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Maybe Off Topic. bg & the history of philosphy

Posted By: higonefive
Date: Friday, 1 December 2017, at 10:39 a.m.

BACKGAMMON AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY; A QUESTION. The history of backgomman can reveal a little bit of the human thought process, and how he transformed the game of backgammon. Modern backgammon begins with the invention of the doubling cube, an instrument to put chance under pressure, getting a grip on her contingency. In the hey-days, for most of the players, the doubling.cube was instead an instrument to raise the element of chance, raising the stakes. The first, who tried to tackle the contingency of the games, were the expert bridge-players, playing backgammon to bridge the time, waiting for a game of bridge. Familiar with the mathematics of probability, they explored also backgammon with this instrument, because backgammon in its heart is a running game, a rollercoaster. In a second wave, there was the chessplayer. Forget about numbers, it’s a strategic game, Position beats pips. And then there was the computer nerd. With ‘Jellyfish’, there was a first strong computer model. Gifted players exploited this tool, playing at a performance rate of 3.5 to 4. And then, with the upcoming of ‘snowie’ and ‘extremegammon’, the second hey-day of backgammon in the nineties drys out. Even the average joe player could play at 5.5-6.5, a rate which was only performed in the pre-bot–ara by worldclass players. The witchcraft of the game was demystified. It’s all about maximizing equity, move by move. The fishes saw, that they were fishes, they and their money left the game. The heuristic/hermeneutic approach, transformed in a machine, fired back as the techne of big data. The expert players moved to poker, texas hold’em, where the skill is much more revealed as in backgammon, wheres fishes could their losses still mystify, staying in faith. So backgammon will fall in slumber again. Experts, in the watchtower, belabouring the game with ‘neural nets’, compiling numbers in human language. The pigeons, unable to follow, moving on to the next game. Isn’t the circle game of philosophy not to compare with this example?

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