Computer games
Think about one-player computer games for a minute. (I’m looking at you here, 2048!) They do certainly occupy my mind a bit[1], so I’ve been thinking about game playing recently.
As I’ve been, say, swiping wee hard candies on my phone, or steering around my at-sign / nethack character on my laptop, I’ve had a sort of depressing thought: there’s no there there, you know? You press a key or swipe or whatever, and the computer does something to create new pieces / monsters / etc. But how does it do that? By creating a pseudo-random number, and using that to pick which piece / monster / etc. goes where. Whenever I do anything, the computer responds with random numbers.
So really, these games are more-or-less shiny user interfaces for reading from a random number generator!
Maybe you’ve heard of Alan Turing’s “imitation game”, in which a (human) judge interacts with a human and a computer via writing and has to decide which of their conversants is a computer. It turns out there is a similar test for game-playing, namely the computer game bot Turing test. In this test, a (human) judge watches a multi-player game involving one human-controlled and one computer-controlled player, and the judge must decide which player is being controlled by the computer.
The reason I mention this is that one-player games aren’t really a similar sort of beast—at least, not on the surface. But what if, instead of a random number generator, there was a human game-master behind the scenes, deciding which wee candy or which mind flayer to put where. Would I be able to tell the difference?
The exact meaning of “a bit” for me actually borders on embarrassing, but that’s a separate issue. ↩︎