The Dice Roll On

What do caribou bones have to do with AI technology?

This month’s whisperbubble might be a bit of a detour from my mission to provide a delightful alternative to doomscrolling, in that it’s definitely current events-adjacent. However, if you delight in the history of big ideas and pondering how they fit together, I think you will enjoy this.

I read Kelly Clancy’s book Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World this summer and I was fully absorbed by it. It’s a fast-moving, engaging and wide-ranging exploration of game theory that weaves a path through chess, Go, and SimCity, but also eBay, military strategy, biological evolution (a lot of it is admittedly over my head), urban planning, economics, and yes, AI. There are a lot of ideas in this book. I have chosen to illustrate only a single chapter, Chapter Three: Dice Playing God.

In order to keep this to a reasonable length (there are nine panels, a little bit longer than usual) I’ve had to omit a wealth of worthy details and greatly oversimplify, hopefully without doing damage to her material. If you’re curious I’d urge you to read Playing With Reality for yourself, all the way through.

And let me know what you think of this. Enjoy!

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Until next time!