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Life is Not a Solved Game
Embracing the many mysteries of life
My youngest daughter and I sat next to each other in a crowded Oregon coast chain restaurant called Pig ’N Pancake, partaking in a delightful ritual: playing tic-tac-toe on the paper children’s menu.
T was eight at the time. After our second game ended in a tie (a cat’s game), she looked up at me with a beautiful smile, missing two teeth, and said, “We’re both too good at this game!”
Tic-tac-toe is what game theorists call a solved game. This means that the outcome of the game can be correctly predicted from any position, given enough information.
Solved games are usually simple, turn-based games. Checkers is a solved game, but chess, with its nearly infinite combinations of moves, remains unsolved.
Once upon a time, data scientists invested a massive amount of time and computer processing power into trying to solve games. Now, working in generative AI is too lucrative for most data scientists to spend resources on game theory.
Many tech titans seem driven by the belief that everything is a solvable game. They are willing to play chicken with the health of the planet based on the belief that generative AI will eventually be powerful enough to solve the climate crisis and every other problem currently facing the…
