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Watch as magician Derren Brown beats a room full of grandmasters and other top chess players even though he doesn’t really play chess all that well. At the end, he explains how he did it…it’s a dead simple clever method.
Riffing in part off of Atul Gawande’s recent piece in the New Yorker about controlling healthcare costs, Jay Parkinson argues that most health solutions aren’t medical, they’re social.
In the past 4 months, I’ve changed my life for the better in three significant ways.
Why?
My relationships changed, and thus my everyday changed. I began eating with someone who ate differently than me. I adopted her eating habits, which spurred me to change how I ate. I also spent more time with Grant, who introduced me to the world of urban cycling. I adopted his lifestyle and his interests. And then I changed myself and started pushing my heart in the gym.
I’m playing Health Month this month, mostly just for the hell of it. The game is built to be social…there are teams, players offer each other support, etc. Just two days in, I can see why this might work for me: it turns private goals into public rules.
Dan Feyer can solve a NY Times crossword puzzle in as little as a minute and twenty-two seconds.
His brain is jammed with factoids: the names of songs and rock bands that lived and died before he was born, far-flung rivers and capitals, foreign sports equipment, dead astronomers, fallen monarchs, extinct cars, old movies, heroes of mythology, dusty novelists and the myriad other bevoweled wraiths that haunt the twisted minds of crossword constructors. He has learned their wily tricks and traps, like using “number” in a clue that most people would take to mean “numeral” but that really meant “more numb.”
The article includes a sped-up video of Feyer solving the notoriously difficult Saturday NY Times puzzle in under six minutes.
Caitlin Burke solved a Wheel of Fortune puzzle after only guessing a single letter…and she didn’t even really need that.
From a blog post by Chris Jones, who previously wrote about the guy who aced The Price is Right.
But something about Burke’s moment — the mean-girl giggles in the audience when she asked to solve the puzzle; Sajak’s speechlessness after she did — better captured the imagination. People watching her clip as it crackled across the Internet responded the same way the stunned contestant standing next to her did. Like that poor guy named Rick, they looked at her, and back at the puzzle, back at her, and back at the puzzle, trying to figure it out: How did she do that?
“There are a million things I’m not good at,” she told me on Tuesday. “But Wheel of Fortune, I can do.”
Scrabb.ly is a massively multiplayer game of Scrabble…everyone plays on one gigantic board. It’s insane how large the board is. (thx, zach)
Health Month is a game designed to help you improve your health.
There are about 50 different kinds of rules. Half of them are rules about what to avoid - things like alcohol, white flour, artificial sweeteners, and illegal drugs. And half of them are rules about what you do more of - things like exercise, sleep, greens, and multivitamins. Choose however many you like, and ignore the rest (you can always add more next month, right?). After choosing your rules, you have the option of making a promise to yourself about how to reward yourself if you stay in the game all month, or to build in consequences if you don’t make it. It’s all about self-accountability, in public. It works.
When Jane McGonigal got a concussion last year, her recovery was taking longer than expected and she got discouraged. Then she decided to make her recovery process into a game called SuperBetter.
SuperBetter is a superhero-themed game that turns getting better in multi-player adventure. It’s designed to help anyone recovering from an injury, or coping with a chronic condition, get better, sooner - with more fun, and with less pain and misery, along the way.
The game starts with five missions. You’re encouraged to do at least one mission a day, so that you’ve successfully completed them all in less than a week. Of course, you can move through them even faster if you feel up to it.
McGonigal recently gave a short talk about SuperBetter:
and has plans to make a SuperBetter game guide so that anyone can play. (via mr)
After pretty much solving chess with Deep Blue, IBM is building a computer called Watson to beat human opponents at Jeopardy. It’s not quite at Ken Jennings’ level, but it’s holding its own versus lesser humans.
Deep Blue was able to play chess well because the game is perfectly logical, with fairly simple rules; it can be reduced easily to math, which computers handle superbly. But the rules of language are much trickier. At the time, the very best question-answering systems — some created by software firms, some by university researchers — could sort through news articles on their own and answer questions about the content, but they understood only questions stated in very simple language (“What is the capital of Russia?”); in government-run competitions, the top systems answered correctly only about 70 percent of the time, and many were far worse. “Jeopardy!” with its witty, punning questions, seemed beyond their capabilities. What’s more, winning on “Jeopardy!” requires finding an answer in a few seconds. The top question-answering machines often spent longer, even entire minutes, doing the same thing.
Here are two people playing the world’s shortest Monopoly game (21 seconds long):
The four turns required are detailed here.
Viswanathan Anand defended his title as world chess champion by beating Veselin Topalov in the final game of their 12-game match today.
The match between Anand and Topalov was hard fought, partly because Topalov invoked a rule for the contest that forbids the players from offering draws to each other. The rule, named after the city where the match was being played, insured that there would be no short draws. As the match wore on and fatigue took a toll, both players began to make mistakes with greater frequency.
“Anand” was briefly a global Trending Topic on Twitter this afternoon, which was unexpected and nice.
Oh, man. Now you can play the original Super Mario Bros game as Link from Zelda, Mega Man, Samus Aran, and others. Really really fun. The only thing that could make this better is if you could play as NHL94’s Jeremy Roenick or Tecmo Bowl’s Bo Jackson. (thx, will)
Physicist John Wheeler devised a variant of the Twenty Questions game called Negative Twenty Questions in which, unbeknownst to the guesser, everyone privately picks their own object, resulting in a game where both the guesser and the object choosers are required to narrow their choice in object with each round.
When returning Joe (let’s call him) asks the standard bigger-than-a-breadbox question, if the first person says no, then the other players, who may have selected objects that are bigger, now have to look around the room for something that fits the definition. And if “Is it Hollow?” is Joe’s next question, then any of the players who chose new and unfortunately solid objects now have to search around for a new appropriate object. As Murch says, “a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens.” Yet somehow this steady improvisation finally leads — though not always, there’s the tension — to a final answer everyone can agree with, despite the odds.
Wheeler thought the game resembled how quantum mechanics worked.
So one day Mattel said, let’s piss a lot of people off. I know, we’ll change the Scrabble rules to allow proper nouns. Kids love branding!
A spokeswoman for the company said the use of proper nouns would “add a new dimension” to Scrabble and “introduce an element of popular culture into the game”. She said: “This is one of a number of twists and challenges included that we believe existing fans will enjoy and will also enable younger fans and families to get involved.”
I also like this part:
Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not.
So you can just make shit up! Or maybe you don’t have to…look at all these useful and real brand abbreviations: BMW, IEEE, XHTML, VW, SQL, QT, BBC, AAA, NAACP. No vowels, lots of vowels, more Q and X words…no more discards.
Update: Woo, that was fun but really there’s nothing to get bent out of shape about.
Here’s what’s actually happening. Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, is introducing a game this summer called Scrabble Trickster. The game will include cards that allow players to spell words backward, use proper nouns, and steal letters from opponents, among other nontraditional moves. The game will not be available in North America, where rival toy company Hasbro owns Scrabble. Hasbro, I’m told, has no plans for a similar variation.
Jeremy Bernstein remembers playing chess with Stanley Kubrick…and witnessing the legendary Fischer/Spassky match.
All during the filming of 2001 we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. Finally we reached the 25th game and it was agreed that this would decide the matter. Well into the game he made a move that I was sure was a loser. He even clutched his stomach to show how upset he was. But it was a trap and I was promptly clobbered. “You didn’t know I could act too,” he remarked.
Speakers move air to make sound. Some clever developer has used this fact to make a foosball game that uses small puffs of air from the iPhone’s speakers to move a tiny real-life Styrofoam ball around. Video (or it didn’t happen):
Another app from the same company called the iPhone Blower can blow out birthday candles. (via convo.us)
You never expect too much from the first few questions of an interview, but this interview of chess world #1 Magnus Carlsen is good right out of the gate.
SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?
Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.
SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.
Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that.
SPIEGEL: How that?
Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.
SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?
Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
His comparison of his abilities with Garry Kasparov’s later in the interview is interesting as well.
Garry Kasparov discusses the very interesting history and evolution of machines playing against humans in chess.
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
The section about people using computers *during* matches is particularly interesting.
Dennis Crowley notes that Target is turning checking people out into a game for their cashiers in order to speed things up.
Girl running the checkout […] said the whole thing “makes work feel like a game”.
Update: A Target employee chimed in with more information in the comments here.
This fun little post talks about how the economics of pinball changed as it became more and then less popular.
In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval.
How to win at Scrabble if you’re perhaps not that good at the words thing.
Scrabble isn’t a game of who can get the best 6 letter words. It’s a game of points and squeezing 2 letter terms into corners. Mehal Shah takes us through clean and sometimes dirty ways to win at Scrabble.
(via radar)
Several times in Last Year at Marienbad, the characters play a game called Nim. The gameplay is simple: a) players take turns removing objects from rows, b) they can remove as many objects as they want from a single row in one turn, and c) the player who removes the last object loses. The strategy is somewhat more difficult to understand, even though the player who goes first and follows the optimal strategy will always win. Although somewhat less glamourous than the film version, a Flash version of Nim is available to play.
From a promotional email sent out by Wired Magazine:
For a limited-time, subscribe to WIRED and get the Mystery Issue guaranteed!* Edited by J.J. Abrams, co-creator of Lost and director of the new Star Trek movie, this issue is sure to be like no other.
*while supplies last
Guaranteed? Inconceivable! And speaking of that issue of Wired, be prepared to read a bunch about how it is going to save print media by moving the crossword from the games page into the entire rest of the magazine.
So, as Mr. Bevacqua wrote on his blog, he spent the next several days following the hidden clues he believed he’d found, using Morse code, alternative computer keyboard layouts and even electrician’s wiring codes to solve the covert brainteasers. Finally he was directed to a hidden Web site, from which he sent an e-mail message to a secret account. A short while later he learned that he was the first Wired reader to solve an extensive hidden puzzle embedded throughout the magazine.
(thx, lloyd)
BallDroppings might be the next Line Rider. Or maybe it was the original Line Rider. If you don’t know what that means, congratulations and go play this fun thing with musical balls and lines. You can also get it for Windows or the Mac. Has anyone made actual music with this sucker? If you take a crack at it, send me a link to a video of the results. (via this is that)
Damn you, Gruber, for getting me hooked on this checkers game for the iPhone. My checkers strategy, honed in many childhood games against my dad, is slowly coming back to me.
From across the pond, here’s a list of 10 stories that could be April Fool’s but aren’t. On the list:
Pubs are telling expectant mothers when they’ve had enough to drink.
Entirely unfunny. For a more joke-filled first of the month, you can always get that yodeling game for XBox360.
Petri Purho, the rapid-prototyping enthusiast and mastermind behind Crayon Physics Deluxe, talked to The Onion’s A.V. Club about the puzzle’s point, the process, and winning the prize.
“I didn’t want to do a cheery kids game, where you’d have bright colors and cheerful music.”
thx john
Recent additions to the official Scrabble dictionary — like za, qi, and zzz — have upset the letter distribution balance of the game, causing high scoring letters like z & q to become overvalued. The three-point line in college basketball and Monopoly’s Vermont Ave. are similarly mispriced.
Even after two weeks of letting Tetris HD play by itself, the screen is only about 2/3rds full. It’s a fun image to see but the browser chrome is perhaps just as interesting…the Google search for “fuck fuck fuck” and a tab containing the Wikipedia page for “Anal sex” for example. (thx, my main man dj jacob)
People on the internet seem to be enjoying a game for the iPhone called Eliss. Offworld:
It was exactly one week ago last night that I fell in love, and to be quite honest I’m still at a little bit of a loss for words. The new object of my desire? She’s Eliss, an iPhone game, and I say that only slightly facetiously, because I’m not entirely exaggerating when I admit to getting goosebumps every time I even just see her in the video above.
And Touch Arcade:
Simply stated, Eliss perfectly demonstrates what iPhone gaming can be. It’s a highly challenging game that’s near impossible to put down and it could not exist on any other platform.
I just d/led it and have only played it a little. The aesthetic is great…it feels more like art than a game. The game’s developer, one Steph Thirion, is up for an award for Innovation in Mobile Game Design for Eliss.
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