Center for Strategic Communication

[ by Charles Cameron — offered to 3QD ]




Three Quarks Daily submission:

Conkers is for kids. So what does it have to do with computers, AI, â€œdeep learningâ€ or robots?

Itâ€™s a very British game, conkers, played with the seeds of horse chestnut trees, of which Britain counts almost half a million, pierced and strung on string. I suppose you could think of it as a primitive form of rosary bashing, with each playerâ€™s rosary having only one bead, but that might give others the wrong impression since conkers (the game) is sacred the way taste is sacred before anyone has told you, â€œthis is strawberryâ€, not the way sanctuaries are sacred after someone has put an altar rail round them, or screened them off with a rood screen.


conkers in the wild - bbc

An artificial general intelligence, left to its own devices and skilled in â€œdeep learningâ€, will surely figure out that play plays a significant role in learning, by reading Johan Huizinga perhaps, or figuring out â€œthe playâ€™s the thingâ€ â€“ or noting that play is how learning develops in mammalian infancy and expresses itself in human mastery. And since learning is what artificial general intelligence is good for and would like to be even better at, you can bet your best conker that artificial general intelligence will want to learn to play.

Okay, computers have played, and beaten humanityâ€™s best, at such games as Pong, Space Invaders, Draughts, Backgammon, Chess, Jeopardy, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Go


— and apparently one set of AI researchers is considering Texas Holdâ€™em as a plausible next challenge. I want to see them try their hands (hands?) and minds at conkers, though.

Consider: theyâ€™d need more than brainpower, theyâ€™d need mobility. It wouldnâ€™t take a rocket scientist but a robot to do the trick â€“ locating chestnut trees, okay, with a judicious use of Google maps for targeting and drones for close observation, agility to get around the trees (climbing â€˜em?) gathering and evaluating nuts, their sizes, densities, colors and weights, testing different angles of attack and types of needles for threading, the respective efficacies of polished (ooh like mahogany!) vs unpolished nuts (somewhat more in the spirit of sabi-wabi), styles of rough or silken string — and then the dexterity to swing the strung nut at its similarly strung and loosely hanging sibling-opponent!!

conkers - sun

Ah, but thereâ€™s a child to find first, shy or enthusiastic, and the very approach of a disembodied brain or robot might scare or enchant said child. Your successful robot will need to avoid the uncanny valley of too close resemblance, in which a machine garners the same emotional thrill as Chucky the scary doll from Childâ€™s Play and its endless sequelsâ€¦

All this, to beat the poor kid at the kidâ€™s own game?

Perhaps our robot overchild will have read the bit about â€œIt matters not who won, or lost, but how you played the gameâ€ â€“ and will have the good sense and humility to build itself an arm thatâ€™s not quite as strong as a childâ€™s arm, and will eventually have played enough child opponents to develop a style that wins only fractionally more games than it loses â€“ say 503 games out of a thousand.


Oh, conkers isnâ€™t the only game Iâ€™d like to see the computers try for -â€“ in fact itâ€™s one of two games that has been outlawed in some British schools â€“- and to live outside the law you must be honest, as Dylan says. Another banned — and therefore extra-interesting — game is leap-frog. How do you win and how do you lose at that? You donâ€™t â€“- you just play.

Thatâ€™s when things will begin to get really interesting, I think â€“- when an artificial general intelligence, with or without robotic body, learns playfulness. There will need to be constraints of course, of the Do no Harm variety -â€“ a fireproof Faraday cage playpen perhaps?


But play is by no means limited to infancy, it also finds an outlet in genius. So hereâ€™s my more serious, though still playful, question for the AI folks out there, and Monica Anderson with her â€œIntuitive AIâ€ in particular:

When will an AI be able to play Hermann Hesseâ€™s Glass Bead Game?

After all, itâ€™s the only game design that has arguably won its designer a Nobel Prize. And at the moment, itâ€™s brilliantly undefined..

Grail for Game Designers

Hesse conceptualized the game as a virtual music of ideas â€“ contrapuntal, polyphonic. Its origins were found in musical games, mathematicians soon added their own quotient of arcane symbols to those of musicians, and other disciplines followed suit until as Hesse puts it:


Various people, myself among them, have proposed playable variants on Hesseâ€™s great Game, and with a little further precision, definition and development, one of us might be able to propose a specific GBG format that would challenge AI to, essentially, produce profundity, beauty, perhaps even â€œholiness.â€ For when allâ€™s said and done, thatâ€™s where Hesseâ€™s game inexorably leads, as his Game Master Joseph Knecht tells us:


Joshua Fost GBG sample

3QD is a polyphonic glass bead game of sorts, and comes far closer to Hesseâ€™s ideal than the internet as a whole, since it curates the thoughts and insights it delivers — so maybe the challenge will be for an AI to win a place at the 3QD table by providing an essay, 1,000 to 2,500 words in length, to Abbas, by email at or before 11.59pm New York City time on some Saturday yet to be announced.

GBG cover Hesse






