My son finds decision-making challenging at times (OK, who doesn’t?) and eeny, meeny, miny, moe helps him break his internal deadlock. Actually, it did until he realized it was deterministic and he could decide the outcome by choosing where to start. So now he waves his hand around while he sings a song for a while, then opts for whatever he’s pointing at when the song ends. I’m not sure it’s actually a random process, but it seems like it must be closer than the original version. Plus he finds it satisfying which is valuable by itself. And based on a recent study of the value of randomness in group tasks, my son just might be onto something.
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game theory
Science Corner: Go with God
Almost 20 years after IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess, Google’s AlphaGo has proven superior at the game of Go. If you are unfamiliar with the relative complexity of the two games, know that each achievement employed cutting edge artificial intelligence research. Now consider how far computers have come in two decades in general; for reference, Google was still over a year away from being founded when the chess match took place. The primary challenge with Go is the astronomical number of possibilities; just calculating the number of legal Go board positions for a standard 19×19 game was an achievement in itself announced earlier this year. That number: roughly 2 x 10170. There are far fewer particles in all the universe (~1080), and even fewer legal chess positions (~1047).
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