DailyDirt: Games Of (For?) Skill

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Plenty of video games are just a waste of time, but some games aim to be more than just ways to entertain kids and people with too much free time. A few games try to solve real world problems, and there are a handful of games that claim to improve mental agility. Here are some quick links on games and human cognition.

• Chess used to be the game that could measure a person's cognitive capabilities, but StarCraft2 might be the new game that provides metrics for humans' abilities to plot and strategize. Meanwhile, the computers are wondering why we're wasting so much time on variations of Tic-Tac-Toe and Rock-Paper-Scissors. [url]
• Imagine a game that taught you how to program better video games, would that be a fun game? If only the result was actually a virtuous cycle for improving video games and programmers... [url]
• Previous studies that suggested video games can help improve human cognitive function may be seriously flawed. Experimental design is really critical for generating psychology conclusions that aren't biased -- and surprise, surprise: there are a lot of widely-cited studies that are poorly designed. [url]
• To find some cool online games, check out what StumbleUpon has found to play. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: chess, experimental design, games, human cognition, programming, starcraft
Companies: kickstarter

Computers Are Programmed By People Not Magic

from the trust-but-verify dept

Ben Adida has a great post discussing the misplaced faith people often have in the machines in their lives, and the way that faith often spills over to e-voting. He mentions a scene in the 2006 HBO documentary on e-voting where an election official breaks down in tears when someone shows her how her voting machines could be hacked. For computer programmers, who are intimately familiar with what goes on under the hood, the idea that we should automatically trust anything a machine tells us is a little bit ridiculous. We're aware that computers are extremely complex devices that can go wrong in any number of ways, that they're designed by fallible human beings, and that it requires a lot of very careful engineering to make sure they're secure and reliable. We recognize, in particular, that the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to have problems, and so the more skeptical we should be of its results. It's not a coincidence that $5 pocket calculators tend to work flawlessly, while complex systems like Excel and the Pentium chip sometimes make basic arithmetic errors: the greater complexity increases the number of ways things can go wrong.

But a lot of non-technical folks seem to view things the other way around. Last week, for example, I noted a a Chicago law professor who thinks that "the future is surely with the touch-screen or some other form of online voting." The problem with this statement is that if our goal is security and reliability, which it should be, the added complexity of computers and touchscreens is a big disadvantage. But this isn't obvious if you've never looked under the hood to appreciate all the things that could go wrong. Computers are not magical boxes that always produce the correct answer, but unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think that they are.

Filed Under: complexity, e-voting, magic, programming