Seven Games: A Human History

known simply and profoundly as the Main Event. Certain televisual imagery of the WSOP lingers in the mind. Baseball-capped men in sunglasses and logoed sweatshirts. Teetering piles of gaudily colorful chips. Incantations of the words “all in” accompanied by elbows out, palms in pushing motions. Dealers wearing vests, painstakingly dealing flops, tu

I don’t believe I was deluded; when I faced off against the machine or strong players online, I didn’t expect to win. But I was improving. I recognized more patterns, moved my checkers more efficiently, and took more of the correct risks. I came to understand that the appeal of this game, like the method used to train its AI players, is not winning

But I wondered about the toll of a life devoted to dice, to randomness. Mochy took a dispassionate view: that the mathematics are sound and that chance, given a chance, becomes a certainty. “I always say it this way: it’s like playing roulette,” he said, comparing himself to the extra numbers on the wheel that give the casino an advantage. “And in

And Mochizuki, the best in the world, continues to study. Like nearly everyone else, he records his games to video. He then uploads them to YouTube, where he pays a different set of humans to transcribe the raw video into machine-readable game records, ready for XG’s analysis. Ancient board games, meet advanced capitalism.

The boom-and-bust cycles of games have a lot to do with how much luck is involved in their play: the more randomness, the longer the cycle—the longer people can keep convincing themselves that they have a chance to win. The chess boom, sparked by Fischer’s win in 1972, while fierce, was short, fizzling within a couple of years. In chess, one faces

There is nothing explicit in the rules of Go that says a group of stones with two eyes can’t be captured. Rather, that fact arises solely from subtle interactions of the game’s atomic parts. It’s no accident, therefore, that life and death are themselves core concepts in the game. Stones are said to be alive when they can never be captured, like th

The Deep Blue team was asked by the corporate PR division to dress well and not smile during the closing ceremony—in deference, apparently, to the human race. The day after the match, IBM’s stock price soared to a ten-year high.

The true motivation of a computer scientist developing a game-playing AI is not dissimilar to that of a parent spending valuable time and energy raising a child. It is an act of creation. Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, upon contemplating his creature, said, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures

Or, put more succinctly: a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”