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92. The Mathematical Heart of Games Explored with Prof. du Sautoy
4.9k Plays7 months ago
An interview with Prof. Marcus du Sautoy about his book Around the Wold in Eighty Games . . . .a Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the World's Greatest Games.
Topics covered in Today's Episode:
1. Introduction to Professor Marcus du Sautoy and the Role of Games
- Impact of games on culture, strategy, and learning
- The educational importance of games throughout history
2. Differences in gaming cultures across regions like India and China
3. Creative Aspects of Mathematics
4. The surprising historical elements and banned games by Buddha
5. Historical and geographical narratives of games rather than rules
6. Game Theory and Education
7. Unknowable questions like thermodynamics and universe's infinity
8. Professor du Sautoy's Former Books and Collections
9. A preview of his previous books and their themes
10. Gaming Cultures and NFTs in Blockchain
11. Gamification in Education
12. The Role of AI in Gaming
13. Testing machine learning in mastering games like Go
14. Alphago's surprising move and its impact on Go strategies
15 . The future of AI in developing video game characters, plots, and environments
16. Conclusion and Giveaway Announcement
*Free Book Giveaway of Around The World in 88 Games . . . by Professor Marcus Du Sautory! Follow us on our socials for details:
Follow us on X: @BreakingMathPod
Follow us on Instagram: @Breaking Math Media
Email us: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to Professor Marcus de Satoi
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Breaking Math. Today we'll be diving deep into the captivating world of games and their profound impact on culture, strategy, and learning with none other than the esteemed Professor Marcus de Satoi, a British mathematician, Simone professor for public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, fellow of New College Oxford, a chair formerly held by his eminent Sir Richard Dawkins,
00:00:29
Speaker
and an author of popular mathematics and science books, including Around the World in 80 Games. He was previously a fellow of All Souls College Oxford, Wadham College Oxford, and served as president of the Mathematical Association, an engineering and physical science research council senior media fellow, and a Royal Society University research fellow.
The Universality of Games
00:00:55
Speaker
Join us as we embark on a journey through the universality and cultural significance of games, from ancient traditions to the cutting edge of technology. In this episode, we'll explore how games differ across regions like India and China.
00:01:12
Speaker
dissect the balance between strategy and chance, and reflect on the educational importance of games that have been played or banned throughout history.
AI's Impact on Gameplay
00:01:22
Speaker
Professor Dusatoi also illuminates the power and prowess of AI in modern gameplay with an unforgettable discussion about a groundbreaking move by AlphaGo.
00:01:34
Speaker
But that's not all.
NFTs and Digital Ownership
00:01:35
Speaker
We'll touch on the expanding field of NFTs in blockchain and gaming and how they can change the phase of digital ownership and fairness. Our conversation with Professor Dusatoi will span across a variety of topics, revealing the connections between games and intellectual disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. It's all right here on Breaking Math.
00:02:07
Speaker
Before we begin today's interview, I have a quick announcement.
Book Giveaway Announcement
00:02:09
Speaker
The Breaking Math Podcast will be doing a giveaway of the book Around the World in 88 Games by Marcus Du Savoy. Just stay tuned to the end of this episode for instructions. Also, follow us on all social media. That is at Breaking Math Media on Instagram, as well as at Breaking Math Pod on X, which used to be Twitter.
00:02:28
Speaker
Soon we will be at Breaking Math Media on all platforms, but if you search for either at Breaking Math Media or at Breaking Math Pod, you should find it. Just follow the instructions on our social media posts and you should be eligible for being in a drawing for a free copy of the book.
00:02:48
Speaker
In previous conversations, we've had this really long pre-interview discussion, and it was some of our most awesome content, and I never recorded it. So as a note to self, I record everything and usually just chop it off once I do my little intro, which we haven't even done yet. Secondly, and this I'm glad I'm recording,
00:03:08
Speaker
This book has almost changed our podcast strategy.
Creative Inspirations from Marcus's Book
00:03:12
Speaker
We are a math podcast, but reading this book, I'm exploding with ideas for how to create a card game, kind of like Magic the Gathering, but instead of magic characters, mathematicians and physicists. You know what I mean? Brilliant. Yeah, I thoroughly approve of that.
00:03:30
Speaker
Oh fabulous and there's something else that I wrote in the show notes that I'll probably allude to in our in our actual interview as well or I'll just cut this section in who knows. This book had so much information both culturally but also mathematically in the history of leisure that I wanted to like hire a couple of high performing interns
Mapping Games by Strategy
00:03:53
Speaker
to make as many visual diagrams and excel spreadsheets where you can make all kinds of lists and maps of different games that are either that have a primarily creative element or a primary random strategy or a primary probabilistic strategy like make as many maps as you can go crazy and then you can make a database for find my game and you know what I mean like
00:04:20
Speaker
You could do that. I was telling Autumn this, and Autumn was telling me that this is my first experience in the gaming literature. So as I understand from Autumn, some stuff like that may exist already. Is that right, Autumn? There has been some mapping, and I know that there's been a few college courses taught on this.
00:04:42
Speaker
So it like my background is so I went to Hampshire College. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them. They are a school that has like no grades. A lot of the like the famous origami mathematician Tom Hall went there. Also, there's been like
00:05:02
Speaker
seventh generation cleaning products,
Autumn's Educational Background
00:05:06
Speaker
Stonyfield Farm organic yogurt, Lupita D'Ango, I believe Kathy Najimi's child went there. Just like a lot of big names that come through.
00:05:19
Speaker
along with that there's a lot of tech giants and over like 30 or 40 percent of the the people that go on go into like studying really niche topics and go on to their phds and like they they specialize in a lot of games and game theory and board games and it's people creating this from like the ground up and i had like the privilege of
00:05:46
Speaker
going there amazing and working with some of these folks and they have like the one of the uh like libraries for all the board games and some of them are uncharted and unmapped like board games and some of them are half created and you can go in there and like that sounds amazing one of them that sounds very dangerous i'm not sure you ever come out
Themes in Marcus's Work
00:06:12
Speaker
Yep, so some people don't. So like, it just kind of fascinated me just reading through the book itself. And I'm like, this is something that I can see paralleling.
00:06:28
Speaker
yeah your work and other folks work and i'm like this is what you're making a game about that the game like jumanji or something you know what i mean like you could do a riff on jumanji kind of like that where you just stuck in these board games or something between jumanji and saw where it's like a horror movie but it's also games
00:06:46
Speaker
I don't know. My brain is getting creative here. We did an early podcast on game theory where we did an imitation of Saw, where my co-host used the Adobe version of Photoshop, but for sound, and I'm blanking on the name of it. What's the name of it? I forget. It's not Audacity, but...
00:07:04
Speaker
Oh my gosh, it's embarrassing. I should know this. The Adobe version of their sound. Okay. He made my voice, the exact same voice as the jigsaw in the movie Saw, and he had this whole long thing that we read at the very end of it. It was a device that would like tickle your feet or something. It was hilarious, but it was fun. It was fun. Sorry. Let's not math related. We don't have to keep that. That's fine.
00:07:29
Speaker
Very good. So I actually think it's entirely appropriate to start the episode just with all of the explosive ideas that came from this. And, you know, even on my ideas here, I almost have more extensions on this book, which I'll probably have to write about in an email because I'm curious, you know, in your other interviews about this book, have other people approached you about extensions to do based on this book?
Narrative Journey of Marcus's Book
00:07:53
Speaker
Well, the interesting thing is that so many people come with new games that I've not encountered before. I mean, this was never meant to be an encyclopedic kind of book on games. So it was always meant to be my favorite games and the ones that I encountered. And I realized that I can probably go around the world in 160 games now because of all the new things. I mean, you know, for example, there are interesting
00:08:21
Speaker
books which have games at their heart. So I put two as the games in my 80 games, one being the Glass Speed game by Herman Hess. But since then, people have come back with really interesting books that I didn't know about which have games at their heart. So that I'd love to put in another version of the book. So I think the extension will be
00:08:44
Speaker
let me go around the world again and drop off in various different places that people said, why didn't you go here? And I said, well, I can't be everywhere. Have you ever thought about maybe, I don't know if this would interest you or not. It depends on your desires. Making a wiki of it so all the game enthusiasts can insert a thing onto your landing page or something. You know what I mean? That would grow it like a fractal.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of that already out there, actually, and it was, you know, good resources actually out there for me helping to write this book. And it's one of the things that I always said, look, you're not going to learn the rules of the game.
00:09:23
Speaker
reading this book that's not the point of this book and there are so many wonderful sites out there for board game geek kind of websites also just fantastic um youtube channels i mean that's my go-to place for when i'm learning a game for the first time is to go to these people who are wonderful are just condensing the game into 10 minutes on a youtube video i watch that and then i'm ready to share the rules with my family because they they've kind of
00:09:52
Speaker
really distilled the essence. So there's great resources out
Mathematics and Culture
00:09:56
Speaker
there. And this is meant to be, you know, the thing about a wiki is that it's very non-narrative based. And I wanted this, and that was one of the challenges of writing this book in a way, because it could have been very listy. It could have been very just like, and I really wanted to try and find some way to motivate people to read it
00:10:16
Speaker
In a kind of narrative way and so that's why i use kind of like phillias foggs Journey around the world and and it sort of follows roughly the journey but of course i had a few kind of distractions on i mean phillias fogg never had to go to Australia or New Zealand and i felt well i need to at least spend a little bit of time there so
00:10:36
Speaker
And also just, you know, it follows quite a historical narrative. So it starts in the Middle East in kind of ancient times and board games are back to 5,000 years. So there's a kind of historical narrative and a geographical narrative. And so I think that was quite important to me. So I would love it for somebody else to then take what's happened there as the beginning to like a Wiki if they wanted to. But for me, in a way, the challenge is going the other way.
00:11:06
Speaker
you know, to take this huge sway of people that have written about games, put wonderful things on about games, and then choosing a pathway through that. And that's sort of what an author, the challenge of being an author is, is how do I take you on a journey through something that you could, probably anybody could go on, just get lost on the internet, reading about games.
00:11:31
Speaker
But the point is, look, I'm going to curate for you my journey through this in a way that I think tells you a story.
00:11:39
Speaker
Wow, very cool. And that's one element that I love with this. So one of the focuses of the Breaking Math podcast specifically is bringing together mathematics as well as arts and humanities and the challenge of doing that and explaining how those two, let's just say for lack of a better term, human activities work together and complement each other. And I think that the historical elements were fascinating. The Buddha, the story of the Buddha in this book surprised me. I have a very limited, very Western centric version of the Buddha.
00:12:08
Speaker
that i've learned about and when i read about all of the the games that he banned well first of all i was very sad about that but then i thought about why you know like yeah is there an anthrop no i agree i i i was quite surprised um
00:12:25
Speaker
why he banned games, especially because
Cultural Contexts of Games
00:12:27
Speaker
actually, as I talk about in the book, something like Snakes and Ladders had actually a very educational role in helping people to understand the impact of good and bad karma on their lives. So that game is actually about the
00:12:42
Speaker
the challenge of reaching nirvana moksha paradise and what you can help to make this version of your life because interestingly snakes and ladders you get reborn in the indian version so you don't wait trying to throw the score to get to the winning square you go back to the beginning if you missed the winning square so you go round and round sort of being reborn um so i was quite intrigued that
00:13:08
Speaker
That's clearly a game which has kind of the idea of reaching Nirvana at its heart, yet the Buddha really didn't wanted games as part of the journey that his followers would take part in.
00:13:23
Speaker
Um, yeah, I was a bit disappointed because, you know, I'm also quite keen on Buddhism as a religion. And there he is saying, no, you can't play any of these games. Yeah. Let me, if I may, I want to, I want to read some of the list of games. Okay. Okay. Summer salts, no doing summer salts. Uh, any games with dice, you can't, sorry, games with dice. You can't play those. Any games with imaginary rows or games played on boards with eight or 10 rows. So, so you can't imagine.
00:13:53
Speaker
playing chess playing chess yeah exactly yeah i know don't even think about it okay and i am going to take the liberty of doing a very quick aside i want to do i want to consult with my friends who are studying cognitive um religion and anthropology because i'm interested in banned things across culture
00:14:14
Speaker
I am aware that there are schools of thought in Islam, for example, that ban all stringed instruments, for example. And, you know, my question would be, from an evolutionary standpoint, the utility and not only the utility, but the perception of things being somehow bad. How does that vary from culture to culture? And is there some explanation of not only the initial idea of the rules, but how they evolved and how context matters? Like, this is a whole
00:14:41
Speaker
whole area that I want to come back to because you know I love them I love my idea of the Buddha and the fact that okay okay here we go here you go you can't play anything where you have where you make pictures of things with red dye on your hand so something like Pictionary you can't do any games where you guess your opponent's thoughts
00:15:01
Speaker
Dude, but children naturally. That's 21 questions out. You know, 21 questions. No, no, no, no. Just 20 questions then? I'm just kidding. You know what I mean? And I guess I think just developmentally, I feel like out of just boredom and trying to exercise our brain, like games are natural. Like games are as natural as scratching an itch. I don't know. That's what I think.
00:15:23
Speaker
was interesting about that list was it gave me some insight actually to some of the games that were around during that period. For example one of the games I talk about is Hopscotch and Hopscotch is a game that you know has Christian kind of resonances because they used to lay it out in
00:15:40
Speaker
kind of like a cross shape and the squares would be labeled a bit like the snakes and ladders you know the last one would be heaven and that would be the journey towards heaven but that's an indication because one of the games that is banned is a description of something like hopscotch and so it makes you realize oh okay hopscotch was around then in the indian subcontinent and being played
00:16:06
Speaker
much earlier than we thought than say European Christian hopscotch games so the other one is like
00:16:12
Speaker
you're not allowed to play, if I remember, something with stacks of blocks where you pull blocks out and they topple. Well, that's Jenga. They had Jenga already in the Buddha's time. So that was quite interesting just seeing that you could use that list to give you quite a lot of insight about the games that were around. There is one game in there which really should be banned, and I don't even understand how it was a game, which is imitating deformities.
00:16:41
Speaker
Okay. Now that is about the one game on that list that I approve of Banning. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Totally agree. Oh, anything with a ball. You can't play any game of the ball at all. Oh my gosh. So how do you... Wow. That's...
00:16:56
Speaker
But then now I'm also reminded of like of like early like medieval monks and like aesthetic practices where people would like get on top of a pillar and remove themselves from society or or or or like like oh gosh that scene in Monty Python when they whack themselves I know it's based on the practice of like scourging yourself with a whip or something I don't know man people trying to attain enlightenment are sometimes kind of kind of prickly kind of dry
00:17:26
Speaker
But I'm very interested by your kind of the goal of your podcast because I think it's something I so resonate with which is the idea that mathematics is part of culture and humanities and you know in a way that was why I love this writing this book because you know many people love playing games and many people
00:17:48
Speaker
have a very negative reaction to mathematics and to be able to use the games as a way to show people, no, hold on, actually what you're doing is playing some mathematics and you may not realize it, but that is at the heart, you're exploring the consequences of rules and there is lovely maths to make these games so wonderfully playable. So, you know, the hope is that people buy this
00:18:14
Speaker
because they think it's a book about games, but actually then they realize, oh no, this is a maths book, but it's actually much more fun than I thought it was going to be. So I suppose I do that with a lot of my projects. You know, I do a lot of, in fact, I'm writing a new book at the moment, which is called Blueprints. And it's about the way that creative artists use mathematical structures, sometimes knowingly, sometimes intuitively, sometimes discovering mathematical structures that
00:18:40
Speaker
perhaps we know about already, but they're making those discoveries within their artwork for the first time. So finding those resonances and showing people that maths isn't a siloed subject all on its own, that it is just the language of the universe, of nature, of humanity,
Play about Mathematician Andre Vey
00:18:59
Speaker
that's sort of one of my kind of missions in life.
00:19:03
Speaker
I've been like exploring that essentially since, but on a personal level since starting my journey with mathematics. I liked, before like being a mathematician and engineer, I like to say that I'm an artist first. So I've done a lot of work in
00:19:22
Speaker
origami, I've done origami dresses, incorporating a lot of those things and elements of the design into high level engineering. Yes, absolutely. And I do some work with an art college here in London, St. Martin's School for Art and Design.
00:19:41
Speaker
And they have a course which is mathematics for artists, and it's the course which is signed up for fastest by students there because they suddenly realize by the time they're coming to university, to college, that these are skills they need. And the tragedy is why aren't we actually taking this back?
00:20:00
Speaker
to school level and making people realise earlier on, because they suddenly realise, no, no, these skills are going to help me make things that I can conceive of in my mind, or even open up new structures that will lead to new artwork.
00:20:16
Speaker
Like, for example, when I was working with some of my students on one of their designs, I'm like, wait, what's what's going to actually work? Not only for optimization, but you also have to look at things from an aesthetic point of view. Do you want it to be structurally sound? Do you want it to be ugly? But it works.
00:20:38
Speaker
And it's really what is going to take that time, like you take that time and think about those things. And as engineers, we're not classically trained to think about that. You think about usually the UX UI design of something, but it's really where does that fine line of being an artist come in and saying, I'm in love with this piece and where do we
00:21:05
Speaker
narrate that, right? So I'll tell you one of the things that made me fall in love with mathematics and actually made me want to be a mathematician was reading a book when which my teacher recommended for me at school, which you may know called a mathematician's apology by
Mathematics as Art and Poetry
00:21:22
Speaker
G.H. Hardy. And this is a book written by fantastic mathematician number theorists in Cambridge in the well he rated around 1940s, but it's about
00:21:33
Speaker
he's writing about what it's like to be a mathematician. And he describes it, you know, being a mathematician is like being a painter or a poet. You're a maker of patterns. And he really stressed the creative side of being a mathematician. You know, a lot of people think mathematics is just the language to be able to do engineering, for example. But he said, no, no, that's the kind of boring bit of mathematics. Naturally, there's a hugely creative part of mathematics.
00:22:02
Speaker
You know I think that's why I decided to become a mathematician maybe rather than say a physicist or another scientist because I think there is more freedom within mathematics to create
00:22:14
Speaker
imaginary worlds which are not describing the universe around us. You see in physics you're sort of bit bound by the physical universe. You're trying to describe that and if your theory does not fit the physical universe it might be a beautiful theory. Really it's not interesting so it's thrown out and but for a mathematician that would have value as a self-consistent universe in its own right and so we have many different sorts of geometry, Euclidean of course but non-Euclidean sort of spherical
00:22:44
Speaker
elliptical, hyperbolic. One of these will be the geometry of the universe, but all of them are interesting as geometries are a mathematician. We have finite geometries. One of them is important in making one of the games in my book, Spot It or Dobble as we call it in the UK. That is you're actually playing a game which is based on an amazing bit of geometry. So for me I think
00:23:08
Speaker
I loved mathematics because it was this bridge between the world of science, certainly is, you know, it's the language of science and science really couldn't do many of the things without
Mathematical Structures in Art
00:23:19
Speaker
the mathematics. But it's also a very creative side and that's what the book I'm writing in the moment is showing how it's in the creative arts. But for me, it has a bit more of a freedom about it, which perhaps you don't have so much in the sciences, which is
00:23:33
Speaker
why I was drawn to it in this book in particular and if listeners haven't read this book I really recommend it for just giving you an insight into what it's like to be a mathematician. It includes two proofs, one of there being infinitely many prime numbers and one of the irrationality of the square root of two and when I read those as a student I also fell in love with the power of mathematics to give you that kind of certainty about your subject. I mean
00:24:01
Speaker
You know, science, again, it's a very evolutionary process. The science of the ancient Greeks got overturned. We don't teach that now. The mathematics of the ancient Greeks, we're still teaching that. So there's something I found very appealing about the security that proof gives you to know when you've got something right and which in the sciences, you don't have that. You have a lot of evidence, but you can never be sure that your theory is going to survive in 200 years time. It might be a, you know,
00:24:30
Speaker
quantum physics, beautiful, but that may just be wrong. And there may be a very good approximation to things, but actually, you know, it isn't a random roll of the dice. It's actually deterministic and maybe we'll understand what the machinery is behind quantum physics.
00:24:49
Speaker
I have a quick thought on that real quick. I've heard that that I've heard a very, very similar description of not only quantum mechanics, but also the know ability of things. But I've heard an extension to it. Somebody was talking about how confident they are or how scientists are in thermodynamics, especially post Boltzmann. And they said their comment was, I believe that the whole of quantum mechanics would be overturned before thermodynamics would be overturned.
00:25:15
Speaker
So do you have anything to say about how no, and I know this is a tangent, I just had to ask, do you have any comments on how confident we are in thermodynamics as a science? And you know, basically, what's your reaction to that comment, if I may?
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, it relates actually to one of my previous books, which in England was called What We Cannot Know, and in America was The Great Unknown. Because what is fascinating is, you know, what questions are there out there that by their very nature are unknowable. I mean, things like, you know, thermodynamics is sort of trying to give you a language to tackle something which is quite unknowable, which is, you know, knowing the precise location of every single atom.
00:26:01
Speaker
is impossible, but so you produce something called temperature, which is a very good approximation of information about that system. But I think thermodynamics throws up something which I think actually it comes up in around the world in 80 games, which is the idea of entropy. So the measure of the disorder of a system, and that's one of the big mysteries. The second law of thermodynamics, why are we tending towards
00:26:30
Speaker
a state of disorder, and sometimes local systems are actually reversing that. So I think there's so much fascinating physics, which I think will be challenged in the future. Quantum physics, the idea of the second law of thermodynamics, maybe that is on the way to a theory. But for me, what was interesting in writing that previous book was, yeah, OK,
00:26:56
Speaker
But what questions by their very nature may be unknowable? For example, is the universe infinite? Well, if it is infinite, how could we ever know that? We have a bubble around us which, you know, an event horizon beyond which we can't see anything. We don't have any knowledge because it can't reach us because the speed of light is this kind of ultimate speed limit for information reaching us. So
00:27:20
Speaker
That might be a question the universe may be infinite, but we may never be able to know that sort of thing. So those are really interesting philosophical questions.
00:27:29
Speaker
Okay. And I don't mean to interrupt. I know I've been hogging the floor a lot out of my, uh, but I had to say two things. Number one, I want to gamify this episode. I want to challenge our viewers to help us turn this episode into a game. Like maybe do a quiz app. I don't know something. I'll think of a creative way of gamifying this episode, but further, you mentioned your old books and I just real quickly, you, oh my gosh, how many do I count? How many do I count like 12? How many books? No, you have to be careful because, um, in America and England, they call books different. So.
00:27:58
Speaker
many people think I've written more books than I have because it's actually the same book. For example, my second book was about symmetry. In England it was called Finding Moonshine and in America it was called Symmetry. And many people wrote to me complaining that they thought this is the follow-up and they found it was exactly the same book. So one of the problems about, you know, our global world is you can get access to American books on English, Amazon, for example. So I think my games book is my eighth book, which still isn't bad going, you know.
00:28:27
Speaker
No, no, not bad at all. And actually, I would love it if you wouldn't mind. If you could tell us just a quick preview about some of your former books, we would love that actually. Oh, lovely. Yeah. So my first book was about prime numbers. It's called The Music of the Primes, both in America and in England.
00:28:42
Speaker
about our greatest unsolved problem, the Riemann hypothesis. That was actually a bit of a response to Fermat's Last Theorem being proved. And I wanted to put something back in the public imagination as, you know, maths isn't finished yet. Still lots we don't know, including, and that actually, that book had its 20th anniversary last year. So I did a new 20th anniversary edition with a new chapter about what had happened over the last 20 years.
00:29:07
Speaker
And then I did a book about symmetry, which is my own area of mathematics, which is something called group theory. Then I did a book which is actually based on a set of lectures I gave for children at Christmas, something called the Christmas lectures that we do, which was started by
00:29:22
Speaker
Michael Faraday back in 1825 or something. So I wrote a book based on those lectures, which is called The Number Mysteries. That's all about unsolved problems in mathematics as well. Then I wrote So What We Cannot Know, which is all about unsolved problems. I wrote a book about AI and creativity.
00:29:41
Speaker
which is called The Creativity Code, then a book called Thinking Better, which is all about the way mathematics is the art of the shortcuts, something my teacher sort of told us when we were at school, and I really fell in love with that as a lazy teenager. Oh yeah, well I'm going to do this subject if it's all about shortcuts. And then my games book, and then I did a little short book called How to Count to Infinity, which was great because it was a short book.
00:30:08
Speaker
Nice, nice. Very cool. There you are. I think that's a guided tour around my back catalogue. Fantastic. Fantastic. I'm going to, I'm going to refrain because I want to, I want to give the floor to Autumn. I always have like six questions to ask, but I'll give you the floor for a second here, Autumn.
00:30:23
Speaker
Absolutely. Like, I know that as you've been taking on this journey between the art and the mathematics and all of the various topics, I believe you said something in the book of where, you know, tell me the game that you like. And I can tell you all about yourself. Yes. So expand a little more on that for me, because I find that to be very interesting, especially like, I've
00:30:52
Speaker
delved into a few specific niches in here. And I'm curious, I'm like, yeah, I think you see, that was almost one of the motivations for the book. Because, you know, the reason that I wrote this book is for years, I've been collecting games wherever I go in the world, because I think games are, in some sense universal, but also very particular to a culture. So I,
00:31:18
Speaker
would always love to find out, well, you know, if I'm in India or in China or South America, what sort of games do you play? And I did start to feel I was getting a kind of little window into their culture. So India is interesting because they often like to give themselves up to fate and the role of the dice is a very important part. And I think, you know, so those people who enjoy
00:31:43
Speaker
losing, you know, letting go of control. Some people do not like that. They do not like a dice involved in a game because they feel that they don't have agency, they don't have control, they want complete control of. But some people really enjoy the role of a dice, it's disrupting the rhythm of something. And so I saw that in India and very strikingly,
00:32:09
Speaker
Chess for example is a game which has its origins in India and Persia, but originally that game was played with a dice, because they would roll the dice to decide which piece you were allowed to move next in the game. Now we think of chess as a pure strategy,
00:32:28
Speaker
And to think that you were restricted in what you could do by the roll of the dice, that forces games in a very different direction. But when gambling was banned in India, they weren't allowed to use dice. And then somebody said, well, why don't we just choose which piece? It's still quite a good game. So even the games that we think were pure strategy games, originally they had a dice involved. So whilst if you go to China, I found China was a place where they were less
00:32:58
Speaker
interested in using a dice still chance was involved because something like mahjong which tiles you get given at the beginning is an element of chance but then it's what you do with those you from that moment on you have quite a lot of control on
00:33:13
Speaker
Well, I suppose you're still picking things from the wall and so there's a chance at which tile you're getting. But I still felt there was a lesser sense of giving yourself up to the fate of the roll of the dice, for example. And the big difference again between China and India, which I thought was quite striking, is that India
00:33:31
Speaker
quite aggressive the sort of games they're playing chess you know you're whacking this piece off the board it's real hand-to-hand combat going on in chess whilst Go for example is a much more territorial sort of war game where you're placing these black and white stones down on this 19 by 19 grid and the aim is to gradually
00:33:52
Speaker
control swathes of land. And then again, if you look at card games, what's the card game that came out of India? It's a version of WIST, which is capturing people's cards in tricks. And you hold their cards, you know, because you won them. Whilst if you look at the card games that are played in China, Marzong is a kind of card game, but played with tiles. You're collecting things. It's more like Rummy. It's, you know, you're trying to get runs of things. You're trying to get all the
00:34:20
Speaker
the dragons or all the fours of bamboo. And so again, it's a more cumulative game. You're gradually building up your hand, which you then lay down to win the game. So I thought that was quite a striking difference. So again, what sort of game do you like playing? Do you like playing a pure strategy game?
00:34:40
Speaker
do you like a game which uh like I like backgammon because it has strategy and chance I don't want just chance I mean snakes and ladders is a fun game when you're a kid but but you want to express yourself through a game you want agency you want to assert whether you're an aggressive player a risky player a defensive player um and something like backgammon I quite like because their strategy yet I also quite like a bit of chance in a game because I I want
00:35:09
Speaker
the person who may be a little bit weaker still to have a chance of winning the game and that was I wrote these kind of six qualities that I think make a good game and one of them is I don't want the game to finish before it starts where if you're playing somebody who's really good at chess and you're average it's
00:35:26
Speaker
The game's finished. Gary Kasparov against Donald Trump is never ever going to be an interesting chess match. But it might be an interesting backgammon game. So I think that's quite important that some games have a handicap system so that if you are really good, they will take a number of points off you. So go, for example,
00:35:48
Speaker
there's a handicap system so if you're a really good go player you have to win by a certain number of more points than if you are just equally matched and so that's quite good if a game has that flexibility to introduce a handicap so that a weak player still can win the game.
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, I find that to be just as interesting because I saw that you took it into a twist with everything from as you narrated from Tarot all the way to Pokemon to Magic the Gathering and even NFTs. Most people don't usually talk about that stuff. I've been big in the crypto space and Web3 space for a while and I just found that to be fascinating for the parallel as I do play Magic the Gathering competitively.
00:36:37
Speaker
And just seeing how that parallels with that. And I'm like, you weren't one of the first people to actually talk about this. I'm curious on how you see those applications, not only in the NFT side of things, but how does that parallel for long-term, for gameplay?
00:37:01
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I was quite struck to discover the role of NFTs in games, where basically you can cash your NFTs in, or you can combine NFTs to make kind of new cards, as it were. So that seems a really interesting technology. I'm quite interested in, I guess, having written that book about artificial intelligence. And my son worked for a couple of years for a startup, which was
00:37:29
Speaker
Well, basically, they were using the blockchain to authenticate art, and then they realized after a while, oh, we are an NFT minting company. It was before NFTs were a thing. What is quite curious is how NFTs suddenly went hugely toxic. And so now you can't really talk about NFTs because everyone goes, oh, they're terrible things. So now we talk about a digital certificate or something.
00:37:54
Speaker
But I still think it's exactly the same thing, of course. But I think there's, you know, I'm quite interested in the role that something like blockchain will play in, for example, the gaming space, because, you know, one of the issues with gaming online is trust and being able to play, you know, has somebody genuinely got those cards that they've
00:38:19
Speaker
say they have in poker. So the role of technology and things like the blockchain and cryptographic systems to be able to play games in a fair way and to play games in a mass online way.
00:38:36
Speaker
uh my mother is quite interesting because she plays a lot of online games uh she's part of quite a lot of tribes across the world um and you know the the idea of your i think she spent most of our inheritance actually on digital swords and um shields um but you know being able to own those and transfer ownership of those you know i probably will receive ownership of these incredible
00:39:00
Speaker
digital armory but the power of you have the keys exactly well exactly the way that yes exactly so all those passwords i'm going to have to but that's what you know interesting digital technology can allow for
00:39:17
Speaker
ownership of these digital assets and to be able to play collectively online in a fair way, I find really, really interesting. So, you know, that was the interesting trajectory of the book, to start in the ancient world with early racing games, you know, there's this 5,000 year old game in the British Museum here in London, which is, you know, the early forerunner of backgammon, but through right through to the modern day where you're playing
00:39:43
Speaker
games using blockchain technology you know that's the beauty of this whole story is how it's been there in part of our culture in different ways reflecting our culture in different ways just exactly tell me the game that of that period and you can understand something about that period in history absolutely
00:40:05
Speaker
you bring that up I'm just thinking I'm thinking about this book and I wish there was a way to tell where this book or books like this like who read it I wish that information was available because I went about anthropologists and this book specifically just because the cultural relevance of games both for sharing culture and for leisure and for building trust in communities I mean
00:40:29
Speaker
Gosh, I think about every single corporation and their efforts to do team building activities using silly games. They're trying to play on the psychology of games. So I don't know. I think that this book, if there were to be blogs based on your book, hint, hint, for us as well, if there were to be blogs reflective on this, I would love to explicitly tag certain anthropologists that would be most effective for expanding upon it more.
00:40:57
Speaker
That's something you definitely could do. By the way, with the breaking math effort, that's what we're trying to do, is we're trying to build bridges to mathematics and everything else, like a really cool spiderweb. At some point, I'll have to tell you about our math tree that builds on the map of maths that another creator made. Remind me to go to that topic before this episode is out. But, um...
00:41:18
Speaker
Yeah, I just had to do a quick little note that will show up in the transcript to make some blogs and tag all of your anthropologist and culture friends who want to talk about games in different cultures and the role they play and how, like if you're visiting cultures, I don't know how you might use a game to build trust. Like they say, never, you know, never beat your boss at poker. You know what I mean? Things like that. So it was very interesting how many different
00:41:48
Speaker
intellectual areas were touched by
00:41:52
Speaker
this topic. I mean, so, you know, the anthropologists have been talking about games, of course. They're an amazing insight into a culture. And so, you know, I quote Heisinger, for example, who wrote Homo Ludens. And he talks about our species being the playing species in philosophy. Games were very important to Wittgenstein. He used the idea of the word game actually in his description of what he thought was how we learned language.
00:42:21
Speaker
word games, language games, that we only understand what a word means by actually playing with it. We can't define a word in a dictionary manner. That's perhaps a helpful way of getting towards it, but the only way we know what a word means is by using it. The word that he thought best exemplified this whole thing was the word game.
00:42:46
Speaker
And then in psychology as well, the role that games have played in psychology. And we've seen that with the idea of gamification, making everything into a game to incentivize people. So a lot of industry is realizing people love playing games. And if you can change it into something people do not like doing into a game, like Duolingo, for example, I think Duolingo fails because it actually becomes too much of a game. So I learned Spanish for a year and a half.
00:43:14
Speaker
Well, you know, it was a really high level in this game. Then I went to Mexico and realized I'd learned no Spanish and that all I'd done was to learn how to gamify the game. And so, you know, I think you need to be careful making sure people are having fun, but they're actually achieving what the game of occasion is meant to achieve. Oh, man. Okay. And so as you just mentioned that an hour before this interview, I was reading over the show notes. That's where all my ideas came for expansions on it.
00:43:43
Speaker
And one of the things I wanted to do is see what efforts exist already in gamifying legitimate huge fields of knowledge. I mentioned not only mathematics, but the field of medicine, the field of law, the fields of engineering. And I just thought, what way? Yeah, you're not going to become an engineer the same as if you had gone through a formal program.
00:44:06
Speaker
But you could even just thematically, like the wallpaper, make some kind of a game that is inspired by people that have made it through a school of law. You know what I mean? I talk about in the book, one of the games is a digital platform that I developed. It's called mangahigh.com, which I did with a colleague who'd
00:44:33
Speaker
He'd done a startup about casual gaming online, playing Yahtzee, pay a little money and whoever wins collects the money. And what he saw was people just getting so good at the games, being incentivized by game playing. And he came out of that startup saying, well, yeah, but wouldn't it be wonderful if actually people were learning something that would be useful? And so he came to me and said, look, mathematical education
00:44:57
Speaker
it is really suffering. Can we gamify? And maths is quite nice because there's a correct answer. So you really, you know, in the humanities, it's a little harder to gamify writing an essay. But mathematics, you know, it is very, you know, you're building this pyramid, things are getting harder levels, it was sort of perfect. So we had a lot of fun, for example, changing
00:45:19
Speaker
Well, we have what's called GCSE, so it's the level for a 16-year-old. The exam that 16-year-olds have to take here in the UK. We just gamified the whole thing. Such that people, when they were doing homework, they just had to do, you know, reach level 10 on this game, which actually, when you've done it, you know how to solve a quadratic equation.
00:45:39
Speaker
Okay, okay. Can we ring a gong at this point in the in the episode because this is where the Buddha would be very proud because we realized why he wasn't allowing the games. Sorry, I just have to laugh because yeah but but I still disagree with the Buddha because games children do naturally and and games like anything can have a wonderful component and an opponent where you become addicted to it and then you lose the original means of it.
00:46:07
Speaker
I just think it'd be cool to, in our actual podcast, to add a gong here. So, you know. I approve of a gong. Okay. And I don't want to say a thing more. I have like five questions in the barrel. I want to defer to you, Autumn, please.
00:46:24
Speaker
But feel free. Okay, okay. Sure, sure. Oh gosh. Where to even begin here. Okay, so you had mentioned earlier that another book of yours that I want to read I wish I had time for it. Can you like make the, this isn't the question but it is a question. Can you make like the book available like a can you can just like slam because
00:46:43
Speaker
I don't have time to read all the books. There's an app for that, isn't there? Insert sponsorship here for an app that does that. I'm just kidding. So you had mentioned your book on artificial intelligence. The Breaking Math podcast did a super deep dive. And actually, I got a little bit of pushback saying, hey, I thought you were a math podcast. I was like, I am, I am, I am, you know, trust me.
00:47:03
Speaker
But with AI, it serves as a function approximator in science and engineering, which I love, and it's also really weird. But I'm wondering, what have you been really impressed with, or what questions do you have about the use of machine learning specifically in the role of games?
00:47:23
Speaker
Yeah, well, very interesting is games are often the thing where we realize that something new is emerging because there are, I think there's a point about the game. It's a very beautiful, closed, safe environment to start exploring, you know, maybe your personality or your psychology, but also for AI, it's a very nice environment for just testing how good is machine learning and learning how to do something, learning to play the game of Go. So that book,
00:47:53
Speaker
creativity code the spark for that book was exactly the way that machine learning was able to create a piece of code that could play the game of Go at such a high level to beat the world's best lease at all because traditionally Go was considered a very hard game
00:48:14
Speaker
to write code for because a lot of it is quite visual. The decisions you're making are about the visual patterns building up on the board and that was very hard to crystallize into kind of top-down code about why you should make particular moves.
00:48:32
Speaker
And vision recognition software was always terrible before machine learning. So it's interesting that both vision recognition software and the ability to play this game, which is hugely patterned in the way that you make your decisions. But for me, the really exciting thing and which sparked the whole journey of that book about could this new AI be creative is that not only did it win a game against the world's best, we've seen that before. That's not so surprising.
00:49:01
Speaker
We saw Garry Kasparov being beaten by Deep Blue, but it actually taught us to play the game in a new way. It made a move and it's now this famous move, move 37 in game two of AlphaGo against Lee Sedol. It is a move that was so, so new that, and I call it the first creative act of an AI because it was surprising. Everyone thought it was a very bad move when
00:49:29
Speaker
AlphaGo made that move, and everyone said, oh well, Lee Sedol should win the game from this point on, but then very late on it showed actually this surprising move had a lot of value.
00:49:41
Speaker
because it helped AlphaGo to win that game. And it's taught us now to play Go in a new way. There have been three revolutions in the history of Go, one in about the 16th century, one at the beginning of the 20th century, and now this is a third revolution which has transformed the game. So that's really exciting because the learning process of the code, and it was the code itself that came up with that move and not a human who put that line of code in because
00:50:08
Speaker
I think if a human had seen that line of code, which was basically very early on in the game, AlphaGo played quite deep into the center of the board, and traditionally that's a very weak move that early on. A human would have deleted that line of code and said, no, that's bad, bad play. I mean, your Go master would say, no, no, that's a bad move. But AlphaGo, through its learning process, the machine learning, was seeing that this actually could be used
00:50:37
Speaker
It's a very powerful move later on in the game. So that really emerged out of the learning process and I think deserves to be called the creativity of the code rather than the creativity of a human who started writing the code from which it then learns. So I think games and AI are really fascinating kind of place to see how powerful AI is before it starts being unleashed on the real world.
00:51:06
Speaker
Wow. Oh, man, that's that's great. So every time I hear the story of AI playing go and beating somebody, as you said earlier, having a real creative things, I just get a shiver down my spine just because to be perfectly honest, as you know, evolved creatures,
00:51:23
Speaker
There's just certain thing, there's certain experiences that are just new to us and being out done at something that we thought was unique for we were unique at, we just get a shiver down our spine. But then I just, the other part of me thinks, okay, well, is there just going to be a part where we evolve further, even at a micro level to, to just be used to that and not be so shocked every time it happens. You know what I mean? But it's just something about our, our, our cognition and our mental picture of ourself that gets just a little bit thrown cold water on.
00:51:52
Speaker
just a little bit, just a little bit or a lot. It's just, it's interesting. Wow. If you don't mind, I wanted to just share a little bit of my thoughts on machine learning with a variety of games. I like to look at things like large language models and what it has been able to do in terms of simulating somebody having a conversation. And I've often thought of if you have a game that has a large user base, something like
00:52:15
Speaker
Oh, what's any massive multiplayer online RPG, anything like the Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft or anything like that? I wonder, there's sufficient datasets where you can have machine learning take over any given part of that, whether it is building its own character, which you can build on the dataset. So my question is, how many datasets exist that go into those games and machine learning thrives where you have massive datasets?
00:52:43
Speaker
You could have machine learning assist with making a litany of similar characters. I wonder how easy it would be to make a litany of plots that drive missions or use machine learning to create new environments. You know what I mean? Like it's different from your world. Or I have this idea that I have not seen worked out. I'm sure it's been done. Every single idea I've had, it's only a matter of time until I realized that somebody did it like 10 years ago. Yes, exactly. I know that feeling.
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, but I've got this crock pot, I don't know in Britain if the term crock pot is still used for a slow cooker. I have these ideas for a very slow cooker machine learning model where we're like, oh gosh, how am I trying to explain this?
00:53:30
Speaker
It studies one player or one group of players and it learns their mannerisms and then from that it designs environments that we would define through a reward function as interesting based on the organic mannerisms developed in a small group. These are ideas that I want to see implemented in massive multiplayer online gaming. If I was in charge over it, I don't know, Squaresoft or Blizzard or I know Blizzard has seen it. Well I think there's very interesting attempts to create video games which
00:53:59
Speaker
which don't have such a limited narrative that everyone's following the same path. And I think, you know, Zelda, the recent Zelda has been very interesting because they've allowed code, allowed players
00:54:14
Speaker
to explore combining components, which they never planned what would be the result of mixing two things that you've collected in the game. And to create some code which can deal with that challenge of, OK, somebody is going to put these things together. What will be the results? They haven't had to write the code to say, yeah, if you put these three things together, it will make a flying machine, which
00:54:41
Speaker
cooks pancakes or something. I don't know. But they created code which has been very flexible in just being able to cope with players' different weird and wonderful combinations of things that they've collected. So I think it's a really exciting time. What you want is code that can produce unexpected results. So you don't have to programming everything in. And in the past, of course, our top-down coding
00:55:08
Speaker
meant we had to know sort of what everything was going to do. Now with machine learning we don't and that opens up you know if it's done well such exciting possibilities and I mean I haven't played the Zelda that's just come out with this possibility to fuse but people I've talked to just said it's amazing because you can be so creative within the game.
00:55:27
Speaker
Oh my gosh, as you say that, it just dawned on me. I've been watching. There's a professor here in the United States at the University of Washington on YouTube. Professor Steve Brunton has a whole series. It's a really great intro to machine learning. And he describes the process. It just dawned on me from what you were saying.
00:55:46
Speaker
If there were to be a game that involved machine learning, the reward function would be users using, like, are your users continuing to use it or are they not? And have a direct reward function that was tied with the optimizing function directly to the changes you recently made. Like, that could be really cool and scary addictive too. I know it would be scary addictive, but the realm...
00:56:09
Speaker
Yeah the other thing I thought that where machine learning would be really useful is in creating the music behind a particular video game because you everyone's playing the game in a different way and the moment is quite clunky so you might move from one area to another and the music will change but what you really want is music that is starting to respond to gameplay your particular personality and just the the way you're navigating the game and in it
00:56:36
Speaker
Having a human do that is almost impossible, but that's perfect for, you know, so you have a human which puts in the kind of early material for the game, but then the machine learning actually melds the soundtrack to your gameplay. That seems a no-brainer in just a wonderful fusion of the human and the machine. I think that that would be something... I have dreams. Oh, I'm so sorry. Go ahead, Aaron, please.
00:57:00
Speaker
that would be something perfect for if you're doing a RPG like Baldur's Gate 3 and that would take it in through each scene and each emotion because I know that depending on how you interact coming in like bottom up really changes the outcome of how you're going to play and you you can even play as the cat. Yeah yeah yeah these are I think
00:57:26
Speaker
just the power of this technology to open up the creativity of the player is really exciting.
00:57:37
Speaker
makes me wonder like how does that also change bringing in AI and machine learning for how we interact as humans right so a lot of the card games uh in board games you're interacting in person with people and a lot of the times you're gaming with your friends online
00:58:00
Speaker
but you don't have those same interactions. How does the AI change our perception of reality in which, you know, your best friend can be some 18-year-old
00:58:18
Speaker
And you don't see that on the other end. Or 80 year old, because this is one of the things my mum loves. You know, my mum loves just the mask that online gaming provides. So she can be involved in a tribe, be a really big fighter within that tribe. And yet nobody realizes it's actually an 80 year old granny down in Cornwall playing.
00:58:41
Speaker
She was actually, I discovered, I think I put the story in the book actually, that she'd been playing with this whole group of people as part of a tribe in some online game. And then one of the people wrote on the chat, oh, I'm afraid Manuel can't come next week to the fight. And my mum said, oh, why? I said, well, unfortunately, he's got to go to prison and he won't have access to his games consoles.
00:59:07
Speaker
And as she learned more, she realized that the whole tribe was basically a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Chicago. And they were using the game as a kind of useful sort of downtime, or I don't know, maybe even communicating. And basically, my mum was like the leader of this tribe. There's 80-year-old granny and Mexicans running a drug cartel in Chicago. So it is interesting the world to get access through gaming.
00:59:39
Speaker
Oh, my gosh. The interconnectivity. Oh, my gosh. Oh, wow. But it's interesting because, you know, a lot of the games I talk about in the book actually are about physical games, games you hold in your hand, you know, hand rather than digits. The digital is all about your finger, not your hand. And I quite like the physicality of a game is quite important. And that includes actually sitting around a table with people physically. And I think that's
01:00:09
Speaker
why board games have maintained their popularity even in the digital age is that we still crave that contact with our fellow human across the table. And I think that's one reason I think games developed in the first place is creating an environment for us to share our inner world, our consciousness, our family, our friends. And so although I talk about video games and digital games in the book, it's not a major part of the book.
01:00:39
Speaker
My wife said I should have put loads more in because then the kids would buy the book. But actually I still think kids, you know, my son's been playing board games even, you know, he loves playing his PS4, 5, whatever, but he also loves the physicality of sitting around with
01:00:55
Speaker
bits of cardboard pushed out of her and put on the board you know. It really does make the difference because I think the generational difference for where you are versus where I am probably at a closer age uh like to your side like I enjoy playing video games online but also um
01:01:19
Speaker
I do enjoy going to the conventions and meeting my friends. And sometimes they're 20 hours away, or they're six hours away across the country. I have friends coming up this weekend. They're like, we're going to the convention that's close to you.
01:01:36
Speaker
And they're like, you're coming, right? And I went, what? I didn't even know this one. They're like, yeah, so we're going Friday through Sunday. Let's go. And it's just seeing them instead of just texting, being online. It's the physicality of being on like in person, playing Pokemon, Lorkana, magic.
01:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also just the physicality of those cards, I think, is something magical. You know, that's why cards have always had a potency about them. Why, you know, of course, Tarot, as I explained in the book, was originally an Italian card game. You know, the major arcana were trump cards in that. But, you know, the power of them then to go on and become this fortune telling
01:02:23
Speaker
uh side of of of the cards which is you know a later thing tarot cards i think most people thought were invented because of uh fortune telling but actually that grew out of a game so um you know i think the physicality of these things have a charm and a magic around them in particularly see cards i was very fascinated to discover have their origins in india probably and they have these
01:02:47
Speaker
wonderful things called ganjifa cards which are circular cards and they're beautifully painted like little Indian miniatures. They're very expensive to make because every card is hand painted and
01:03:00
Speaker
essentially they were wiped out as a species by the French European cards which came in or so easy to print the cards that we used to playing with. But I'm seeing when I've gone back to India I found a few studios which are reintroducing these beautiful cards and whenever I go to the museums in India I found just examples of they're so beautiful you just want to hold them and you know I think we still love the physicality
01:03:29
Speaker
of a game is an important aesthetic part of it. I know that games and cards are being, you know, they're often associated with children, but I wonder how successful anyone could be if they tried hard to make, like, just collecting silly cards that are literally just Pokemon cards, but for grown-ups. Like, I'll bet you could do it in the automotive industry, you know, like sports cars.
01:03:54
Speaker
Um, well, but then I got to think like, like, uh, sorry, I have this litany of really, really silly media productions in, in my head. Like I have a, I used to watch the channel college humor and they had a whole video about a breakfast cereal mascot for grownups where it was this boring, uh, old old Reverend who was philosophical and, and, and, you know, the, the, the cereal was for like steel cut oatmeal. And he, he showed up in this gong plate and, and he, he was always, he was always like, uh,
01:04:24
Speaker
Uh, perhaps I can win your, uh, cereal in a game of cards. No, very well. I abhor games of chance, then I'll ask you in a straightaway manner. It's a very funny video, but I, I say all this because I'm serious. If somebody, if somebody just took upon the challenge to make an addictive game like Pokemon, but make it for grownups, what would, what thing, what symbolic thing would you put on the cards? So I don't know. Just a thought, just putting it out there. So.
01:04:52
Speaker
I think Magic the Gathering in a way was a game that was, you know, that was a game that came before Pokemon. And, and then it's the interesting thing, you know, to have a game where the actual cards collecting the cards in their own right is beautiful, but also actually, uh, yes, I'll bring out my desk in a moment is on the back of the bookshelf behind me. Um, but I think that that's, I think Magic the Gathering is a game that was more appealing to adults than it was to children. I mean, it was.
01:05:22
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, and you'll excuse me. I realized time-wise, we are over an hour. I have more questions. We could go forever. My issue is that I actually am due at my job. My boss gave me until my time, 11 o'clock AM, which means that I have to wrap up soon. I wish I could pass this on to you, Autumn, and you guys could go until you feel it was appropriate.
01:05:43
Speaker
But I did want to mention real quickly the topic, the math map. I wanted to mention real quickly as one of our initiatives. When I was talking with Autumn, so Autumn joined this team recently because you may or may not be aware, the first person that your publishers corresponded with was the beloved late Sofia Baca. Sofia and I were the co-founders of the Breaking Math podcast and tragically we lost Sofia this last year. He passed away. Yes, I was very sorry to hear that.
01:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. I've been in great contact with Sophia's parents, and Sophia's parents greatly approve of the podcast going forward. And there's been lots of conversations about how to outreach to various communities that Sophia was very close to, and how to bring enjoyment of math to them through this podcast. And I've talked to them at great length about Autumn. And I hired Autumn because I need help. I'm a dad of five kids. And my time to do the podcast is like,
01:06:36
Speaker
tiny you know what I mean and I'm constantly interrupted with like oh no a glass broke oh the dog got into the kids toy oh the kids you know poured the cereal all over the ground it's all kinds of fun here I hired autumn because I needed so much help and then it turns out autumn is not only a social media manager but has her undergrad, undergrad and industrial engineering all this to say
01:06:56
Speaker
we had a powwow about where the podcast is going and in the powwow I found a map of mathematics that somebody had made and I thought it was number one brilliant if you go to youtube I think it's oh gosh I always forget the channel there exists a map of mathematics I want to expand that sorry
01:07:17
Speaker
extend the idea of the map of both pure and applied math and all the connections. I want to make a version of it that is clickable. I want to make it more like a tree that has a time element that has all of the podcasts that we've done already and where we haven't even gone yet. Because in every RPG, every video game, the excitement is looking at a map and thinking, oh, I haven't gone there yet. And I think that it would be helpful if I said we've got, what, between 90 and 110 episodes, if you count the mini episodes,
01:07:45
Speaker
And I could do every topic that we've done and make it clickable. And then when you hover your mouse over it, the intention is to make it so that, you know, the terms are defined, these episodes are summarized, but then connections are made to other branches of either mathematics or non-math topics, such as, I don't know, medicine or politics. And I only share this idea because this idea, I think, could take any form by any creator, by anybody who has a history in math publishing,
01:08:13
Speaker
And since I am already borrowing the idea from Map of Mathematics, I just bring it up like, shoot, if anyone else has more time than this busy dad and wants to go crazy with it, I'm sharing this idea hoping that either I get around to making it or somebody shares it. So yeah, I just wanted to share that.
01:08:31
Speaker
Sounds very exciting. Yes. I look forward to clicking on it. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Awesome. And then the other thing I'll say is as we're wrapping up, I have to wrap up, unfortunately, and I wish if you were logged in as an admin autumn, and I apologize, I didn't think about this, you guys could carry on. I also have a call I got to make to India in a few minutes time. So this will probably be a good time for.
01:08:53
Speaker
wrapping up as well. Is there any remaining plugs for anything at all? Future books, past books, other topics, causes, anything that you would like to plug on the show as we are wrapping up?
01:09:07
Speaker
Well, I'm hoping everyone will be excited to buy the games book now. As I mentioned, I've also got this book that I'm currently writing, which my deadline is in a few months time for my editor. So I probably shouldn't be talking to you, but I should be writing, which is called Blueprints. And I also have a play that I've written, which is about one of my mathematical heroes, Andre Vey. The play is a kind of exploration of
01:09:32
Speaker
Well, it's actually an exploration of free will through his biography about why he made a particular choice in his life and whether we really have free will or not. But also about his mathematics, because he proved what I regard as one of the great theorems of the 20th century, which he proved whilst he was in prison. So the play starts with him in prison.
01:09:52
Speaker
So that I'm taking on tour in India in the autumn of this year and I would love to bring it to America because I think American audiences will be very interested. So if there's anyone out there who'd like to sponsor a tour of this wonderful new play called the Axiom of Choice around America then I would love to hear from you.
01:10:14
Speaker
Oh my gosh, let me, I have some connections. I don't know that I have one little bite. You know how it goes. Everybody knows somebody. Yes, absolutely. For what it's worth. That's awesome. The axiom of choice. Free Will is trending right now. I'm sure you've seen, what's his name? Robert, what's his last name? I apologize. Robert Sapowski. I would Google it, but I'm talking to you on my phone right now. He wrote a book called Determined. He's a biologist and he believes he has no free will.
01:10:42
Speaker
And I find myself that all, okay, just to full cards on the table. Ah-ho, the pun, get it? Full cards on the table, ba-dum-ch. Okay, sorry. Full cards on the table. The more I study it, I'm finding that all roads lead to Rome being his conclusion that there is no free will.
01:10:58
Speaker
I hope there is, but I, that's where everything that I'm reading. I think that's the easy option. And I think the real challenge is can you with all that we know prove that there is free will. So that's, that's, so actually, uh, this, this book here, which I've got on my desk right in front of me, it's called why free will is real by Christian list is the best. It's basically a philosopher. Um, and he, he does a really good job of even in a deterministic universe. Why?
01:11:28
Speaker
why we have free will and it's not just an illusion. I raise a glass and I'm sorry, I'm American. I don't have a fancy glass of like a really nice cognac. I will do my best as an American. I told you what I was drinking right now. Oh my gosh.
01:11:44
Speaker
That's crazy. Can we get a sponsorship deal with certain energy drinks? Well, I just got a bicycle oil. If I raise a glass to anybody defending free will, I do. I hope they win. May they win. It's just that I find myself on the other, you know, the materialist, Sid Beanhosen and Felder side.
01:12:06
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So, yes, sir. I hope that anything may come of what you've mentioned. I think that your book is a garden that is ripe for blooming in many topics. And I hope to be part of that. We're literally... Autumn and I are talking about what interns can we hire and put on a project of just dissecting your book and similar books and making, like... I don't know. I got to see what already exists out there, but, like, there's so much to talk about. Very interesting projects.
01:12:35
Speaker
yes i'm very excited by the inspiration is giving you thank you and i do need to mention this i saw that the chair that you currently occupy or did occupy i don't know what the current status is is the same one that uh sir richard dawkins held before you is that correct he did yes i'm the second holder of this chair
01:12:53
Speaker
It's the Simone chair for the public understanding of science. And Richard was the first holder of the chair. And when he retired, I was the one who got it next. So it was a wonderful chair. Nice. Nice. Instead of talking about the god of delusion, we talk about games. It's a little more dining room table. So the difference here is you can talk to your grandma about it. So
01:13:18
Speaker
I'm gonna get in trouble on this podcast. Okay, I better go drive off to work. Sir, it has been beyond a pleasure. I would like to follow up with what we intend to do with this. There's been about a month-long turnaround on editing and getting this stuff out. We might get this one out faster, depending on various things, but please look forward to hearing us in the future, and I don't know when.
01:13:40
Speaker
Before we end today's episode, don't forget that we are doing a social media giveaway of a free copy of the book, Around the World in 88 Games, by Professor Marcus Dusatoi. In order to be in the drawing for the giveaway, be sure to check out our social media and follow the instructions on the post labeled book giveaway. Again, you'll find a post on both the X, which used to be Twitter,
01:14:04
Speaker
If you follow us at Breaking Math Pod on X, you'll find a post with the title Book Giveaway, and also you'll find a similar post on Instagram. Our Instagram handle is at Breaking Math Media. And there are specific instructions for what you have to do. It includes tagging a few friends, sharing, liking, and following a few things, including the book publisher, as well as the book author. And when you follow the instructions exactly, you'll be in the drawing for a free copy of the book.
01:14:31
Speaker
Thank you for joining us and I hope you enjoyed today's episode.