes, in poker you need to calculate odds and the ratio between the bet that your opponent made and the size of the pot and how likely are you to hit your straight on the river or whatever but these are extremely sick. I mean this is elementary school math. But I think what's more important in becoming a good poker player is this is is a very game theoretic idea and by that I mean imagining what your opponent will do next and sort of what has he done, and therefore what can I infer about what cards he has the sort of logical getting into the mind of your opponent like, okay I know pre flop, he called and after the flop, he check raised and you know that kind of thing, what what might he have, and I think the actual calculation calculation mathematical calculation is a very very small part of this in my fairly amateur opinion. In terms of recommendation I would say rather than math books to read poker books I mean probably just starting with theory of poker the classics, David Sklansky book, and two plus two is his publisher, lots of good poker books. I have an additional question from Chapin Boyer. Is there any research that you know of working on Moncala style games at NYU Game Center we discussed the four global games with Moncala being one of them. And I wondered if it was receiving similar AI development. Oh that's cool I've, I've been to the NYU Game Center and know it's former director and very, very special place actually like a block from my apartment. Moncala. Yes, the answer is yes, but unfortunately I don't know much about it. There, I believe there's a version so there's lots of sort of versions and variants of Moncala and I believe one of them is a solved game, which is sort of this rare class of interest in game where the computer can actually play perfectly, ie you could tie with or be God, if you played him. This is kind of the shorthand. So the answer is yes, and I encourage you to look it up elsewhere if you're interested because I'm sorry I don't know much about it. I'm sorry was there a second part to that question. That was the that was the entirety of the question. Okay, just interject to say, I often get asked about various games, not often Moncala, but I'm glad you did. Why, like what's going on with him and I'm making a list, because there'll be you know, seven games, the sequel, seven more games. So I'm just keeping track of dominoes is when I get asked about a lot. Mahjong is when I get asked about a lot. Thank you. I will put you in the acknowledgments of book two. Great. Well, I want to thank Oliver rotor for inspiring us about these seven games and his new book seven games, a human history. We look forward to sharing more with you in the future. And of course, when you're here in San Francisco will love to have you enjoy Mechanics Institute and our chess club. And I also want to thank our chess staff, Paul Whitehead and Judith Sartre for joining us today and thank you our audiences come back on our next programs and come down to Mechanics Institute at 57 post Street in San Francisco once again. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody.