But this book—subtitled “A Human History”—is not really a philosophical inquiry. Nor is it a deep consideration of any of the games or their star players, although such people provide much of the joy of the book. There’s Marion Tinsley, a moderate Midwesterner with settled habits and deep religious faith, and the greatest drafts player who ever lived; and Nigel Richards, a distant ascetic who lives in Malaysia but dominates every Scrabble competition he participates in. And while backgammon’s roots are buried in Egyptian tombs, it was a Russian expatriate named Prince Alexis Obolensky who popularized the game in the 1960s as a jetsetter’s pastime.. But none of these people are the main characters of the book. Instead, this is the story of the likes of Jonathan Schaeffer (checkers), Gerald Tesauro (backgammon), and Jason Katz-Brown (Scrabble). They are players, yes, often very good ones. But they are here because of their computer programming skills.
Each of the main sections of this book reads like a tragedy, a repetitive myth of hubris, told with different characters but with the same ending, so that by the third or fourth story you start to fear what you know is to come. Every game has its history, its champions, its quirks and its community, and then comes the programmer who believes he can teach a computer to play it. Each time, game enthusiasts claim that their pastime is a pure expression of inescapable human creativity, and as the programs improve, players are stripped of their illusions. The human champion ends up in a hotel ballroom across from a young programmer’s game board who sits next to a box telling him what to do, each time the box wins. The game they thought was art is just another mechanism, no more inaccessible to the brute force of microprocessors than, say, building a car. In this regard, “Seven Games” is not so much a biography of these classic games as the obituary of their group.
That tragedy is most profound in his first narration: Schaeffer, a Canadian computer scientist who became obsessed with creating a drafts program that could defeat Tinsley, his greatest champion. He started with box-sized machines in the 1970s and finally succeeded in 1994, but the triumph was bathed in loss. It was Tinsley’s last game; the cancer that would soon kill him was discovered during the game. The last we see of Schaeffer is at an airport ten years later, traveling with his daughter, whom he barely saw when she was growing up because of the drafts obsession that also cost him his marriage. Schaeffer receives a message: The latest, most powerful version of his program has “dissolved” disks, meaning there is now an optimal strategy that can never be defeated by a human.
By the time computers defeated human champions at chess, then poker, then backgammon and Go, human players had stopped resisting the inevitable as much as surrendering to their superiors. High-level poker, Roeder tells us, no longer means playing “the man, not” the cards”, but instead memorizing ideal strategies spat out by programs that perform millions of variations on a given hand. Instead of gamblers jotting down each other’s stories, the game is now dominated by young men wearing sunglasses and headphones , so that their ‘game theory-optimum’ strategy is not affected by distractions when another player vibrates.After wins or beats, players compare their game against the programs they have purchased to make sure they are using the software recommended You start to realize that people don’t play with each other using computers, the computers play against other computers and use people as meaty armatures to move the pieces.
