“Dance, Dance” by Zack_M_Davis

As a brash but anxious young programmer in the before-time, I affected a standoffish attitude on the topic of games. Why would I learn to play a game as a human, I said, when I could just write a program to do it? When an office chess game got started at my workplace, I wrote a chess engine (a standard minimax search with α–β pruning) rather than learn anything about strategy or tactics. When my insufficiently requited love started hosting a meetup to play Zendo—a deduction game in which one player makes up a rule to positively or negatively classify arrangements of plastic pyramids, while the others submit arrangements to be classified to help them guess the rule—I wrote a program to efficiently propose examples to deduce a true rule from dozens of candidates. (Given a distribution over hypotheses, it generated an arrangement whose positive or negative classification would eliminate half the remaining probability-mass.) Now, in my old age (and the present end-time in which custom software is no longer such a flex), I no longer feel the need to pretend not to understand the appeal of games. I even learned chess properly back in 'twenty-four. The [...] --- First published: October 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R7jsxihAzvd6Gf24R/dance-dance --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.