The playing monkeys.

Published May 19, 2017
Advertisement

[font='times new roman']Here we have a hundred monkeys for a reasonable infinite amount of time, and we are going to make them play chess, tournament. But, we are going to do so by setting up two parallel tournaments. [/font]


[font='times new roman']- Tournament A is played on a physical set, with a wooden board and pieces. Physical. [/font]

[font='times new roman']- Tournament B, where the board and pieces are displayed on a big tactile screen. Digital. [/font]


[font='times new roman']We accept, for argument sake, that the monkeys will not be jumping around. We will assume that our monkeys will move pieces from one square to another and that they do not know the rules of chess. Like in Emile Borel's typewriter monkey thought experiment, just as a metaphor for random sequences, the one that says that; a monkey with an infinite amount of time will type the entire works of Shakespeare. [/font]

[font='times new roman']A monkey in chess tournament B makes an invalid move, to move a pawn horizontally. The digital game does not allow this move, returns the pawn to his original square and waits until the player, the monkey, introduces a valid move. This will happen each time a movement is made that does not match the rules of chess. Therefore these B monkeys can only play valid games. Off course, without any strategical thinking process, lacking of meaning and poetic value beauty. Full of tactical abominations, but valid games nevertheless.[/font]


[font='times new roman']There is a big difference about how tournament A deal with invalid moves and the way B does. [/font]

[font='times new roman']It is due to a strange interactive relation that digital games have with its players. That is precisely the point of introducing the monkeys metaphor, is to illustrate the situation, where in digital games, regardless if the players know the rules or not are forced to play by them. [/font]


[font='times new roman']We have greater chances to find an interesting game played by monkeys digitally rather than played with the physical set. If it was up to us to decide which tournament air in the national TV, and we care about our audience and the game, we should air the digital games, because at least every single one of them will be played according to the rules. [/font]

[font='times new roman']We see that programming make the matches played at tournament A and those at tournament B clearly different, as digital players are forced to play by the rules by the software. [/font]

[font='times new roman']Authority had become decentralized. While in tournament A a judge must be present and play, every second being monkeys, an active role. In torunament B the rules are enforced by the code itself. [/font]

0 likes 0 comments

Comments

Nobody has left a comment. You can be the first!
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Profile
Author
Advertisement
Advertisement