Tag: games

The new economics of chess

Do not underestimate Magnus Carlsen. He has been #1 in classical chess, rapid, and blitz, all at the same time. He is a huge YouTube star in chess. He has won a tournament about chess trivia, and he has been #1 in fantasy football for the whole world (not an easy feat).

And now he is bringing an economic revolution to chess, with himself as the #1 labor and equity earner at the same time.

Ancient Games

Long before Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and Risk won legions of fans, actual Roman legions passed the time by playing Ludus Latrunculorum, a strategic showdown whose Latin name translates loosely to “Game of Mercenaries.” In northwest Europe, meanwhile, the Viking game Hnefatafl popped up in such far-flung locales as Scotland, Norway and Iceland. Farther south, the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mehen dominated. To the east in India, Chaturanga emerged as a precursor to modern chess. And 5 ka ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013.

GPT-2 Chess

What does this imply? I’m not sure (and maybe it will imply more if someone manages to make it actually good). It was already weird to see something with no auditory qualia learn passable poetic meter. It’s even weirder to see something with no concept of space learn to play chess. Is any of this meaningful? I still don’t know.

MuZero

MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games – the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled – our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art. When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.

Minecraft Earth

That unlocks a class of experiences that have never been seen in a mobile AR game: coordinated actions that can happen only if multiple real people do things in the right order, standing in the exact right place. Like, say, an Adventure in which 4 people have to stand on pressure plates in the various corners of the space, thus triggering the reveal of a secret underground dungeon. You thought the Pokémon Go phenomenon of groups of people all pointing their phone in the same direction was weird? Wait until you see the Minecraft Earth version: half of them are spinning in a circle, 3 are squatting and making digging motions toward the ground, and a few others are all jumping around. Even better—they’re all talking about it. ”You can perfectly coordinate how to mine out an area or find hidden treasure if you’re with strangers, without talking, but social interaction around the common goal is a core part of what makes Minecraft Earth a different sort of multiplayer.”

Disco Elysium

a detective RPG of improbable depth. It’s part Planescape: Torment, part police procedural, part psychodrama. Your fatally hungover detective peels himself off the carpet, naked except for a pair of soiled underpants, and begins the laborious process of piecing his broken mind back together, while simultaneously attempting to solve a gruesome murder on the wrong side of the tracks.

Poker Cheat

But then I start to see things that seem so obvious, but I wonder whether they aren’t just paranoia after hours and hours of digging into the mystery. Like the fact that he starts wearing a hat that has a strange bulge around the brim — one that vanishes after the game when he’s doing an interview in the booth. Is it a bone-conducting headset, as some online have suggested, sending him messages directly to his inner ear by vibrating on his skull? Of course it is! How could it be anything else? It’s so obvious! Or the fact that he keeps his keys in the same place on the table all the time. Could they contain a secret camera that reads electronic sensors on the cards? I can’t see any other possibility! It is all starting to make sense. In the end, though, none of this additional evidence is even necessary. The gaggle of online Jim Garrisons have simply picked up more momentum than is required and they can’t stop themselves. The fact is, the mystery was solved a long time ago. It’s just like De Niro’s Ace Rothstein says in Casino when the yokel slot attendant gets hit for 3 jackpots in a row and tells his boss there was no way for him to know he was being scammed. “Yes there is. An infallible way. They won.” In 69 sessions on Stones Live, Postle has won in 62 of them, for a profit of $250k in 277 hours of play. Given that he plays such a large number of hands, and plays such an erratic and, by his own admission, high-variance style, one would expect to see more, well, variance. His results just aren’t possible even for the best players in the world, which, if he isn’t cheating, he definitely is among.