Gaming the System

I get scared to ask computers if they play games because I was brought up in the eighties when the the amazing film War Games came out. So I gotta be honest, I've never seen it, actually me neither. Wow. Okay, guys, prepare yourselves because this movie is amazing. So what now We're just gonna watch this movie and the podcast booth and we don't have time for that. I'm just gonna give you. I'm gonna sum up. So War Games is

specifically the story of a a uh a hacker. A young hacker played by Matthew Broderick, who has Fred Savage not Fred said this is pre Fred Savage. Um, before Fred Savage, we had Matthew Broderick, right, Yeah, Matthew Broderick

was the proto Fred Savage was. So Matthew Broderick is playing a part of a of a hacker and he he likes these particular computer games, so he hacks into a system in order to get a chance to play some of these games that have not been released, and one of them, one of them is Tic Tac Toe, but another one is Global Thermonuclear War. And it turns out that the AI developed by the computer scientists who created the games isn't really really sophisticated, and you can

play these simulated global war scenarios. But spoiler alert, the program gets installed into an actual military facility. It essentially infects a military facility like a virus and then starts to take over actual defense systems and prepares to launch

a full attack on the then Soviet Union. So it becomes the role of Matthew Broderick's character, along with the original programmer, to figure out a way to convince the computer, hey, you don't want to do that because it would be bad for everybody and you don't need to win this game. Computer you can let it go. They actually teach that that there is no way to win. In fact, the computer says, strange game. The only way to win is not to play. And the way that the computer figures

this out is by using an analogy. It actually starts first. It starts with the various simulations of nuclear war uh, and it runs the simulations over and over and over again. Hasn't launched anything. It's just simulating. And so you're on the big like Norad screen you see these things playing out this which is the tic Tac Toe. The reason it switches to tic tac Toe is because if you play Tic tac Toe perfectly on both sides, you will always end in a draw. And so the lesson is

there is no way to win this game. Playing this game makes no sense because you cannot win it if you are doing everything correctly. So I just saved you the the time of actually watching the movie. But it is a good film, guys, I actually really like it. All the joy in any Matthew Broderick film is not the plot. It's it's Matthew Brodick, right. So at that point the computer learns what we know that did you take that back kidding. Matthew Broderick is a Broadway superstar.

Um No that that in mutually assured destruction. Once you enter a conflict, it's game over and nobody wins. It's kind of right there in the name. Yeah, So comparing nuclear war to tic tac toe is absurd but also kind of awesome. That's able to make this abstract connection between the two. Uh, and tic tac toe is what we would call a solved game. And we'll talk more

about what solved versus unsolved means a little bit later. Uh, And we wanted to talk a little bit more about games and computers and whether or not we humans are doomed to always come in second place to computers in the long run. Will computers get to a point where they will always be better at whatever games we pick than we are? Well, maybe the stakes are high for

the computers too. I mean, I'm sure that neither of you guys ever watched the nineties CG Cartoon Show reboot, because like five people in the world watched the nineties cartoon show Reboots. I had a friend who is into it, and I tried to watch it once. It's real, silly, it's real, real, silly, I never tried to watch it. Okay, okay,

in reboot, you guys. The premise here is that when a user runs game software on a computer, all of the citizens of the computer are that are caught in the game's path must fight for their lives according to the rules of the game, and losing the game to the user means decimation or worse than one tenth destruction for all of the ones and the zeros and the sprites who make the computer run. So it's kind of

like Tron. Actually, when you play a game, the user plays the game, but the people inside the computer live or die. Yeah, in this case, the people fight against the users, not for the users. Okay, so that's probably not really what's happening in in reality, but at any rate, so we wanted to talk about this, and in order to do so, we wanted to first mention the concept of game strategy or game theory. So there are volumes written on game theory, like textbooks of in formation on

logic and game theory. But ultimately, if you really want to boil it down to its basics, game theory comes down to using strategy in order to make decisions to achieve a goal. That's really what game theory comes down to, once you get rid of everything else. And not all games actually rely on game theory. Some of them are more about random chance and less about strategic decisions made by the players. Yeah, I mean there are slot machines. I guess that counts as a game. There is no

game theory for slot machines. Yeah. No. You you might think that there's a system to win at a slot machine. You are incorrect. Uh, it's all based on timing. And the timing we're talking about is down to like hundreds or thousands of a second, so there's no way impact whatsoever on the outcome of the machine. It's pure chance if you have pushed the button or pulled the lever at just that right moment, or something like like candy Land,

where you're just rolling dice and moving pieces. Yeah. Yeah, candy Land is like a progressive slot machine. Yeah. I wish I could make a candy line joke, but it's been a long time since I've played that game. Alright. So, so games that do involve strategy, you should try it sometimes. It's pretty sweet, nice, nice, all right. So anyway, games that are have straightforward strategies include stuff like chess. That's pretty obvious, right, Checkers or drafts if you're English und

draft Yeah, drafts, I've never heard this. Draft Checkers, that is the pro that's the proper name for Checkers. Actually, yeah, the the actual older name for Checkers as drafts. Do they have cracker barrels in the UK? I hope not. I doubt it. Yeah, I don't. I've never seen one. Uh if if you work at a cracker barrel in the UK, give us a shout. So other games that also involved strategy connect for Tic Tac toe go is

another one. There are lots and lots of these, and some of the games have enough strict parameters or rules in play that make them solvable. Right, And so this is a concept in in game strategy that there are some games that are solved in other games that are not solved. And basically, a solved game is a game where if you know the starting conditions and players play at optimal performance, meaning they all make the perfect or best decision every time. Yeah, you can predict exactly what

the game is going to be. Right, this would be This would be a ken to having two people sit down at a chessboard and before anyone's even touched a piece, one person says mate, and twelve moves and the other guys like, very well done, and they shake hands they leave. But of course chess is not solved, No, it is not.

Chess is much too complicated to have solved. You can't know what all of the possible moves in chess are and not like our current computing powers, right, Uh, yeah, I mean there's so many possible series of moves in chess. I kind of doubt that could ever be calculated. You are not the only person to doubt that. As for solved games, there are three broad categories of solved games. There's ultra weekly solved games, weekly being w E a K. Not not like every week a game this really really

comes out every week. This would be this is really really not strong. Uh. You can only predict the outcome accurately from the initial position, meaning before any player has made a move. And uh, at that point, it would just say like, all right, well, assuming that everyone plays optimally. For example, with Connect four, the first player is always gonna wine if you always you know, if no matter if both players are playing perfectly, player one always wins

Connect four. Uh. Weekly solved games include not just the prediction of the outcome, but also a strategy for its eiaving it from the initial positions. So essentially saying, here is the the process through which you will always hit this particular outcome. Uh. Strongly solved games include strategy to achieve the best possible outcome from any point of the game, even parts of the game where someone may have made

a mistake earlier on. UH. So this would be where if you would look at a game that's already in progress and say, all right, from this point forward, we're going to have perfect play on both sides and you could still predict who was going to win. So you gave the example of tic tac toe in the movie

War Games. But this is a solved game if players, If both players are playing perfectly, and there are perfect ways to play, there the optimal moves you can make in any given game, then it's always going to end in a draw. That's exactly right, which is why I say that's why the computer it comes to the conclusion that there is no point in playing because there's no way to win. So winning a tic tac toe do pens on your opponent making a mistake right exactly. You

also mentioned Connect four. Yes, that one was solved in twice. It was by two different independent researchers, and it was weekly solved to show that the first player can always force a win given perfect play, and in it was actually strongly solved to the point where at any given moment within a game, if you took over from that point forward, you could you could predict who was going

to win based upon that previous positioning. It wouldn't always be player one in that case, because they may have made mistakes. So next we have nine Men's Morris. I don't know what that is. If you played Assassin's Creed Black Flag, you would because it's a game that exists within that game and you get achievements for playing it and winning. So I played a lot of nine Men's Morris. Nine Men's Morris involves it is a not no, it's

not specifically a pirate game. There's a board game in which you have spaces where you can place a piece, and so the first part of the game involves placing your pieces on the board strategically. The second part of the game involves moving those pieces along specific pathways that are available to you and you're trying to line up three pieces in a line, and if you can line up three pieces in a line, then you are allowed

to take one of your opponent's pieces off the board. Well, whereas your opponent is trying to do the same thing while also preventing you from lining up three three pieces in a line. So one of the things I've noticed so far about all of these examples is that they don't include any element of luck. Yeah, these are all again very much strategic games. These are games where it requires the player to make a decision, and then the player's decision is uh, you know, whatever happens from that.

The consequences of that are all based upon the strategy of the other player as well. So I'm sure we'll talk more in later in the episode about games that are a combination of skill in law. Yes, but but checkers or or droughts, drafts, Well, we're we're American. We can say drafts, some of the British douce drafts. But so you're saying checkers like they play at the cracker barrel? Was that's a solved game? Solved in two thousand seven.

It had been close to being solved for much longer than that, but officially solved in two thousand seven, which was proving that from the initial standpoint standpoint, both players can play to a draw with optimal play. So so even if you go second, yeah, you can at least play to a draw. You may not win, but you can at least play to a draw. So if you are player too and you lose, it's your fault. Uh. It took. It took eighteen years to solve checkers. At

one point they had two hundred computers working on this. Yeah, that's because there are five hundred billion billion possible arrangements that could appear on an eight pie eight checkerboard. So it's real impractical to analyze every single one of those that this The solving of it was the odyssey of one Jonathan Schaefer, who's a comp scientist who began with just sixteen megs of memory on a computer in and and built out this this solvability issue. Uh it took.

It took really the scaling up of computer power to make it possible. This is you know this, this is not simple stuff. Obviously, it's interesting because a lot of these games are very easy for us to grasp as players. We understand the rules and the basics and the and general strategies pretty intuitively. But when it comes to proving the you know that you have solved the game, that you know definitively how the outcome will will be based

upon perfect play, that's a lot trickier. Some games are only partially solved, So chess is partially solved, but only from an end game standpoint. Yeah. Yeah, So if you say, um, you know, the only pieces left on the board, or these five or something, and they're in these positions, there

is a perfect way to play. And as you get more pieces on the board, it gets way more complicated because you have more options, more variables, and so I think when you get up to about seven pieces, it's really that's really like the limit of how far you can solve. And not all of those uh permutations are solved, yet some of them are, because again it depends on the combination of pieces. Pieces move in different ways depending upon there that what piece you're talking about, whether it's

upon or a bishop or a rook or whatever. Uh. And then there's some other ones that have been solved for smaller versions of the game, like Go Go as a game, which is really interesting, and that you can play it on different size boards that determine how many pieces are in place. So a five by five board of go has been solved. There's a perfect way to play it, Yes, but most people play it on something like a nineteen by nineteen board, which is nowhere close

to being solved. So again, is partially because of just the amazing complexity of the game at that scale. Sure, Now, whether or not a game has been solved doesn't necessarily mean that humans can beat a computer at playing it consistently. Yeah, as it turns out, computers don't have to have a solved that they don't have to know quote unquote the solution in order to still beat the pants off a

human opponent, even a really good human opponent. Yeah. So chess is not solved, but we've gotten to the point where computers will always be the best human chess player, even way back. Yeah, this was the famous case. It's sort of like the people people likened this to the story of John Henry and the and the uh steam engine that was laying down tracks, like the man versus machine story. But this was the man versus machine story

for the twentieth century. So in u there was actually a chess rematch between Gary Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue computer. And Kasparov and Deep Blue had met in ninety six for a series of six games, which Kasparov won four to two. But in the nineties seven match, Deep Blue one it beat Kasparov. I think it's like three and a half games to two and a half games, the haves being I believe draws. So they you know, now we saw a machine beat a chess master for the

first time. By the way, Kasparov actually demanded a rematch, he had match. Yeah, he had claimed that there was some hanky panky going on, and IBM declined his request because they said they essentially had proven, they had proven what they set out to prove. And since then these chess programs have become more powerful and sophisticated. But what they're actually doing isn't evaluating strategy so much as running through every single possible option at that time. Give then

the board and the peace position. Yeah, like in encryption or decryption, I should say, this is called brute force. Yeah, you're essentially throwing everything you can at the system to find out what works right. So that's that's really what brute force is all about. So it might look at the chess board and say, okay, if I move my queen here, what would be my opponent's best next move or what would be all of his or her possible next ye yeah, yeah. So let's say let's say that

you say, all right, let's move my queen. Uh up, you know, one square we're moving it, moving the queen forward one square. What are all the possible responses to that move? And then what are my responses to those? And then after figuring all that out, all right, well, what if we move the queen two squares? What are all the possible responses and what are my And that's for every single piece that's in a position that can be moved. And remember chess has certain rules that also

complicate things like there's the rule about castling. Castling adds another variable to that sort of stuff. There's also timing. I mean, you can't have the computer takes seventeen hours to decide what moved moved to make yea. So now those roote force with computers that are sufficiently they're sufficiently fast, they can make these decisions relatively quickly. If we humans played like this, a chess game would last year entire life.

You would never finish the game because you would be constantly evaluating all these potential moves before finally settling settling on the one that's waited to be the strongest. But that's essentially what chess games and other computer games are doing. They are looking at all the different possibilities and picking the one that's the most advantageous or at least advantageous

to a certain degree. Because if you set your difficulty, because a lot of chess programs allow you to set the difficulty of the thing, what they'll do is they'll say, all right, well, we'll just look for x amount of time and use the best one out of all of that, rather than evaluate the entire board and all the pieces. Yeah, and so in this case, the strength of the program would probably be based on something like how many moves

in advance can it look right? And and how quickly can it execute that, because if it can't execute it within enough time, it may have to, you know, cut

back on that. Um So, one thing I thought was really interesting is that there's a new approach to creating a chess playing computer that does not rely on brute force and It comes from Matthew Lay of the Imperial College of London, and what he did was he developed a learning algorithm and a neural network, which we've talked about so much on this show, right, neural networks and learning algorithms to teach a computer rather than to program a computer. So he taught a computer chess. He uh.

He created a computer program called it Giraffe and started to teach it how to play chess. Before he even got started teaching at chess, he tested it against a a standardized system that is used to evaluate how well a computer program does in chess, as a top score fifteen thousand, so before we had even schooled it, where it knew the it knew the less. It knew the rules of chess, but didn't hadn't really learned the value of various gambits. It scored six thousand, which is not bad.

After he schooled it, and by that I mean he fed on five million different chess positions into the database, because you need huge data sets for learning algorithms to work. Then he set Giraffe against itself. It played itself in a series of games to start learning which positions were the most valuable, which one's made you vulnerable, which one's led to victory or defeat. He then tested it again and this time it scored uh, like nine thousand, seven hundred,

so much higher. Yeah, yeah, And that still means that it's not perfect, right, but it's it's at a level that is consider stint with an international master of chess. So this is a computer program that learned chess, and it looks at the entire board and the piece positions on the board and then evaluates that based upon their attacks and defense capabilities. So it's kind of the way

we play chess. Yeah, exactly. I think statistically speaking, it only picks the quote unquote best move about half of the time. Yeah, a little less than half, like forty six percent of the time it picks the the quote unquote best move, but the best move is it tends to be in the top three choices around seventy percent of the time. And that's pretty good when you consider it's not doing brute force, it's not planning all of

these out. It's it's essentially taking a look and then intuitively, which is a weird thing to say, but that's as close as I can get feeling out which one is the best approach, So about half the time it gets the absolute best choice, and seventy percent of the time the best choice is within its top three options. But this doesn't mean that you cannot beat the pants right off of a computer in some games. Yeah, you can

totally do that in some games. There are some games that computers still cannot beat the best human players, And then there are other games where computers are just horrible, like they can't even beat average players. Yeah, if you're really stronge, well, yeah, when you when you play a game where the rules are made up on the fly, it's very hard for computers. X k c D is

responsible for that particular example. Uh So go A is a good example, like I was saying before, where you have a board of like nineteen by nineteen positions that you can start to play in. A really strong human player can beat a computer in that case, because computers just can't deal with all the variables. And uh, it's still a challenge. I mean, it's still really hard, but

it's possible. Other games don't rely heavily on strategy, so then the computers are at a loss because the one thing they do really well may not play as an important role in those games, and especially if you have incorporated randomness into your gameplay in some respect, like whether it's dice or shuffling up cards, that kind of stuff where your position, however you wanted to fine, that is

not fully determined just by your strategy, but also by luck. Yeah. Yeah, And lots of games involve a little bit of luck, like a poker or scrabble. Yeah, poker is a is a very interesting example to me because you could argue about that there are different levels of skill involved in poker. I mean, there are a lot of it is just luck, it's the cards you're drawing, but skill, the the effect of skill on poker emerges over the course of playing

many hands. There there are three things I would argue that go into determining whether or not you're going to be successful at any given poker game where you're not not a hand but a game ease of hands. One is luck the cards that you draw. That's going to be part of it too. And keep in mind that you know, bluffing is still a strategy in poker. If you're effective at bluffing, you may be able to win

even with lousy cards. Two is an understanding of the statistical probability of what other people are holding in their hands. So knowing what you should bet and how you should play based on the cards you have and the probability of receiving other cards. So if it's texas hold them and you're looking at the flop, which are the first three cards that are laid down face up, and you have, you're looking at the cards in your hand. You can then start to think, well, those cards are now eliminated

from my opponent's hands. There's no way they can hold those cards because I know what they are, I see them. What are the combinations that could beat the cards I have combined with the flop. That's the sort of stuff you have to start thinking about, what are the odds that someone at this table can beat the hand that I have. Then there's the third part that computers really can't handle, just getting a read on the playing style of your opponents, knowing which ones are aggressive, which ones

are timid, which ones might be playing on tilt. While it's especially difficult because humans are good at playing against expectations, or good humans are, I mean, so a computer can look at the what you've done in previous hands and say well, okay, this player tends to be raising the bed every time, and so I think that this player

is probably bluffing sometimes. Like you could design a program that wouldn't make that analysis, but it's hard to design a program that understands that that other player is trying to get you to think that that's how he or she plays, so he or she can then surprise you when you're vulnerable the good old check raise or something

along those things lines. I remember seeing poker games where really really strong poker players, could you know what they would start talking during the tournament, and like as they're looking at their opponent with and they're deciding what to do, and they even figure out what cards the person's holding, like at least one of them, uh, one of them in particular, I remember him saying, like, you gotta I

guess you've got to have a queen. And I look at the cards that have been shown, including the ones that you know held by the other players, that I know what those cards are, but he doesn't. He hasn't seen them because he's not watching the camera where it

reveals where all the cards are. And it was amazing to me because the guy held a queen and it was phenomenal that he was able to use deductive reasoning based upon the guy's behavior and the cards that were already out and the ones that he held in his hand, and was able to be that accurate. Now, computers could cheat, they could know that if it was built into the program. But I gotta tell you, I've played a lot of games that are that put you against a computer opponent

in poker. They're lousy, they're not consistent, they don't they don't behave with any logic. I mean, if you're playing Texas hold Them and you're playing one of those poker games, half the time they're going for they're going to see the entire hand, like the flop and the turn the river. They want to see the whole thing. And they might have like a two seven, and you're thinking, no human apart from a couple of crazy people, would ever stay

in this hand that long. They would have folded immediately. But computer, if you yeah, if you haven't programmed in the concept of of personal stakes in a game, then a computer is going to behave radically. It also doesn't help that in most computer games, you're obviously playing with fake money, so there's no there's no consequence to losing, and probably it's not like in Reboot where the computer losing is going to destroy part of its little interior

computer town. Probably not. Another game that includes both random chance and strategy would be something like Yachtzi. Pretty simple game, right, But when you make a role, then you have to decide what category does that role go into on your sheet? And every time you put down a category that one is, it's then inaccessible to you for the rest of that

round of the game. Right, So if I roll three fives, I could say, all right, well I want this to go on my fives category, or I might say, no, I want this to go in my three of a kind category. Um, so there's a bit of strategy as well as the random chance. You don't know what your next role is going to be. Another one I would think of is Risk, Like there's some amount of strategy, but there's also a large degree of luck based on dice rolls. Yeah, here's the way I know how how

the game is gonna go. For Risk, if you ask me to play, I've already lost. Uh yeah, I would say. A way of predicting the end of Risk is did you start playing it will end with people quitting and rage slipping the table and hating you forever. I just go, I just go straight to the hate because I I've only ever played it once and it was one of those things where because of the way the game went, I was eliminated before I even had a chance to

do anything. Oh yeah, yeah, things like like Monopoly and Settle of Catan are other examples of games that are partial strategy and partial random chance uh largely table flipping. There are, of course, other games that involve absolutely no strategy, like Shoots and Ladders or Snakes and Ladders or the aforementioned candy Land. Yeah. These are games that are more

like distractions than anything else. It's it's you know, you can kind of get the feeling of hey, I won or darn I lost, but then eventually you get to the point where you're like, no, I roll dice and that's what determined everything wicked. We move one space at a time, a citizens quote, isn't it all right? And then there are games that rely heavily on intuition and interpretation. These are games that are not designed with like cards

or dice. Necessarily, they can incorporate those, but I'm thinking of stuff like pictionary. Yeah, see, that's great. You can have definite skill at this game. You can get good

at it. But I'm sure computers are just awful. Well yeah, because I mean you can you can create abstract representations of things in these games which humans can understand because we can have these weird associative things in our brains that, oh, because you're acting that way, I happen to know that the thing you're acting out is pulp fiction, you know, which could could be whether it's, you know, mimicking something that's going on in the movie and that's how I

know it, or it's because you've acted out the individual words. However that might be Wait a second, I take that back, because actually I think a computer could probably destroy people at pictionary by just Google image searching the term and then drawing pictures of the results that come up. A computer is probably better at drawing than I am. I'm

pretty crap at drawing. It would be good at drawing, It would not necessarily be good at guessing, because it would then have to look at the abstract nature of things that we draw and then figure out what concrete concept is linked to that. Although I'm wondering right now if something like like shrade, well not shrades, probably because

that would involve full my robot, really lame party. But it's something like like Google Deep Dream could be successful at pictionary by kind of reverse engineering, I don't know. And well, we're seeing some more sophisticated image recognition software out there where it looks like we could get to a point where computers could at least make a guess

based upon uh, certain drawings. And there's certain certain shapes that seem to be more or less universal when you want to draw something, so like a cat, you know, you see, besides those who are actually really good at drawing, for those of us like me who struggle with keeping within the lines in a coloring book, it's going to be a circle and a couple of triangles for years.

You know, you know that, oh that's a cat. Um. There's certain things I think that are almost universal in that respect, and computers could easily start to recognize those as well. So the big difference obviously is the role that rules play and that strategy works within those rules. If you have very well defined rules and you have a lot of restrictions on what can actually happen within the game, and there's not a lot of variability there. Those are games that are easier to solve and also

easier for computers to totally dominate. Um, the more you get into variable rules or different styles of play, different options that you could have during the course of the game. Intelligence, that's a big one. Humans will do better at those two. Yeah, And this is partially described the former part more so by the game theory concept of convergence versus divergence, which says that games that are more solvable tend to converge their pieces and possible moves towards the end of the game.

In other words, there are fewer ways to win the further along in the game that you get. Less solvable games have more pieces in play and and more possible moves towards the end, thus making it harder, even with a very powerful computer, to to list all of the potential piece positions and moves that can lead to a winning board layout. So yeah, it's it's what do you

guys think? Do you guys think we're going to eventually be in a future where no matter what the game is, apart from you know, kill the computer, the computer is always going to win. Uh yeah, I think for for essentially all math based or strictly logic based games that that involved what would you call them, you know, numerical quantities or something as the ways of scoring and measuring advantage,

computers are going to dominate. Even even in the ones where they're not winning now, they will soon be able to defeat all human experts because it's really just just a matter of of programming and processing power. Sure well, I mean I if it comes down to ultimately there is a best way to do this, computers have the

advantage and that they can evaluate all the other ways. Now, the ones I don't know about are the ones like, uh like the games that have social intelligence aspects which I mentioned, like bluffing in poker, and obviously the randomness of it also plays a factor in that there can be quote unquote luck where the computer could end up with the worst rolls, the worst cards, whatever it may be, and that is enough to offset its strategic dominance of

the game. Although I do wonder that that even with with poor luck, because because you can you can have a poor hand and still when it poker. I wonder if especially with with digital imaging and recognition. A computer could be taught to to identify and exploit a person's tells well, especially better than a human if you could use a an algorithm similar to the one we talked about with the sound, where it can actually detect your

heartbeat through your neck. It's looking it's looking at your pulse through your neck and can tell what it increases, and thus can map that to how excited you are about the hand or how much dread you're feeling about the hand you have. Yeah, you're talking about some some I mean that's a that's a computer that can really read in a pope that I'm only kind of joking. Yeah, yeah, no,

I mean that. And like my nude eye dilation temperature changes, look at it in the in the infrared spectrum laser infrared, uh voice changes. Sure, yeah, wow, we were I don't think computers will ever be better than humans at the most dangerous game hunting humans. I stand to disagree, but that's a whole documentary series about that. Uh yeah, it's um.

You know, I think there are certain games that are are inherently human that that I think computers will The only time computers will really start winning is when humans and computers. There's no longer a distinction between the two, where the two have merged at some point and become one unified thing. And who knows, we might be playing

totally different games at that point. But yeah, this was a fun thing to think about, just like, what are the games of the future going to be like, not just you know, in the video game sphere, but just games in general. What is play in the future? And um, I'm sure we're going to see a lot more examples of people still wanting to test their skills, both against

human and computer opponents. Um, it could be fun, it could be really frustrating if you're like me and have an incredible competitive streak paired with an almost comedic inability to win a game. Um, and as long as I can beat a computer at Betrayal at the House in the Hill, I'm happy. So let's just keep that street going, folks.

That's all I'm saying. All right, guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, I recommend you write them in and let us know the email addresses FW thinking at how stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Google Plus, Twitter or Facebook at Google Plus and Twitter. We are FW thinking over at Facebook. Just search FW thinking, it'll pull up our profile. You can go in there and you can leave us a message and we will talk to

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