Transference of Game Skills

A question posted on Reddit caught my eye:

Any chess GMs that are crazy good at boardgames? This is something I’ve been pondering, I’d think they’d have a HUGE advantage in abstracts (clearly) but non abstract games what do you think their advantage is if any?

“Chess GMs and the general board game“

As it happens, I have some knowledge about this. I read The Psychology of Chess (which I believe was by Ray Keene, but I can’t find it online, possibly because there is a new (2018) book with the same name. (I read my copy in the 90s). So this is from memory.

In general, Chess knowledge (past a certain point) is only detailed knowledge about chess, and doesn’t translate well. For example, a Chess GM can massively “chunk” (compress) positions and quickly recognize them. (See a video where Magnus Carlsen names chess games from a key position and/or a few moves).

In one of the most famous experiments, GMs can quickly recreate a position from a few seconds glance, and this ability goes down with rating. But — and this is the part — this is only for valid positions that resemble real games. If you used dice (or whatever) to randomize the pieces on the board, then rating does not correlate with how much they remember.

I recall an IM (not a GM, but hardly a slouch) at a game convention one year and did not hear/see any awe inspiring stories, but I don’t think I played any games against him.

I suspect GMs are more likely to be decent board game players than random people … because “an interest in board games” is likely how they got into chess, discovered they enjoyed it and were good (which often go together).

On a personal note, even something like “The ability to calculate variations” doesn’t transfer well. After I gave up Chess (~1750 rating as a college freshman) and took up Go, it didn’t help. Because the key part of calculation includes “which moves are candidates that need to be evaluated” and “is this position good or bad”

(Certainly someone with a monster ability to visualize would be at an advantage for either game, as compared to the people who do not really have a mind’s eye).

I do happen to play board games against national and world class Bridge players, and the world class player is indeed good at many games (and certainly better than me at many, not just card games, but not outrageously so). I suspect that skill at cards, probability knowledge, and card counting are more generally useful to games than chess positions (and the general skills of evaluating a position, determination / grit, etc apply to both).

One other big difference that occurs to me off hand. A Bridge Grandmaster has to handle one thing a chess GM doesn’t: Interpreting your own results. If you lose a chess game, you can go to a computer and find your mistake(s). If you do poorly on a bridge hand it may be because you made a mistake or it may be because of bad luck. Or you may win due to bad plays. Many “forever novices/intermediate” bridge players are unable to distinguish good results from good technique.

(A story I have told before — a local bridge national champion (one that I play other games with) is playing a short match against some little old ladies. After the hands are over, but before they get up to compare the scores, he tells the LOL’s “congratulations, and good luck on your next match.” The LOLs win the match, and are wondering how he knew … simple. He knows that the bad decisions that the other team made will not be repeated by his expert team-mates …. but those particular bad decisions happened to work out on that particular day. The 80% slam the ladies missed? His team-mates bid. But bad breaks doomed it, etc).

Of course that doesn’t mean that GMs are necessarily bad. Carlsen famously is good at poker (many bridge experts are, too). Kit Woolsey is world class in backgammon and bridge. But my gut is that most of that is “likes games” and dedication /skill in both fields, not some “transference.”

There are certainly skills that you can get that move from game to game, but someone who has played 1,000+ different games (and studied them) will likely gain many of the same skills, to whatever ability they can.

Update — A bridge book (!) mentioned the chess experiment and that it was conducted by Adriaan de Groot (the wikipedia page doesn’t mention the experiment, but this Wired article does). The Chess Psychology book I was reading was likely by Harston and Wason, not Keene. Thanks to Rich Heli for his comment).

Opponents, Expertise and Enjoyment

I’ve been thinking about the “Expert” tag again. I’ve always been on the fence about calling myself a bridge expert, but how should one define expert? I thought back to my days playing chess and at a tournament there may be ~3-4 players with the expert title in a field of 40 or so. And you know what, “in the top 10%” feels like a good definition for “expert.” Expert is good, experienced, but not terribly rare. You run into experts fairly often.

After thinking about it, I looked up the USCF ratings graph, and expert is roughly top 3% and Class A is 10%. Perhaps I’m mis-remembering or maybe it was just a tough field, but there’s something nice about round numbers and even measurement systems, so from now on my internal metric is

• Expert = Top 10%
• Master = Top 1%
• Senior Master = Top 0.1%

Grandmaster is another few orders of magnitude … perhaps Top 0.001% or 0.0001%-ish. From the USCF site, these are “close enough if you squint and/or are bad at math” accurate. Good enough for me!

Last week’s Bridge Regional inspired this train of thought. I played team games, partnered mostly with Hank (for the first time in nearly two years) but playing with relatively new players, so we were not in the top bracket. Hank had more master points than the rest of the team. I am definitely under-counted because I rarely travel for tournaments (and don’t even play many club games, as there haven’t been night games in ages).

Apparently there was lots of complaining going on (when we were supposedly out of earshot, although Hank and I did overhear a few). “Why do we have to play against them?” etc. Hank and I sometimes get this because we play an odd system, but I also heard it a few times when I was playing with Tom (and we play something close to expert standard 2/1). Tom was in Flight A when he was partnered with other people, but we were second bracket. Again, all through the normal sorting of teams based on rating.

It was odd to be whispered as some sort of “Bridge Bogeyman” in the bracket.

My favorite was when Hank and I got to a routine 6NT … ice cold for with a two-way finesse or drop of the queen for the overtrick. (ATx opposite KJ9xx or so). As there were 8 cards in the suit (five missing) with no real clues I decided to play for the queen to be under the KJ9xx (as that way I could also pick up a 5=0 break as well as any 4=1 breaks) and slapped down the ace and then finessed. Queen was wrong, making six. I think the hand took under a minute to play. It was just for an overtrick.

The other declarer played for the drop (and it worked) to score the overtrick. It was a close match, we won 6-2, with that overtrick IMP being half of the 2 we lost. But as we going over to compare Hank and I hear “I was sure that they would bid the grand slam for a big loss!”

There was a lot to unpack there:

• A grand slam should only be bid at teams if its around 70%, which this clearly wasn’t.
• The play of the drop is inferior to a finesse in that situation (with no relevant information changing the odds).
• When in doubt, experts should stick with the field and trust on their play to win instead of random bidding differences.

But the fact that I know the above list (and they don’t) is part of why I’m now comfortable calling myself an expert. (At least in that field).

You become an expert by being the small fish in a big pond. (At least, if you are capable of becoming one). IMO one of the reasons bridge is dying is that most people value winning over learning (or a close fought loss). Board-a-match and Long KO matches (which both greatly favor the stronger team) are replaced with IMPs and Swiss (which have more luck). Stratified Swiss (where teams with same records play each other, so the Best Flight B may play a match or two against Flight A) becomes Bracketed Swiss (where all the best teams are Bracket 1, the next best are Bracket 2, and you only play in your bracket).

At a local sectional there was a big brouhaha when the sectional tried to turn a bracketed swiss into a stratified (because brackets need a specific number of teams). Several teams threatened to walk out. There were impassioned speeches! It was vaguely ugly.

Expertise isn’t magical. Mostly its avoiding stupid mistakes. When I was mentoring a newer employee who had just finished a code camp and she was bemoaning how everyone knew so much more than her, I pointed out that most of that was just time. After you make a mistake for the 5th or 10th or 100th time you eventually learn to recognize it before hand and avoid it. But you don’t learn from your mistake if you don’t actually notice that it was a mistake …. like winning an IMP from the wrong play …. or a bug you put into production that someone else fixes two years later after you’ve left the team ….

Anyway, when Hank and I were discussing this (and related themes) we were joined by a local ~Senior Master (by my categorization …. several national championships, pro, and a sometimes board gamer). At some point I noted that “The real difficulty with playing against a strong player is that you can have a situation where you know that a weak player may not find a defense that is too tough, so you don’t have to consider it as an option).

Senior Master then told the following story: (paraphrased)

“I was playing against Bob Hamman” (Grandmaster, arguably the greatest player of all time) “and held AKJ9 of a suit. I played the ace and Bob dropped the queen behind me. As you said, with a novice or even an intermediate player, it would be easy, cross to dummy and finesse the nine against the ‘proven’ ten. But against ‘The Great Bob Hamman’? So I thought. I figured it was a coin flip but even if the finesse of the nine worked I would still have problems [due to the rest of the hand] …. but if Bob had false-carded from Q-T then I could claim, so I played the King. Bob just shook his head, said “too good!” and dropped the ten.”

For the most part, Hank and I didn’t do too well. Partially that’s rust (two years without playing together is tough for our system) but partially that’s just playing with a weaker pair. When we lost and it was my fault, I was annoyed at myself. When it was our team-mates fault, I shrugged and moved on. It’s just a game. I guess I’ve always been an odd duck — I tend to dislike games I win on the first play, unless it’s everyone’s first time. They are usually too simple.

Perhaps bridge players need to hear that Reiner quote.

When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.

Reiner Knizia.

A Response to Jorbs, regarding Poker and the Tragedy of the Commons

Last night I saw that Jorbs (the Slay the Spire Streamer and former pro-poker player) posted a video discussing tournament hold ’em and the tragedy of the commons. While Tao isn’t a huge poker player, I’m not entirely without skills. And mixing game theory, poker, and policy design? The kind of catnip topic I haven’t seen in years!

To summarize the video:

1. In tournament poker (unlike in cash games) not all chips are equal value (the Independent Chip Model)
2. In the final table of a tournament (for example) this model leads to optimal play often being to wait for you and him to fight. “Going to war” (with random hands) on net costs both players expected value. (I don’t really think you — the average Tao reader, gifted with math knowledge far above average — needs that link. Nor does Jorbs. But maybe I’ll catch some traffic that does).
3. Jorbs provides the example of a 6 handed table folded to the small blind. In this situation, the SB may just shove all in much more often than optimal (in a cash game), because the clever BB — even if he knows that he SB is bullying — is stuck. Calling with more than the “correct” set of hands (whatever that may be) is just destroying his expected value.
4. This is a tragedy of the commons, a known problem (Jorbs uses the “picking up trash in a public park” example). (It’s kind of a two player prisoner’s dilemma, with a small blind/big blind, but because it can be repeated with multiple actors, it extends. There are some assumptions buried in there, but for a 20 minute video or a blog post, I think its fine to handwave this).
5. But — here is the crux of Jorbs’s frustration — Pro Poker players are some of the most strategic thinkers on the earth (in their domain at least) … So, why have they not come up with a solution to this problem via some enforcement strategy?
6. More frustratingly for Jorbs is that apparently poker players do not apparently acknowledge this problem.

I have many thoughts….

Let’s You and Him Fight

First, this problem is a typical “multi-player wargame” issue. This is the reason 3+ player (non-team) Chess doesn’t work. If A and B trade pawns, C is better off. There’s a reason that Titan is a classic: If A and B fight, C may be the big loser (because fighting has gains and losses …. the fight’s winner can gain points, a recruit, an angel, possibly legion tokens).

In fact, I think Jorb’s simplified model over-stated how negative the EV was of going to war. He just assumed payouts of 6,5,4,3,2,1. But typical tournament payout would be something like 300,150,75,40,25,10 … the values would depend on entries, but winning is ~40% …. Running a full EV calculation is harder then, but my gut feeling is that it lessens the impact of going all, but it would still be a negative EV play. (The calculation is harder b/c the person who doubles up now has a 40% chance of winning the tournament, but also improved chances of 2nd, and reduced chances of 5th, etc. This calculation may be solved, but I don’t know the solution and don’t care to do it now. Perhaps one of my readers knows the answer).

As any bridge player has heard, Matchpoints isn’t real bridge. (See my review of Matchpoints by Kit Woolsey). So, Jorbs feeling that tournament poker has these annoying corner cases makes total sense. You have taken an open-ended cash game (like Bridge, originally) and turned it into a format that can take an arbitrary number of entries and produce a winner in a relatively fixed time frame. Why would you expect that to be a perfect translation?

Perhaps the TL;DR of this essay is “Given that this is a known problem in tons of domains, why would you think Poker is immune?” Again — hardly satisfying. So let’s dive into it in more detail

Enforcers != Enforcement

Jorbs brings up the idea that people should enforce it. Let’s define that. An optimal player in the Big Blind will know the range of hands to calldown with if the Small Blind is playing optimally (even if I don’t). This is likely solved. If the small blind is “stealing” (betting or shoving all in on more hands than is optimal) then the Big Blind can call more aggressively and still be playing optimally (assuming he has a good estimate of how much the small blind is cheating).

We’re still in game theory. But what if the Big Blind decides to change from “optimal” play to an enforcer? Now they will not only call when it is optimal, they will call sometimes when it is sub-optimal, just to hope to catch the small blind and punish them. Something I have said professionally (but not on this blog, apparently) is

“Security is paying a small cost to impose a large cost on your adversary.”

(Me)

So, an enforcer expands their range of plays (possibly to the point of just always calling anyone who appears to be consistently stealing). If all the seats agree to do this, then you have solved the tragedy of the commons, or so the argument goes. Because players see that you are willing to punish defectors

Let’s posit that some players at the final table are just lucky and not up to game theory.

If we go back to our park example. An optimal person will pick up some trash and keep the park clean for everyone (“cooperate” in the prisoner’s dilemma). If they see a defector (someone who walks past a piece of trash without picking it up or even worse tosses some trash on the ground), they will not do anything. But an enforcer will punish the defector. Call them out, shame them, fine them, something. The enforcer takes an additional cost to make things right.

So now our enforcer rushes over to the guy who tossed a soda cup on the ground, harangues them, and then gets their reputation destroyed on social media, gets fired from their job and the litter bug’s Go Fund Me explodes … (Now might be a good time to mention the “Central Park Karen” — I haven’t followed that particular story enough to know who is actually the bad guy here, but this is not a hypothetical).

The obviously true fact is at the poker table, there’s a lot of variance. “Punishing” the defector is probably taking away a couple percent from them in the long run, but in the short run you’ll double them up a fair amount of the time.

And what do the other players see? A way to tilt the enforcer (should they ever be sitting to his right). Because “Enforcer” is another way of saying “Not playing optimally.”

Enforcement may incentivize the behavior you are trying to stop. Particularly for an opponent who recognizes he’s outclassed. (This is another aspect of Matchpoints. When you are inferior to the field you should absolutely not use the exact same bidding system as the field. Why get to the average contract and let the result be decided by technical perfection when the other players are better at it? Better to flip a coin, even if you know the coin is slightly biased against you).

It would be one thing if when you tossed some trash on the ground, enforcers (cops or otherwise) magically appeared and gave you a $50 fine. But if they magically appear and give you a fine 52% of the time and give you a $50 gift card 48% of the time, you are “losing” EV, but it might take a while to catch on.

People play lotteries voluntarily and plenty of criminals risk decades (or life) of jail time because enforcement is haphazard at best, and that’s with paid enforcers.

A minor but related point — If your village has 100 people, the park is probably small but nice. Everyone knows everyone, and if Giselle doesn’t pick up the trash because she thinks its beneath her, people will talk. If your commons are Manhattan’s Central Park …. well, there’s a lot of anonymity in the big city (except for Karen) anyway. Even if you discount the bad incentives and knew that everyone would see what you are doing and react accordingly, it matters if you are playing against the same crowd over and over again (where they will learn you are enforcing) versus some people you’ll likely never see again. (Yes, this might very well be the definition of Tragedy of the Commons, but I wanted to make it explicitly).

The Elephant in the Card Room

One aspect that Jorbs touches on …. there is an enforcer. The Casino. As he mentions, there are rules against collusion. The Casino cares about that, because if word got out that a gang (etc) were colluding in their card room the game (and their sweet, sweet rakes) would dry up. The tournament rules (like raising stakes) also exist for the Casino’s benefit, because they don’t rake each hand (only the fees), so they have incentives to make it fast enough to be profitable, but long enough that players want to play.

And the Casino is a notoriously ruthless enforcer. If I became desperate enough to resort to stealing, I’d go for a waitresses tips before trying to steal chips from an area where all the players had went to the bathroom. Even for non-crime, rules of the game enforcements, casinos are tough to beat. I’ve been called out for string raising because I didn’t know the exact rules of that particular card room (for example), even though I’m usually careful to not string-raise. The dealer is often very sympathetic to me, while rigidly enforcing the rules.

A story I read in a poker book. In one of the early tournaments, a small stack pushed all in under-the-gun. The next person (a medium stack, with several big stacks behind him) pushed all in and flipped over his pair of aces. The logic was impeccable, he was likely to bust out the small stack, but a big stack might think he was also cheating and try to bust him out, and even if he had a hand, ICM theory said it might be right to call. The ace-holder might very well grab a bunch of chips, but it was at a risk and by advertising he was making the safe solid play.

This is another weird Matchpoint-esque situation. Playing for cash you’d be happy to have a bunch of callers.

Now casinos ban players from showing their cards.

Of course, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why Casinos don’t say “No cheating in the final table, tragedy of the commons situation.” How to tell and enforce? Casinos want a bright line rule. But from the Casino’s POV, this is a legitimate angle/shot, all part of the game, and not something that (most) players care about. If players did care, Casinos might try to enforce it, but mostly it takes care of itself. Chip stacks are rarely even and the blinds will increase fast enough that other issues come to the fore.

Part of my wonders if one reason that Pros (in general) don’t care isn’t a lack of awareness, its just that its a small minor corner cases that they get over (“Matchpoints”). And against that small benefit, if they ever decided to band and somehow not have it backfire, they are worried about the casino.

Because if you (and the rest of the Pros) stood up and loudly proclaimed “We will punish defectors” some Average Joe somewhere is going to go to the Casino and say “Aren’t they colluding?” (I don’t really think this is an issue, but its an interesting angle).

Some random other thoughts / Conclusion

I keep thinking back to Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty. For any problem inside an organization or system some people accept it (Loyalty), some complain but try to work within the system (Voice) and some just give up and walk away (Exit). This is obviously a butchering and gross simplification of Hirschman’s book, which I doubt I remember enough to treat well …. Thankfully poker isn’t nearly as important as most tragedies of the commons.

My main response to Jorbs is that I think he’s correct, and I can see why it bother him, but … well, I play a lot of Matchpoints these days. What he’s describing is true, and has no solution that I can see. If it really bothered me, well, I’d be an exit-guy as well. I’m sympathetic. Whaddya going to do? It’s the rules of the game.

PS — For a great article discussing capitalism, evolution, and various tragedies including the prisoner’s dilemma, paperclip maximizers and the race to the bottom — with a stop in Las Vegas — I suggest Scott Alexander’s (very long) essay Meditations on Moloch.

I will now jump from boring game theory stuff to what might be the closest thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had.

Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:

It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

A Practical Test of ‘Gaining the Mental Edge at Bridge’ using … Slay the Spire

One of the most unusual bridge books I’ve read is Kim Frazer’s Gaining the Mental Edge at Bridge. Unlike the vast majority of bridge books, there is practically no advice on bridge. This is all about “how to think” (a topic that I love enough to have a category in this blog for). Bridge forms the majority of the examples here, but apart from that these articles would not be out of place in any coaching symposium.

Kim was an international caliber shooter who took up bridge and later represented Australia in International events, so she has definitely “walked the walk” in two separate sports. There are chapters on focus, positive mindsets, mental preparation, rehearsal, match preparation & fitness, relaxation, goal setting and tracking.

The book itself was interesting — I don’t think much of it will come as a surprise but having it all done in a nicely packaged book (and providing references to sports journals, etc for more information) is good. I’ve started to try and build up a routine for the playing of bridge hands (still more forgotten than observed) so as to reduce the number of stupid errors. In fact, the first night (on BBO) I did it, I think I played well and then I went and forgot to look at the checklist this week, didn’t use it, and had a large number of errors. (The checklist is just a routine to do at the start of each hand …. say “Focus” to start the routine, note the board information (dealer,/vulnerability) count the HCP, decide on my opening bid (should it pass to me), and my likely continuations, responses.

I normally do this (in some shape) on most hands, but not in a formalized way. But (as per the book) I wrote out a checklist and used it, to good results (the times I remembered).

While thinking about this training, I realized that I could run a quick experiment on the chapter on goal setting and tracking using … Slay the Spire. I mean, while this book is aimed at Bridge it is not specifically for it, and right now my StS play is much more prevalent. (And is a solitaire game). Consider it a training run.

So — what are my goals? I’d like to improve my win rate (a win defined as “Beating the corrupt heart at ascension 15” (which is what I normally play at). There is a “Victory?” where you win without getting to the heart, but I consider that a loss. It means I’ve forgotten to claim one of the three keys required to unlock the fourth act.

Control Data

Anyway, the first part of goal setting was to set a record keeping standard. I decided to review the last 50 runs I had for each of the three main characters I played (I do not particularly enjoy playing Watcher, so I rarely do). Fortunately StS keeps a record of runs, so I pulled out some basic information (like which floor I died on) and put them into an excel spreadsheet.

Here are the stats:

Died during….	Character — Ironclad	Character — Silent	Character — Defect
Act I (Exordium)	10	7	3
First Boss	6	7	6
Act II (The City)	11	16	21
Second Boss	3	3	5
Act III (The Beyond)	3	3	5
Third Boss	2	4	1
Act IV Elites	1	1	3
The Corrupt Heart	3	4	4
Victory!	11	5	2
Checksum	50	50	50

Not a huge sample size….

It struck me as odd that the Second Boss and Act III numbers matched, but I doubled checked and its just a coincidence.

First thought — I won at a 12% rate, which was lower than I thought (I would have guessed I won at a 20% rate overall), but perhaps I am just deluding myself. I do think I had some bad luck (a certainly have a better than 4% win rate as defect!) so I would expect over the next 150 games to improve the rate in any case. The book states that I should set a goal that seems difficult but achievable. Let’s try for a 25% win rate overall (doubling the control).

I also need to build a checklist for the game, so I did. (Commentary in Italics)

• Start of Act
  • Examine the floor layout, pick likely path and alternates if I get good/back luck.
  • Note who is the end of act Boss!
  • (Act I only) Decide on Neow’s gift (a special bonus you get at game start), re-evaluate
• Checklist for each fight/event
  • Upon revealing the enemies, decide on how dangerous this fight will be (win easily, win but take significant damage, likely die, etc).
  • Note relics that I have that may have an interaction
  • Set out my goal for the fight is (Not just winning while taking as little damage as possible, do I want to set up relic counts for the next fight, etc).
  • Decide on general fight strategy …. if I will likely be using a potion(s) (In general the fight strategy will be set by how my deck is built and not change much from floor to floor, but I wanted to explicitly call out this step).
  • Per Turn Checklist:
    • Examine hand, enemy action (if varied)
    • Is my luck good/bad enough to change strategy? (Maybe I’m getting killed an need to drink a potion or assume a good draw next turn….or maybe things have gone well so I can shift from “just win the fight” to “win the fight and set up my relics counts”)
    • Determine candidate plays, pick one (may iterate if plays draw cards).
  • (For events this is basically the same, but simplified since the fight is “picking which event outcome to take”)
• Post fight analysis
  • Did I accurately judge the fight? Did I miss anything that I could have done better?
• Post-fight rewards
  • Examine offered rewards
  • State how each option affects my deck. Do I need it to cover a weakness (a specific enemy/elite), or to solve a general problem (front loaded damage/scaling damage/blocking).
  • Double check for good/bad interactions. Look at your deck and relics when deciding!
  • Decide which is best and take it (or skip).
  • Determine a rough “State of the game” (my ‘equity’ in the game). (Don’t need an exact number, but has it gone up or down).
  • Adjust strategy based on state of game. Pick next floor.
• Post-game analysis.
  • Record tracking information
  • Write up a quick summary as to why I think I won/lost
  • Think of at least one positive and one “need to improve”

Again, I probably did a lot of this automatically, but there are a few things I’m calling out to myself — Making sure to double check potions and relics (because forgetting to use them is a big mistake).

Things to track:

I’ll track everything as before, but also keep track of my mistakes and notes. (For the above, I didn’t show it but I also noted which enemy I died to).

“Oops” Mistakes — Playing too quickly (if I make a move I want to “take back” then that’s a mistake. You can quit a fight and restart, but I’ll only do that if I make an actual misclick. I’ve been somewhat casual about that, but the real goal of this is to slow down and think more — which is the one skill that translates directly to bridge). In order to make this more “Apples to Apples” I’ll divide this by # of floors which isn’t an exact measure since not all floors can have them, but is at least reasonable.

Why did I lose — For my losses, I will categorize them as follows. I’ve decided to assign points to each category, with a total of 10 points.

1. Too Aggressive — Taking an upgrade when I should have rested, and in general not respecting that.
2. Too Passive — The downside of that is not recognizing when I’m poorly placed and need to be taking more short term risks to be able to face the next boss, etc. Note that I think I can be too passive and aggressive in the same game (obviously at different times).
3. Gross Oversights — I missed something and it got me (missed a relic interaction, etc). I’d really like this number to be low … that’s the point of the checklist. These are things that get me killed or a huge chunk of HP.
4. Math mistakes — Sometimes you have to just run the numbers.
5. Bad micromanagement of fights — Small errors in fights that cost a HP here and there, missing subtle interactions.
6. Bad Luck — Sometimes you just don’t get offered great cards, you bottom deck the fights, etc. Things that are outside my control. In theory there should only be points in this category on half (or less) of my games, but sometimes you just lose without doing anything wrong. (Negative Points means I had good luck and wasted it), so if I assign less than 10 points, I’ll dump the rest here.

When I win I will assign a “Good luck” score, how much was it just destined (because I got great cards/relics, etc).

As I normally do, I will rotate characters (Ironclad, then Silent, then Defect), just to match the controls.

Final thoughts (before starting)

Just looking at the stats was useful, because I have noticed a few things:

I play Act I too aggressively as Ironclad. Ironclad’s “schtick” is that he does a lot of damage and heals a bit after fights, and I clearly rely on that too much and end up dying in the first act (or at the first boss) much more so than other characters. My Ironclad win rate is higher (caveat for small sample size), but many of the runs are short, quick deaths.

I may be too passive with the other two characters …. For the silent/watcher (who don’t automatically heal) my play gets through Act I but am not well placed and die in Act II. I suspect I am not taking enough fast damage or all out attack.

I need to respect the Second Act more and start looking “past the first boss” when I think I have it beaten.

Let the games begin.

Update — After thinking about it (and playing a round of games while I was editing this), I think that “Bad Luck” should probably average 3. Jorbs only wins 70% of the games, so assuming that 30% are unwinnable at my level of play seems reasonable. (He’s on a higher ascension, but a better player). I’m not going to agonize over it too much (especially since it would lead to negative thinking, a “no-no” in the book.) I had a few games where things just didn’t seem to line up….

Why I wrote Draco Malfoy and the Practice of Rationality; and How I’ve Been Able to Enjoy it Again

(Warning — Non-gaming content. And a narcissism alert. But where else would I post this?)

Like the Starman sings, it’s been Five Years since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ended. And five years ago I was wishing there was more.

(This essay could end here. That’s enough of a reason. But that seems a bit short).

Years ago I read James Gleick’s book on Feynman (Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman), and there’s a line I remember (paraphrasing): There are two types of genius in the world. The first type, you look and think ‘If I just studied more, worked harder, applied myself, were a bit more gifted, I could do that.’ And for the second type you are just bewildered. Those geniuses have thoughts and do things that would never occur to you.

Feynman (and Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, whose exact name I still have to look up to spell correctly despite having written literally over one hundred thousand words in that universe) are the second type of genius. In HPMOR McGonagall (whose exact name I still have to look up….) has this exact thought about one of Harry’s insights. As for Eliezer Yudkowsky (whose exact …), the author, I’m not sure. I’ve never met him. He clearly rates highly on the mathematical aptitude scale, but I myself won the city-wide math prizes in contests (in a city > 1M), so i can see myself aspiring to the levels of math/CS proofs he does.

But never in a thousand years would the thought of writing Harry Potter Fanfiction as a teaching tool occur to me (more prosaically, neither would the existential threat of a non-malevolent AI, or many of the other ideas I saw on Less Wrong). So he certainly may be.

I’ve wanted to be a writer for decades. As a teenager, I took a summer workshop with famed editor David G. Hartwell on “Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy,” at which point I got my first taste of how difficult writing is. Why SF&F? Well, as a reader I have two axis that I’m looking for:

1. Interesting ideas
2. Beautiful language

As a teen, I favored the first reason — and SF writing has enough great ideas in the tropes. As to the writing, well, in published SF it was often acceptable. It wasn’t until later in life I started reading for beauty. I don’t find it often. But there are stories (and books, and series) where literally nothing happens (at least, as to plot) but I can remember the small turns of phrase, the tiny scenes.

These books are often filed under “Literature” in book stores. Some are quite good.

Anyway, I was reading “exquisitely written” books (when I read fiction) when I stumbled on HPMOR over a decade ago. (Fan Fiction lists the first chapter as published in Feb 2010 even thought I’m reasonably certain I read Chapter 100 in 2008, but perhaps that’s just FF’s publication date). For interesting ideas, HPMOR was off the charts. The writing was at least as good as the writing I’d put up with — or perpetrated — in SF&F. I was already familiar with some of the lessons (having read LessWrong, etc, as well as my own studies in Cognitive Science, decision making under pressure, etc) but even discounting those I’d found a story overflowing with ideas.

(And do not discount repetition. At least one of the lessons I knew intellectually, but was restated in such forceful and personal language that I re-evaluated some of of my life choices. Sometimes knowing a thing is quite different than understanding it).

HPMOR had a framework of cognitive science, with the fun part of exploring magic, the “aha” of seeing something in a (great) kid’s book being twisted to an unintended use! It had a villain who wasn’t just a story book character acting as a foil, simply feeding the hero to sharks-with-frikkin’ lasers then leaving and assuming the hero would die. And while HPMOR is clearly an “idea” story, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there were beautiful moments and character beats that gave me the shiver up my spine that I associate with moments of true beauty, and that are rare enough that I cherish them, no matter the source. There’s a joy to reading something — almost anything — written with true love. I like baseball; but even if you don’t you can read Bill James (at least, in small doses) because he clearly loves it and thinks about it and it shines through his writing. (Also, Bill James can turn a phrase). And EY had that going, too, but on a topic that I am deeply interested in, much more so than baseball.

And it had Harry Potter. Catnip to me (and so many others). And then …  it went dark for years. I switched jobs (twice by FF’s date, three times by my memory) and was at a new job when it started back up. And unlike so many stories, it seemed to be ending strongly.

Then came the final exam, and I wrote up a quick solution. In an uncharacteristic move I also reached out to some media outlets shopping around an article about the final exam and my theories that he was using this as an actual research experiment. (I reached out to E.Y. for an interview, to no avail). I eventually posted it here, although my premise turned out to be wrong (as I admitted). As the final chapters rolled out over the next two weeks, I rushed home from my career appointed task that gave me no joy to my daily dose of reading, thinking about, arguing online, etc.

And then it was over. But I wasn’t ready to let it go. And I discovered (via r/hpmor) sequels and branching fictions.

Let me be charitable and say that the few I tried were generally uninspired, had too many grating moments, or just felt off. In at least one case I closed the web page after the first sentence. So, I despaired. But, while the thought of writing HPMOR would have never occurred to me, writing a sequel fic seemed do-able. I decided to try it. I was writing it for me.

And — for once when writing fiction (as compared to writing about games) — the words flowed easily. I enjoyed it. I quickly set up some ground rules for myself, because all art is defined by constraints.

Draco would be the main character, because I’m not the second type of genius (or the first, really). I doubted I could plausibly write HJPEV. (Actually, that’s not necessarily true. If I spent a day or week or month coming up with a contrived clever thing, then have my character think of it in a flash, that could work, and I did use that trick). But also because Harry explicitly removes himself from the role of hero at the end of HPMOR. The other (obvious) constraint would be that this was a simple continuation fiction, and HPMOR was canon. And I did not feel that I ‘got’ Hermione. But Draco …. well, my training wasn’t quite as exquisite as his (and was in a vastly different field) but I could work within Draco’s constraints. And let’s put it this way. I’ve been accused of having some  … Slytherin tendencies. A college friend (and still friend) once described me by saying “If [Tao] knew the cure for cancer, he wouldn’t tell anyone until he’d figured out the implications.”

So, Hermione I am not.

DMPOR wasn’t great stylistically but I wrote the first chapters quickly. I didn’t even really bother editing it, I just put down the words (as is obvious from time to time) and fixed gross mistakes. (I did in fact go over each chapter several times, but like many people I mentally autocorrect any writing if I know what the author means, and as the author I always knew what I meant).

It was fun. After all, this was just a lark, my trying to draw out one last hit of my recently cut-off supply, as well as knocking off some cobwebs off a dream discarded years ago. I decided to post the link to my fiction to r/HPMOR and see if anyone else thought it was any good, and got a generally positive response, so I got that little bit of Whuffie and an endorphin rush, kept it up and knocked out the prologue (Ch1-9) in a month or two.

By this point I had decided to continue and also what I wanted my themes to be. One of those themes is a note of mild caution against HPMOR (the story) itself. There are (many) good ideas in there, but as I heard long ago (and the saying is older than that), “there is no difference between theory and practice …. in theory.” I’d had that in mind from the first moment of writing, hence the “practice” of rationality (and the Sorting Hat’s song). One point (that EY made himself, quite forcefully in the final chapter) is that HJPEV isn’t perfect or necessarily even a great role model. He has a very useful skill set, but everyone should be aiming for the type-one genius of Hermione. Work Hard. Be Nice.

But I could never make myself want to be like Hermione. (“A man can do what it wants, but can’t want what he wants.” —  Schopnhauer). I knew I couldn’t capture her point of view, not in the big picture.

I could easily want to be HJPEV (or at least, a more mature version). Or Quirrell. And I’m not alone in that. I had that in the back of my mind from Day 1. And I also had in mind the idea that “every advantage has a corresponding weakness.” If you’ve ever played one of those role playing games where you ‘buy’ a character (X points gets you more skills), you’ve likely been tempted to make yourself.

I’ve wanted to build a game where you can take as many advantages as you want, but each one has a package of disadvantages. Want to be Sherlock Holmes? Fine — because of your acute attention to detail and knowledge you are also easily bored (to the point of doing drugs), irritable, generally unpleasant to be around, unwilling to learn anything that has no practical value, etc. Everyone wants to be Batman, but minus all the dead parents and decade of angst and training.

HJPEV is a great protagonist, yet simultaneously a cautionary tale. DMPOR is both a sequel and also a (gentle) rebuttal, but again no more so than Chapter 122.

While writing the prologue I’d come up with some clever ideas, so I decided to continue but I needed to nail down my theme and general course.

— Broad sweeping Spoilers for DMPOR below but you can skip until the next section —

Continuing the rivalry between the triumvirate seemed obvious, and obvious doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Within the constraints of the world, it would undeniably happen, and its interesting. Significant Digits (which didn’t exist when I started; if it had I doubt I would have written anything) also latched onto this (in some ways working the opposite of I did, but in others along similar paths that struck me). Both our stories got a sort of ‘first movers’ advantage of premiering so soon after HPMOR ended, but SD is undeniably better written. But back to my story…..

There was not much room for Harry/Hermione antagonism, which led me to the obvious conclusion that Draco/Harry antagonism would work. I remembered the first few episodes of Smallville I only watched two or three before giving up, but I liked the idea of Clark Kent and Lex Luthor growing up together and ending on the opposite sides as adults. (This also echoes The Metropolitan Man by Alexander Wales, which I had read).Yes, its the BigBandFriend trope to have the villain be the guy you were hanging out with, but that works. I mean, if the reveal is that your nemesis is Joe Blow from Accounting. that’s realistic, but hardly dramatic. And this Draco/Harry interaction in many ways mirrored the Harry/QQ interaction (“I don’t have to hate him, I just have to win”). Symmetry is also enjoyable.

But I didn’t want to make Draco the villain. I wanted to make him a tragic heroic figure. In some ways I wanted this to work as a work like a Japanese story, where the heroes often kill themselves because of what they perceive as duty (think of the Forty-seven Ronin). I didn’t have everything plotted out, but by the end of the prologue (where Harry’s slip let’s Draco understand that he spoke with Voldemort extensively). As a sidebar, many readers objected to the Draco’s internal monologue saying that Harry had “chatted” with Voldemort, saying it was imprecise.

Perhaps, but I wanted to draw attention to that fact, and I wanted to draw attention to how Draco viewed that fact.  I’d also foreshadowed how that night would haunt him for years. I decided on the general idea of how Draco would work (self-obliviation with the help of his diary, and his vast resources) and why (including a little nudge from Dumbledore, who may still be operating under prophecy, which I thought would help the readers come to grips with his eventual decision, because even then I recognized that this was not for everyone).

Now I just needed to work out the details.

— End Spoilers —

(Also, I just had to look up how to spell Voldemort. It’s been a while).

Anyway, with the prologue out of the way and the broad strokes as to the “Hows” of the main plot, I went on my merry way. Before starting to write I’d re-read the Chamber of Secrets, which gave me some ideas for twists (such as Draco’s magical diary), red herrings and jokes. I had a goal but no strong urgency to get there, so I could sidebar with whatever interested me, and this let me put in some of my knowledge on Recognition Primed Decision Making, or anything else that held my fancy.

And I made a lot of mistakes. Not just factual mistakes, but story-telling decisions and shortcuts that some readers (and later, myself) disliked. I cut short the battle sequences because having Draco always win would be unrealistic, and he would often be unconscious, and because frankly they didn’t interest me as much. This was called “teasing” and annoying. I wanted to show viscerally the unreasonable effectiveness of ambushes. To call it a theme would be too nice, I had characters come out and say it over and over again. So ambushes would work. (I’ve seen ambushes — social and/or political instead of physical — up close and personal and they are devastatingly effective). So, I tried to have my story show my lessons. Some of this was unconscious but some was decidedly authorial intent.

I put in the”Thirty Four Years Later” epilogue (mirroring the one from Deathly Hallows with Adult Harry and Hermione but not Draco) as foreshadowing and also because I felt it would have more impact there, but that didn’t go over very well.

And then there was ‘the heist.’ The last third of the story.

I’d early on given up on the idea of having a final exam, but I wanted something big and bit off more than I could chew. To say that the last third of DMPOR kept me up at nights is both literally true yet feels like gross understatement. Trying to come up with a plan to achieve what I’d set out to do was hard. I’d built the world up and published mostly as I wrote (I was often 10k words ahead after the prologue, but I knew the ending would take a while. I kept having ideas then — a day or two later — spotting holes. Rationalist fiction has rules and they were liberating: when I wasn’t trying to make an Ocean’s Eleven style show piece.

The structure of the ending annoyed many readers but seemed (to me) fair in the sense that Harry, has to reconstruct it. This let me reveal things in what seemed a better order (instead of strictly temporally ….) and also gave me wiggle room in case I’d overlooked something. It worked (ish), but the last few months were not nearly as enjoyable as the first two thirds of the book.

I can honestly say that If I’d just written whatever came to my mind during my daily commute and breaks and then wrote out would have probably made both myself and the readers happier than the choices I made to make the heist “work.” There were a few chapters in the later parts that really moved me, but overall it was a massive relief to finish. I’d told the story I wanted to tell.

And I got some praise, but also ugly reviews, emails, because many readers did not particularly want to hear a story with. I often use the reviewing phrase of “a noble failure” for a game that tried interesting things but didn’t quite work and I came to the conclusion that DMPOR was a noble failure. I’d tried to tell the story and I thought I had foreshadowed most of the controversial points (excepting the ones that I had to make on the fly, but that also seemed to have a symmetry with HPMOR and regular canon), but the readers were not particularly happy. Or so I thought.

But I was done. A year or two later, while reading the Poems of William Blake I was struck by some lines from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that I felt captured … something of what I was trying to say. The dichotomy between rationality and human interaction. I’d always toyed with the idea of a distant future epilogue which had the symmetry of all three of the triumvirate having an impromptu and unexpected re-union and so I wrote it up (farily quickly), dropped it, then deleted my fan fiction password so I wouldn’t be tempted to read the reviews.

Done and done.

I heard from a few friends who read the story but that I closed the book on that chapter of my life. But at some point after the new year (and new Decade) I was ltaking inventory through my old works (in general) and was wondering about timelines and noticed HPMOR ended five years ago. I re-read a few bits, then  went to fan fiction and re-read DMPOR. It wasn’t bad. I still feel the memories of dread when reading the last third, but it was OK. I realize that some of the themes and things I was working through at the time mirrored what I was working through in Essay form in Thinking About Imperfect Thinking (and if you are here from r/HPMOR, I suggest you read that).

Looking at that article, I see the line–

I never thought “Well, I will become recognized for being a good writer.” So there’s no pressure.

That wasn’t true when I was finishing DMPOR. (At least, for the scale of fan fiction).

But its no longer true, I think. I’ve mostly let it go. Perhaps the last little burden was lifted when I saw a recent thread on r/HPMOR with several people listing it as the best sequel, including a few user names that I respect. (although, in all honesty, I’m not exactly sure why in some cases. I think I’ve chatted with them about other things, but it was years ago). I personally think Significant Digits is better … just because the writing is so much better and the plotting and ideas are great, too. And if his ending felt a bit ungainly, well, I know all about that.

At the time I finished I just wanted to throw my hands in the air and say “Well, if they didn’t get it, oh well.” But certainly its the writer’s fault if things aren’t clear. So I felt that now would be a good time to spell out what I was trying to do at some level. Maybe not exactly, but hopefully (particularly with my last essay) you’d get a feeling about my fascination and unease, both with Harry Potter (etc etc) and myself, and perhaps a little more insight into what I was trying to achieve.

Have I learned any lessons? — I am faster to give praise now, probably improving my rating from “geological time” to “snail” or perhaps even “tortoise.” I never used to comment online (and still don’t), but the experience of writing this affected me. This is one of those things I should have known, and did know intellectually, but I really felt it. A line that hits me every time I read HPMOR is Dumbledore’s line to Hermione ” As you would be kind to others, be kinder to yourself as well.” That is a lesson I’m slowly learning. I don’t consider myself a particularly harsh self critic, but I’ve been dropping things that used to gnaw on me as unimportant.

Now I can add this to the list.

I’d like to find another fiction project that inspired me like the first half of the sequel. I’ve had a number of good ideas (ideas are cheap) and every time I’ve started I just stare at a blank page. The number of times I’ve written anything where it flows I can count on the fingers of maybe two fingers. Maybe one day I’ll get another. I’d like that.

(If you came here from r/HPMOR, this is mostly about boardgames, but feel free to look around).

Thinking about Imperfect Thinking

Author’s Note — This is long and very self-absorbed, but has been weighing on me for a while.

I’ve wanted to be a Bridge expert since college. Not ‘expert’ in the sense of Life Master or one of the better club players, but “threatening to win a national event” expert. Or better.

In High School I’d expected to conquer chess, but achieved only tournament mediocrity after five years. Possibly — if I’d kept trying — I’d have pulled myself up into barely expert rank through sheer perseverance and the slow accumulation of knowledge. But I felt immensely frustrated, I wanted the fast accumulation of knowledge I’d encountered in so many fields. I can’t ‘see’ positions in my mind. I studied openings and would sometimes remember them, but often not. I studied endgames. I studied and studied but during games minutes would tick by. I would be “thinking,” but haphazardly. Loose thoughts, jumbled together in a tangled mass.

So I read and studied more.

One book gripped my psyche and captivated my thoughts. Kotov’s “Think Like a Grandmaster”. In the introduction Kotov tells about visiting a distant chess club andbeing asked to give an impromptu lecture. The crowd shouted requests, that Kotov review a master game or some new opening theory.

He demurs. “There’s no point in learning details if you can’t learn how to think. Let’s discuss thinking”

Kotov sets up a position and turns to his audience, “Let’s imagine you’ve been asked to take over for a player who has fallen ill. It is our move, what shall we do?” The story — omitting much chess analysis — continues:

“There are two obvious moves (a kingside and a queenside move). Let’s try the a kingside attack. Does it work? Hm. …Kotov runs through a few moves… no, that last move seems to stop me. OK. What about a queenside pawn push? Hm … runs a few moves … no, that seems to be losing. It’s too slow. Back to the kingside. What if I prepare the sacrifice with this move? No. Hm. Still doesn’t work. Maybe if I do adjust my queenside pawn push.”

Kotov alternates between the two lines then exclaims Then you look at your clock and think “Oh my god, ten minutes have gone by! How could I have only analyzed two lines in ten minutes? I’m going to lose on time!”

And then Kotov grabs his king and castles, saying “So you just castle, without even thinking about it. Its probably safe enough.”

Kotov’s audience roars with laughter, and applauds. They recognize themselves. And I (a young teenager) recognized myself. Kotov then explained that Grandmasters think through a line only once, because they are sure their analysis is right and if they missed something, they are likely to miss it again. The rest of the book is his instruction on how to think. But I could never absorb the lessons, at least not to the level that satisfied me, and at some point I stopped playing Chess.

---

As this is ostensibly a blog about games, let me present a hand from a Bracketed Swiss (top bracket). (Skip ahead to the Post Hand Analysis, if you don’t care about the details).

Dummy S:QJx H:AJxxx D:Q98 C:Q9

My Hand S:Tx H:KTx D:KJxx C:K8xx

My RHO opened 1 Club, I passed, LHO responded 1 Spade and my partner doubled. RHO raised to two spades, and I bid 3 Diamonds, ending the auction.

I thought partner’s red suits would be equal (or diamonds longer), and could have bid 2N to let partner pick the suit, and I thought that when dummy came down, but I recognized that I could no longer do anything about that. Partner didn’t expect me to have the World’s Fair and compete to the three level, no doubt. Here’s the auction again:


RHO  Me LHO CHO
--------------
1C   P  1S   X
2S  3D  All Pass

LHO led the club Ten.

After some thought I covered the queen and RHO won the ace. RHO then shifted to a diamond, ducked around to dummy’s nine.

My opponents have a Flight B national championship (I believe); they aren’t bad. Steady players. They make mistakes, but play steadily enough to win a long multi-day event against other Flight Bs.

What play should I make? Here’s my internal monologue:

First things first — Count! Spades are presumably 4-4. With 5-3 I’d have heard a support redouble.The opponents only have 18 points — RHO opened and LHO responded, so it could be 6 (on my left)-12 or 5-13 or 7-11 or maybe something like 4-14. Either opponent could be light. The latter is most likely if LHO has a stiff club, but RHO didn’t return a club.

LHO likely doesn’t have AK of spades, that would be an almost automatic lead.

[Not terribly extensive, but at least I did note those things and counted. That’s better than too many hands. Back to my thoughts…]

I see three options —

• I could continue with diamonds. This will work spectacularly well if I pick up hearts. But RHO thought pulling trumps was OK. If I lead a trump I risk it going diamond ace and another
• Or I could lead the 9 of clubs and win the king then ruff, then cross in hearts and ruff another club.
• Or I could float the 9 of clubs. That 8 of clubs is taunting me.

If LHO led the T of clubs from JT tight (which is the standard lead) the last would be phenomenally bad. Can I tell? I don’t think I can. Restricted choice says its likely Jx, but I don’t know.

I considered the pros and cons of each, but I also spent a fair amount of the time wishing I hadn’t been dealt the 8 of clubs. And considering if I could make inferences from their defense.

In the end, I decided to play the diamond queen (ducked all around), then a diamond to the king (RHO showing out and LHO winning the ace). The opponents cashed their spades (honors split) and put me on the board with a spade (I pitched a club). Thinking again, I decided that

1. If LHO had the heart queen then he’d be stronger than opener, and
2. If LHO had the heart queen then from RHO’s point of view hearts were potentially running so a trump shift would be ludicrous.

Given these two data points I finessed against RHO’s heart queen with the ten (winning), pulled LHO’s remaining trump and claimed the rest.

+110, score it up. LHO hissed “Anything but a trump switch” and I looked like a competent bridge player.

I can, in hindsight, say that LHO had 4=3=4=2 shape, but I never found out what LHO’s other club was.

Post Hand Analysis

After the entire hand, I still wasn’t sure whether my play at trick 3 was right. Even analyzing it here, it feels close. Also, I may have played wrong at trick one (although I think I didn’t).

But when I wrote “I decided to play the diamond queen,” I lied.

A more precise description of my mental state: “Being frustrated by not being able to see the correct answer, I eventually just called for the diamond queen to end my indecision.”

Even though it worked, my thinking had stopped. I didn’t call the diamond queen because I knew it to be right (or even right on probability). I didn’t choose it after deciding that my options were too close to call, or a coin flip. I called it out of frustration, before I had finished my analysis.

After the hand I remembered Kotov’s story.

---

I console myself by remembering that everyone makes mistakes. Here are some I witnessed (or made) in that single day. These players are the best teams of the field. (I am perhaps median in the bracket for strength— a few strong players are much stronger than me, but its mostly a bunch of us weak experts).

… Playing in NT with AKQ8x opposite a stiff 9 an expert cashed AKQ and failed to note that the JTx fell on her right, so she called for the low three instead of the high eight.

… Amusingly enough on that hand I (holding 7652) played the 76 on the first two cards and then the 5, because I noted fall of the JTx, so of course assumed the expert would. Given that, I wanted to continue to play my cards top-to-bottom as an unmistakeable signal that I was guarding the upper suit.

After I played the five, I thought “Maybe I should have saved my five because declarer might not have be paying attention.” I decided I was silly, declarer was a solid expert.

When she called for the three I had to sheepishly follow with the deuce. The two of us started laughing and apologizing to our partners.

… I saw an expert make a no hope play that cost a contract. That time I did think “What the hell, its IMPs” and baited her (risking overtricks to offer the failing option). She took it. Dummy instantly noted her mistake.

…(They were also in the wrong contract because she didn’t bid correctly).

… Prosaically — A revoke.

… A few days earlier partner opened 1NT with a singleton because “he had a club mixed in with spades.” We were playing online, the computer sorts the hands. He literally mis-saw a pre-sorted hand.

I’m no better. I chronicled a near-national qualification for Flight A North American Open Pairs and disasters include a hand where I literally could not remember the most basic part of my system. Not obscure, rarely used parts of Polish, mind you. (We all forget the rare stuff from time to time). Bread and butter bidding, in this case — splinters. They show up once a session. (Technically my problem was remembering multiple systems and not being sure which one I played. I was playing standard splinters, and had been for several years at that point).

One partner calls it “Chicken Braining” when you suddenly don’t know things. Where a song name suddenly is gone, or where you can’t remember something until you stop trying. That happens to everyone, I think, but for things like “songs you haven’t heard in a decade,” not “bridge conventions you’ve used for two decades on a weekly basis.”

I remember in college (when I’d been playing for 3 years) making a boneheaded play and my mentor saying “You know better than that.” I remember the shame, because even at that point, I did. I couldn’t explain why I’d done the stupid thing.

I constantly bid or make plays I instantly recognize as mistakes; plays that make me mentally smack my head. I fail to count. I miscount. I can’t tell you the card partner played after the trick is over.

What’s so much worse, is that every once in a while, when I pay attention, I literally mis-see the cards played when I know exactly what I’m looking for.

The funny thing? I’m still a good player. Dangerous … but I rarely win. Too much chicken brain. I can remember the exact details of many of the hands I’ve played in the most recent session. People present me problem hands and I usually get them right. I really am an expert, albeit a weak one.

Kind of where I’d have ended up in Chess. My thinking is just as haphazard as before, but my study of Bridge put my chess study to shame. With so much study I can often recognize the critical point of a position, so I don’t have to think as deeply. It’s like hearing a very complex math puzzle and knowing the answer because I’ve already seen the puzzle solved. Sometimes I just do the obvious things instead of think. But other times hands I’d get right in a puzzle, I miss because I play automatically. Over a full session I’m likely to flub something stupid once or twice (if I’m lucky). Stronger experts don’t flub the easy stuff. And there’s luck … sometimes I can recover or the cards just don’t lie wrong to punish my mistake. (Sometimes my mistake gets lucky and does better than the right play).

At the club I win because the game is loaded with patzers. I won the last club game I played at. But Flight-A events?

I’m too erratic. I can’t really think.

---

One recent morning I woke up physical refreshed but mentally ambivalent and decided to write the day off. I went back to sleep.

Eventually I got out of bed at a time and sent a note to the office formalizing my status as absent-with-leave. Still feeling a bit groggy and meh, I decided to watch something uplifting and cheery and bright, with songs. (Moana). I felt a bit better, so I grabbed some lunch. Rather, I tried. But my favorite restaurant near my house has a “closed one day a month” policy (and two weeks once a year) that is eminently sensible if you are a restauranteur wishing to retain his sanity, but struck me as a gross injustice when staring at the locked door, craving Thai and only just then remembering their reasonable/infuriating “First Tuesday of the Month” policy.

I’ve had this restaurant be closed a few times in the last year, and each time I thought “Oh, right.”

After a pedestrian, non-Thai lunch I still felt tired, so I napped, and then finally I felt refreshed and OK. I decided to watch a movie that I’d had in my queue — The End of the Tour.

This movie recounts David Lipsky’s interview/road-trip with David Foster Wallace. I haven’t read any of DFW’s fiction, but I enjoy his essays. He writes well (of course), but also takes mundane topics in unexpected directions. And it stars Jason Segel. Now streaming on Netflix. Perfect for a lazy day.

But, much like the green printout sign on the Thai restaurant’s door, I had momentarily forgotten a fact.  David Foster Wallace committed suicide.  (On checking, nearly a decade ago).

The movie is not typical Hollywood. Two hours of writers talking about life, pets, writing, snack food, movies, fame, tobacco, addiction, and writing. It makes me wonder “Who thought this would make a good movie?” But, catnip to me. I routinely turn off movies after a few minutes, but I found this compelling even though nothing much happens.

Good movie. Uplifting it is not. And I had many strange thoughts that tie in with this essay.

(Don’t take this story to mean that I have severe depression. I don’t. But neither do I have the “can-do, turn that frown upside down, let’s face the world with gusty” spirit some people possess. Some days the thought of going out to meet the world fills me with dread. And I have enough resources to simply choose not to face the world, so I sit at home and watch TV, eat Thai food (or not), possibly play computer games or go to the bridge club or write about board games. I relax for one revolution of life’s game clock. This isn’t an “I hate my job” thing, either. I no longer go to the Gathering for ten days because even at five (sometimes less) the noise seems too loud, the colors too bright, and the crowd too maddening. I don’t have depression, so much as a preference for introversion. Perhaps they are related, but depression isn’t a problem for me).

Anyway, the movie is mildly depressing, but also intriguing because DFW spends an equal time contemplating important issues and a similar amount of time caught up with trivia. He describes Infinite Jest as about addiction and the question of “Why do we have so much more than prior generations, but are so much less happy?” (Which makes me want to read that, now). He deals with ethics and philosophy, and comes across as manic-depressive-ish. Not regarding energy, but on the politeness-axis. He is remarkably open in the interview, even dangerously unguarded despite knowing full well that the interviewer can crucify him, then suddenly acts paranoid and terse about letting Lipsky interview others. Wallace freezes up for hours, then suddenly is open and warm beyond measure.

And while I’m not depressed, over the last few years I’ve wondered if I’m losing my mind. Not just normal lapses due to age, or minor facts like the First Tuesday Thai Shortage, or which celebrities are dead. Driving home from a tournament I decided to stop by Trader Joe’s to pick up some things. I’ve been there 50-100 times. I could not remember if it was before or after the highway exit I took. I knew where it was, in the relation to the buildings around it. But not in relation to the exit ramp. Could I get there without turning around?

Didn’t remember.

This is literally two miles from my house, a road I have driven for a decade. A store I’ve been to maybe a few times a month in the years its been open. The exit I take to my house.

Couldn’t remember.

I’m in a meeting meeting where a person says “We’ll agree to do A.” And so I say “OK, we’re doing A.” and the entire meeting says “No, we just agreed to not do A.” I don’t think I mis-heard. These things don’t happen often.

Just enough to make me wonder what’s wrong. I would think it’s normal age related issues, but then I look back on my chess career (as it were) and realize that I’ve always had some problems like this, but I’d just said I’m absent-minded.

---

Last season of BoJack Horsman featured two episodes (and a few scenes) inside a character’s head, instead of the typical third person POV. One shows Beatrice Horseman (BoJack’s mom) reliving her childhood memories, and also seeing scenes as she seems them now — with dementia.

The people have no faces. She can’t tell them apart.

The other episode was called “Stupid piece of Sh*t” and voices BoJack’s internal monologue: telling himself what to do, to be nice, to not eat food he doesn’t want, to limit himself to one drink.

For all the terrible things he does, he knows better. But he ignores his good intentions. Then he berates himself. (The episode title refers to BoJack calling himself a stupid piece of shit over and over).

It sounded like my internal bridge monologue when I just make a decision without thinking. “Why did I do that? I know better! You stupid *(#&.” Then, in the closing scene, BoJack’s daughter Hollyhock confesses that she has the same internal voice and asks “But, that’s just a stupid teenage girl thing? It will go away, right?”

BoJack assures her it does.

I forced my wife to watch the episode (she hates the show), because I felt like “Finally, someone gets it.” At the time, I felt such elation that one other person …. the writer of some TV show … had the same voice nagging them, berating them.

Thankfully– for me its mostly about being good at games. I’m not driving a Tesla into a swimming pool or getting blackout drunk or driving people away. I’m not suicidal. I’m just annoyed and insulting myself due to avoidable Bridge mistakes. Hooray for the relative unimportance of my terrible decision making!

Every time I sit down to play I tell myself, “this time, I’m going to pay attention, and I’m not going to make a bid or card play and just instantly recognize it as wrong. I’m going to think it through, I’m going to pay attention.”

Sometimes I don’t make it through the first hand.

---

The End of the Tour conveyed that DFW was self-aware, but not able to improve despite his awareness. (The movie does not touch on his abuse of women). As I said, not uplifting. BoJack suffers the same way.

After my day off I returned to work. Afterwards I swung by the used book store to see what they had and bought several Wallace books. One of them was “This is Water“, a college commencement speech presented in a nice little format and — as such — a ridiculous thing to buy, even used for five dollars.

Wallace talks about compassion, perseverance, and overcoming the problems of mundane existence. It has the following

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” … It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

(DFW hung himself).

A few days before seeing The End of the Tour I was tinkering with this article (even then several thousand words), struggling to describe my thoughts about being not-as-clever as I wish, feeling stupid about bridge, my patterns of thought. Parts of this essay are nearly a year old. (The parts with DFW are new). Trying to determine how much of this is just:

• narcissism — I face problems that everyone faces
• laziness — I don’t work hard enough, and could overcome these issues more effort
• improper strategy — I have to accept my problems, but find superior work-around to solve them
• Impossible to fix

I scheduled it to post (again) then pulled it (again) a week before I saw The End of the Tour and picked up the books.

So you’ll understand why another line from This is Water hit so hard.

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up
feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

---

I want to re-iterate, I don’t feel depressed. Maudlin, perhaps. One reason I write about games is that it feels easy. Writing about other issues — I could stare at a blank page for hours and never put words down. I have. Writing on a deadline is one of the most terrifying things I’ve done.

And there is nothing inherently wrong about writing about games, or Baseball, or Harry Potter Fan Fiction, or Movies. Good writing is good writing. I don’t pretend all, or even the majority of my writing, is good. But I’m proud of this blog despite wishing I could get better (and spending some time on the mechanics of the craft). But (unlike Bridge or Chess) I never thought “Well, I will become recognized for being a good writer.” So there’s no pressure. My inner voice has sometimes chided me about writing, but infrequently.  In the movie David Foster Wallace (the character) says something like (Paraphrasing) — “it’s fine, even great that Infinite Jest has become so popular and talked about, but even if it were read by only a handful of people I wouldn’t feel like I’ve wasted years of my life writing it.” I assume that David Foster Wallace (the person) said something similar. That struck me as a remarkably healthy attitude, one I wish to have.

Much of what I’ve written here is ephemeral, but I feel the same way about writing and want to feel the same way about the things my inner critic does nag me about.

I’ve long known about my mental quirks — just as many people take Psychology to try to solve their problems, my interest in Cognitive Science is trying to figure out my patterns of thought. (My interest in Cognitive Biases, Less Wrong, HPMOR are likely influenced the same way). For example, after quitting Chess I discovered studies that some people just don’t have as powerful of “a mind’s eye,” and adjusted my bridge strategy to use more literary memory techniques. I don’t exactly burn the midnight oil keeping up with latest science, but I do pay attention. After all, I’ve been calling myself a stupid piece of shit since I failed to master Chess. I’d like to get over it.

Last year Scott Alexander posted a book review that contains

Unbeknownst to me, over the past decade or so neuroscientists have come up with a real theory of how the brain works – a real unifying framework theory like Darwin’s or Einstein’s – and it’s beautiful and it makes complete sense.

I eagerly read Scott’s post, which is difficult to summarize but says your mind is tries to reconcile top-down predictions against with bottom up sensory data (in a Bayesian framework). It will focus attention, discard data, and modify beliefs to get the best fit. It’s a compelling story (although there are problems).

It felt right (especially the attention focusing and data-ignoring) and explains quite a bit. It provided a framework to handle some (possibly most) of my mental lapses. If you expect to see something, you may see it if the data is only off a bit. (Who hasn’t mistaken a heart for a spade at some point? Just not at the most important tournament of their life….) It’s somewhat comforting.

Sadly, it doesn’t give me any practical advice about my problems, other than not to take bridge too seriously (and general mindfulness).

For all my complaining, my mind is phenomenally sharp. (Another of the reasons I’ve unscheduled versions of this post several times is fear that it reads as a humble-brag). I’ve taken pride over my quick thinking, but then feel ashamed because that’s like taking pride for being tall. Nobody picks their height, and nobody ever said “I thought being dumb seemed like the better choice.”

I can’t say I worked hard at it. It just happened. (I am firmly in the camp that you should praise children for effort, not brains, because people can improve their effort). I’ve developed strategies for maximizing my abilities and hiding my limitations from everyone.

Everyone does. We spend our entire lives working on them.

In terms of raw processing power I was dealt a great hand. I just have trouble focusing it. So, I put myself into projects where my strengths are obvious and my weaknesses are minimized. I spend time “thinking about thinking” because I’ve recognized that I’m good when I can enumerate options and rely on prior analysis, and not nearly so good when I have to do the work ‘at the table.’ (That is true for everyone, of course, but since I have real issues focusing at the table, especially true for me).

For some reason, I don’t mind working through a problem by writing. (Hence this post).

I’m not bad at it, even if I still mumble “Stupid” to myself a few times a session.

---

One of my bridge partners had a stroke last year.

It affected his game (especially in the first few months of his recovery). His concentration drifted. He got tired quickly. Things you’d expect. Textbook symptoms.

But surprises, too. His bidding became wildly aggressive (he even noted it), and he was not exactly on the low end of the aggression spectrum before. He’d quickly claim the contract when there were obvious plays for overtricks (at matchpoints as well as IMPs).  He’d sometimes notice after the hand (or session). Sometimes not. After a few months of recovery, he’s pretty much back to normal, but I sometimes spot a mistake I think he wouldn’t have made, pre-stroke.

And I have absolutely no problem with that. He’s had a stroke, why would I be annoyed at a lapse? I’m not a monster.

Here’s the first point to this long winded essay: its abundantly clear to me that the stroke is responsible for many of my partner’s mental errors.

I’ve spent 25+ years telling myself “concentrate,” “think clearly,” or “visualize the position in your head,” and not being able to. Telling myself to watch the opening lead and remember it, then forgetting. Falling into the rhythm of the game instead of counting. I spent decades berating myself, and just the last few years wondering … am I just not wired up in a way that lets me get this consistently right?

Is this just the intellectual equivalent of color blindness? There are people with aphasia, autism, who can’t read faces. Am I just missing some component?

I’m beginning to think so.

Sherlock Holmes couldn’t be Sherlock Holmes if he were a friendly guy interested in talking to other people. That’s the literary conceit, anyway … but isn’t it true? I see plenty of people trying to will themselves to be good at something, dedicating years of study to it, and being … mediocre, or worse. They can almost improve, but there are hard limits in many cases. I can’t taste what a super-taster does. That’s just a physical difference.

Ever since grad school I’m haunted, feeling that I’m an intellectual Moses, able to see the promised land but never destined to set foot in it. A lack of focus is fine in High School or College, but in Grad School everyone had my mental power and my inability to focus cost. Hard. I can’t make the cut to true expert…. in pretty much anything. I can get close. I’m not asking to hit the home run in the bottom of the ninth in game seven. I’m the guy toiling in the triple AAA league just hoping to make the big leagues. Crash Davis who hasn’t even achieved 18 days in the show.

“What if I’ve always been wired wrong?” That thought takes the wind out of me. Because if I’m wired wrong it sure looks great from the outside world. If I’m missing one component, I have several others most people lack.

But if I’m missing some block, can’t I just be kinder to myself?

Then I think “That’s an arrogant self-pitying thought, you asshole. You’ve heard lots of praise from people who’ve wished they could trade places with you. Just be better.” And I worry that this feeling (“It’s like colorblindness — unsolvable”) is just wishful thinking. An excuse to not get things right.

If I lost my legs I wouldn’t be surprised that I couldn’t walk (even if I still regretted not being able to). But I want to be able to solve my problem, and if I can I definitely should.

I remember an aphorism that “Sometimes there isn’t a problem to be solved, just facts you have to understand.” But now I’m thinking “Worship your intellect and you will end up feeling stupid” and it’s clearly true. I have. I could have used that advice decades ago. I should be kinder to myself.

Maybe I can find a better strategy to compensate. Perhaps I should meditate. Who knows.

I hope I’d have conquered this one after so many years of trying, across so many domains (not just games), but even trying to not worship my intellect I still naturally want to maximize it.

And now — after spending hours on this essay another quote from This is Water literally woke me up a few mornings ago:

Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the
absolute center of the universe

I’ve seen others’ struggle. Watching BoJack my thought was “Ah, one guy gets it.” Reading HPMOR and the fundamental attribution error and knowing all of this about Cognitive Science and thinking about this since the stroke, and I’m just now entertaining the thought that “Everyone gets it.” (Or, if not everyone, a huge section of the population). And I’m looking back on my essay and re-reading my line about how David Foster Wallace seems self-aware and how that struck me.

Everyone else is self-aware. I’ve known that, of course. (I’m not a monster). But I don’t experience it. It’s the water I swim in. I’ve been struggling with this for decades, and now I wonder just how many people are.

I only noticed that David Foster Wallace was self aware because I can heard it in his voice (technically Jason Segel’s). Even then I had to literally have it spelled out for me in an essay. I hear Wallace … and BoJack  and all of Kotov’s audience and so many other characters who seem more alive than people I deal with because I got a glimpse of their point of view…. struggle with problems they intellectually know how to solve and can’t overcome.

And I see them fail. Kotov didn’t produce a room full of Grandmasters, but his book may have helped us all a bit.

I read David Foster Wallace’s speech about how to live a good life and avoid dying inside before you kill yourself.

But David Foster Wallace killed himself. With all his awareness, his depression wasn’t a problem he could solve.

Before I knew — intellectually — that I wasn’t alone. I’d struggled trying to get my inner critic to quiet down, while still trying to improve, but now I don’t feel alone. That won’t solve my problems, but it makes me feel like I should be kinder to everyone, including myself.

And that’s something.

PS — One of the final reasons I didn’t post this last year is that I felt it would be of no interest to anyone else, which I now see as the exact same lack of empathy as before. You can read This is Water, online.

Bah — Finance Majors

Or — as we call them around here — idjits.

I mean, how else can you explain the fact that when presented with a game rigged in their favor and offered the chance to bet real money repeatedly playing the game … in any amount they choose … as many times as they could play in 30 minutes

A full third of them lost money! More than a quarter of them went broke! Some of the test subjects were making a living working in investment firms!

Idiots, I say.

Certainly not gamers.

Definitely not gamers with a background in engineering or math.

Of the 61 subjects, 18 subjects bet their entire bankroll on one flip, which increased the probability of ruin from close to 0% using [the optimal strategy] to 40% if their all-in flip was on heads, or 60% if they bet it all on tails, which amazingly some of them did.

Read the full paper (Rational Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Observed Betting Patterns on a Biased Coin) then consider where your retirement savings are.

(Mine are in index funds).

Screwtape discusses voting

My Dearest Wormwood,

After receiving your most recent letter, on your advice I watched the video on quick and easy voting for normal people. I am surprised that this comes as a revelation to you, since We who are down below routinely allow our charges to vote for a wide variety of things using what our patients semi-jokingly refer to as the Chicago Method (“Vote early and often”) and what your video refers to as Approval Voting.

And, as befitting our station, we scrupulously respect their votes whenever suits our mood. Which is more often than not, because all voting methods have flaws. Surely Our Father has taught you all the details of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which has dozens of applications to suffering and gaming. I myself learned it at an early age.

(A more pedantic member of our kind – although I doubt you will ever encounter one – may state that Arrow’s formal proof  does not  strictly apply here. Math is a realm of The Enemy – and as such I have no done no more than dabble, lest I be accused of heresy again –  but I believe the idea generalizes. I will check with several experts I am dining on tonight).

Whenever a vote is proposed, you should of course make sure the outcome is as you desire. The stakes are high!

The video numbers make for a poor example for more interesting applications, so let us juggle them a bit. Surely even a youngster such as yourself is familiar with creative accounting?

• The five vegetarians prefer: Veggies, Burgers (w/Veggie option), Steak (in that order)
• The three carnivores prefer: Steak, Burger, Veggie
• The lone Burger guy prefers: Burger, Steak, Veggie

In all cases the 1st two are “acceptable,” so burgers get nine votes, and is an acceptable compromise.

First of all, note the obvious flaw with the system. It punishes excellence. This means that, despite all of its problems, you should suggest Approval Voting whenever possible. Your goal should be to promote mediocrity and lazy thinking in all aspects. Do this consistently and your patients will always dine out on the most milquetoast and bland meals possible, never taking chances, never risking sublime beauty!

Do not mistake my critique of this system – which is done as a general exercise to instruct my favorite nephew – for a serious criticism!

Now, let us make a small change.

If, on the final restaurant named, people don’t vote on something acceptable because they prefer the currently winning option. Now, so long as Burgers are listed last, Veggies will win, because the Vegetarians, being more delighted with the currently winning option (named first or second), decline to raise their hands for Burgers. Which will now lose 5-4, despite being a unanimous winner before!

Then simply force those shuffling carnivores towards their tofu. Demand their happiness while they respect the group’s decision. Be sure to smile broadly as you choke down your okra. Sing praises towards democracy, which levels all of our patients in the same way that water always strives for the lowest resting place.

(As to my prior criticism, I simply state that while Vegetarian restaurants can be excellent in theory, much like excellent non-alcoholic beer it does not occur in practice).

As always, he who sets the vote order (and he who votes slowest, deciding after others who have raised their hands) has an immense amount of control, particularly if they well judge the preferences of others.

These tricks (along with a few more which I dare not reveal, lest this letter is intercepted) will let you control the outcome with ease, which is why we are serving a slightly maggoty meatloaf for the thousandth night in a row instead of the exquisite venison or lovely pouched trout, both clearly visible in the cafeteria.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

---

[H/T to Chris Farrell’s twitter feed]

My first (semi-joking) comment was that the Tao of Gaming method was to have everyone list all their options, then reject them all and walk away. This prevents mediocre games, although I admit that also has problems. I had thought I tweeted a joke about that but, much like Screwtape, I prefer the old method and send my messages encoded in the pitches and volumes of screams, although I do keep up with the times and try to limit my conversation to at most 140 screams.

An amusing coincidence — I was already thinking about the Impossibility Theorem earlier today, since my side project incorporates a quote by Kenneth Arrow in the next chapter.

The AI Researcher Who Crowdsourced Harry Potter Fans

(Authors Note — I wrote this yesterday, shopped it around a bit, and decided to post it here instead. The dates are the real dates of when I originally wrote this. Contains some not too surprising spoilers for a Harry Potter Fanfiction).

Writers of Fan Fiction come from all walks, united by their love of the underlying book, movie, game (or whatever). And Harry Potter has an immense following at www.fanfiction.net, with over who knows how many stories and hundreds of thousands chapters posted. Eliezer Yudkowsky writes one of the most popular, Harry Potter and the Methods or Rationality (or HPMOR). This story is explicitly a pedagogical device – a Rationalist tract to teach readers how to think better. (One of Yudkowsky’s other sites is “Less Wrong”) The sugar for this medicine go down is Harry Potter. Specifically, what if Harry Potter had been raised by a loving couple including a scientist, and blessed with a Richard Feynman like intelligence at a young age?

11 year old Harry James Potter – Evans – Verres lectures his friends (and Dumbledore!) about findings from cognitive science and regular science, including proper brainstorming technique, over-condfidence, and Bayesian thinking. Important psychological works like Cialdini’s classic book Influence or Asch’s Conformity Experiments are explained; numerous others are name checked.

It wouldn’t be popular without a great story. Harry fights bullies, leads an army in mock battles at school (replacing Quidditch), makes friends and enemies and conducts experiments on magic’s secrets. Harry pokes and prods, spells, sometimes with fantastic discoveries, sometimes to no avail. As the story progresses, he edges towards becoming a Dark Wizard himself. Harry jokes “World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” He’s a chaos magnet, polite but dangerous, a mile-a-minute mind in a world where almost anything is possible. He’s not infallible and not the Harry Potter you know; this is an 11 year old genius Muggles can’t handle. The Wizarding world has never seen his like.

Lectures mingle with the plot, all while finding time to make allusions, references and jokes about Rowling’s work and other classics. Harry is an 11 year old science geek; he knows all about Ender’s Game,  Batman, Army of Darkness, Star Wars and other comics, films, manga and books. He argues with Dumbledore via Tolkien references.

This peculiar Harry Potter fiction had been on hiatus after nearly 600,000 words when Yudkowsky announced (last year) that the final arc would be published between Valentine’s day and Pi Day (3/14). Fans rejoiced and online discussion blossomed again. For the last two weeks, chapters had been arriving every day or two.

February 28^th, afternoon.

Then came Chapter 113, titled “Final Exam” posted on February 28^th. This chapter is the hero’s low point, where things look bleakest. Harry is trapped by Voldemort and all the remaining Death Eaters, who have the drop on him. Voldemort (unlike the “canonical’ one from the books) won’t stupidly cast a spell he knows may backfire. This Voldemort agrees with Scott Evil (Doctor Evil’s nephew, played by Seth Green). No elaborate death traps and leaving the hero alone. Just shoot him. Voldemort has a gun (as well as a number of other lethal devices) because he’s worried about magical resonance.

So Chapter 113 ends … and the Author’s Challenge begins : the fans must devise Harry’s escape.

This is your final exam.

You have 60 hours.

Your solution must at least allow Harry to evade immediate death, despite being naked, holding only his wand, facing 36 Death Eaters plus the fully resurrected Lord Voldemort.…

Any acceptable solution must follow a ridiculously long list of meticulous constraints: any movement, any spell leads to certain death. Nobody knows where Harry is (or that he was even missing). Harry could use any power he’d demonstrated (within those constraints) but couldn’t gain any new ones. There’s no Cavalry, No Deus ex Magica.  And ….

If a viable solution is posted before 12:01AM Pacific Time the story will continue to Ch. 121…..Otherwise you will get a shorter and sadder ending.

(Emphasis mine). A small section of the Internet exploded in disbelief.

Yudkowsky had done this before with a Science Fiction story called Three Worlds Collide. But this was on his old site with many fewer readers. I’d read the story well after he’d challenged his fans. Now he was working on a bigger scale. Final Exam was posted five years (to the day!) that Chapter 1 first appeared online. HPMOR has well over half a million page views. Readers faced having a story they’d invested weeks of reading (and sometimes years discussing) just end with the hero’s death. There seemed to be no solution. Voldemort, terrified and highly intelligent had planned this trap out in detail; Harry had blundered into it. (Being smart doesn’t magically give you all the critical information you may need, and Voldemort has decades of training and a few insights Harry lacked).

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres had, in the preceding chapters, solved complex puzzles and all of them played fair (within the constraints of the world) and provided enough clues to satisfy the strictest mystery writer. But this seemed impossible. Fans despaired. I concocted a solution requiring a Patronus, the Cloak of Invisibility, a time turner, the Sorting Hat and still required negligence on Voldemort’s part that would make SPECTRE rip up your bond villain card. Other solutions were not arguably better.

Complex problems are Yudkowsky’s day job, a Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He spends his time (when not writing about Hogwarts) dealing with thorny problems related to Artificial Intelligence – its benefits and risks. The big risk, basis for countless fiction from Frankenstein to Terminator, is “Can we control our creation?” Yudkowsky’s research aims to create guidelines for a Friendly Artificial Intelligence, a machine we can trust to guide humanity into a new Golden Age, and avoiding “Unfriendly A.I.”

Other researchers (See update at end) suggest we isolate A.I. from the internet (and machinery) to keep us safe. We’d keep the A.I. “In a box.” Yudkowsky contends that Artificial Intelligence worthy of the name will be so advanced it will simply talk its way out of the box (assuming it couldn’t hack its way out). To further this argument, Yudkowsky developed “The AI Box experiment” where one player takes the role of the AI and tries to convince his opponent (the “Gatekeeper”) that it is safe to release him. He’s done this several times, and published protocols for this thought experiment.

Yudkowsky has taken the role of the AI in those prior games. After all, He’s the expert and trying to prove the point. If he can convince you to let an unknown quantity run free; what problem would an AI have. You’d probably think it’s your idea all along. Yudkowsky does this in order to draw attention to the dangers of unfriendly AI development. Once the AI gets out, nobody will be able to put it back. And if the AI is unfriendly, that’s Extinction. Game over.

(For a much more detailed introduction to this line of thought, I recommend the Wait but Why articles The Road to SuperIntelligence, and Our Immortality or Extinction.)

March 1^st, AM.

Some readers (most on the discussion group I follow) knew this; but this was fan fiction, not a serious research effort. Harry Potter, not HAL and Dave. Less than 24 hours after the challenge had been issued, some discussion groups proposed the thesis – The entire story had built up to renact the AI in a BOX thought experiment with Eliezer playing Gatekeeper against his entire fanbase.

The argument seems compelling.

• Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres is a super-intelligent, rational being, capable of discovering the inner workings of magic (well beyond what Harry did in the Rowling’s series, even though the entire series of HPMOR takes place in his first year at Hogwarts).
• He was acquiring power at an alarming rate.
• He was now trapped with Voldemort himself ready to pull the plug.

Worse still, Voldemort knows that Harry Potter is not friendly. You would think this goes without saying, but Voldemort is not simply afraid for himself but for all wizardkind. (There’s a prophecy, and it’s a long, complicated story). Acting out of a fear of an extinction level event, Voldemort has done everything in his considerable power to catch and neutralize Harry Potter. And done it well. Harry can’t cast spells without permission. He can’t speak to anyone but Voldemort, who is about to pull the trigger. He’s even forced Harry to speak only the truth (via magic) and answer questions like “Have you thought of a plan to defeat me yet?” so he’ll know how long he can delay.

The only thing Harry can do is talk to Voldemort.

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality — HJPEV

All the constraints were, proponents argued, a clue. In an earlier chapter HJPEV explains that a rationalist avoids needless complexity. And all the solutions proposed were fairly insane. Harry’s internal dialogue mentally “assigns penalties” to complex explanations. You can chart orbits with the Earth in the Center of the Solar System, but its much easier if you put the Sun at the center. The proponents for the box theory argued that fans couldn’t find a solution because they had put the earth in the center of the solar system. The fanbase was trying to write a Hollywood ending where Harry wins, the argument went. But in the real world people talk out their differences all the time. And people who are in a bad situation have to accept it. (That was an explicit lesson that Harry even learned in Defense class early in the story).

So, in this reading (which I consider more likely) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is no less than a five year buildup to Eliezer Yudkowsky taking the other side of the Box Challenge – the side played by the less intelligent person. Yudkowsky appears to have engineered a situation where a small but dedicated portion of the humanity simulates his AI for him in the Potter-verse. He’s spent years explaining how to calmly tackle a seemingly impossible problem, list assets, evaluate what they know and discern truth from fiction. He’s unquestionably provided ample motivation. With the deadline approximately 36 hours away, chat rooms are alive with proposals, debates, strategems, tactics, and detailed analysis of any and all relevant documents available on the internet. Arguments are weighed, flaws discovered and discarded and useful nuggets saved and added to a master list.

You know, like an AI might do.

Can the combined super-intelligence talk their creator out of killing their story, with the odds stacked against them? As day turns to evening on March 1^st, some discussion groups aren’t interested in what Harry has, they are listing what he knows about Voldemort’s beliefs; what information he can volunteer that would stay Voldemort’s hand. Others are discussing Eliezier Yudkowsky’s beliefs and knowledge, adding another level of meta to the analysis. In the story, Voldemort himself knows (via magic) that Harry Potter cannot lie. What appeared to be a horribly binding constraint is suddenly a fantastic advantage. Could we trust whatever an advanced being with unknown (or malevolent) motives told us?

Watching the discussion forums with a bit over a day to go, I believe this is the broad stroke solution (with lots of in universe details to be worked out), although I’m irrationally attached to my earlier, needlessly complex answer. I believe this is the author’s intent. It’s elegant. In the universe, Harry Potter will (I suspect) exchange some information about Prophecies and then deduce an alternate (correct) interpretation where it is to everyone’s advantage to keep him alive. To let him out of the box.

In the real world, Yudkowsky gets another argument in his favor. “A few hundred or thousand people could do this to me. An AI could do this to you, easily.” I suspect the answer has already been posted, but I haven’t checked. The submissions page for the final exam already has three hundred thousand words. In less than 36 hours. The author has asked for help summarizing the solutions.

How does magic work in Harry Potter’s world? His experiments are still ongoing. Out here, in the real world, Teller (of Penn and Teller) wrote that “You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.” In our world, Eliezer Yudkowsky spent five years appearing to be writing a story, and just recently the wool has fallen from my eyes.

Footnote #1 — A reader pointed out I did not cite this. I realize that I did not know who proposed this. Some quick googling doesn’t reveal this either. It may be discussed in this Armstrong, Sandberg, Bostrom paper, but I have not bought it. Bostrom’s name is all over the stuff I’ve read, so he probably knows. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Update — March 2nd, 5pm

The deadline is 8 hours away, and Yudkowsky is overwhelmed by the response and requesting help. I have decided to post this now, because I am reasonably confident of the solution, so I am making an advanced prediction. I am less confident of the exact solution, but I do believe that it will involve Aumann’s agreement theorem. My answer certainly will.

I suspect the internet will get a viable solution. However, will the solution make a good story? I’m not sure.

Update 9:30pm (< 5 hours left). I posted my solution to FF.net hours ago. I have no idea how to link to it (since I can’t find it) and I left out a key step hours in any case (oops). But I have posted my actual solution (heavily abbreviated) on reddit in case someone else wants to post it, and as a prediction of the correct answer. I may revise this as errors are noted and I correct them (and add more links), but will put new information in a new post.

Followup post March 3rd — I was wrong.

Jeremy Silman plays Nations

I played my 6th game of Nations last night, and in the ensuing discussion I wound up thinking about Jeremy Silman. Back when I played Chess (semi-exclusively), his book “How to Reassess your Chess” did very well, mainly because it rhymed. But also because he presented things clearly to amateur players. The most interesting idea was on exploiting imbalances.

Nations is a game of exploiting imbalances.

You can have lots of coal, or coins, or wheat. You can have little. You can have great production, or not. Military: Big or Small? Earn VP during the game or via buildings/wonders? Etc. You can’t beat everyone everywhere; you must choose your imbalances.

If you have great coins, that means you can afford the high-ticket items, so you can afford to take a few turns to get architects (for example) and pay a premium for better stuff. Or you can buy the cheap stuff, then snag a few expensive things later on. If you are coin-poor, you need to get the most important thing. If you have lots of coal, you can move people around to optimal places. You can also presumably afford to move to a high military for a turn, planning on abandoning it if necessary. (A coal poor person would be forced to keep it, since he couldn’t afford to move the workers around). A small military person may have to recognize that and boost stability (or preemptively buy a war) to avoid losing to much.

There are lots of specifics (and I’m vaguely tempted to write a few thousand words about them, but perhaps later). But the basic ideas are simple, and apply to many games:

1. Be Flexible. If you put yourself in a position where you need to grab some card, you can be screwed.
2. If you are going to be losing one type of fight (and you are), then make sure that isn’t a critical fight for you. If you are going to lose a war, by god, lose it. No point fighting for 6 grain on a crappy building if you need 7. Take the hit and boost your books and VP to compensate.
3. If everyone is fighting for resource X, then there is some resource Y they are ignoring. If you corner the market in it, they’ll all fell the pinch.
4. Having a ton of resources and few gained VP by the middle game is often just fine.