Class distinction: these games got played
[ by Charles Cameron — who just realized the Lotto would be as hard for a machine to beat as his own HipBone Games ]
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A friend pointed me to the Washington Post’s story of a chess grandmaster caught cheating with help from an iPhone today, and the phrase “a simple cellphone can transform anybody into a grandmaster” struck home immediately. Not possible, I tweeted, with games of analogy, HipBone, Sembl &c, the human being, not the computer, is key — in games, intel analysis, etc. Big data crunches well, I continued, but the human mind digests!
Y’see, I’m somewhat proud of the fact that my HipBone Games would be more difficult than Chess — more difficult even than Go — for a computer like IBM’s Watson to play at grandmaster level.
And then my eye was caught by the parallel story of an IT specialist who goes up for trial on Monday on charges of “fixing” himself a winning Lotto ticket.
Lotto is way downmarket compared to Chess. no? And the prize for the winner of the 17th annual Dubai Open Chess Tournament was $12,000, whereas the lucky Lotto winner’s grab netted him $14.3 million. Go figure, and use your smartphone if you wish.
Could Watson beat the Lotto? I don’t believe it could. Does that make Lotto more upscale — more demanding, more difficult or an AI to fudge — than my HipBone Games? Maybe it does : (
Ah well.
In any case, human beats random number generator — score yet another win for the human mind!
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Sources:
Washington Post, Chess International Business Times, Lotto
