We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.
but did you know that Musk is also a lifelong gamer? for example, here he is in the chess club of his whites only apartheid prep school.
grew out of that though.
really want to highlight the phrase “understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks.” what the fuck is he talking about?
in any case, he clearly has some issues around the game and I suspect his performance in the chess club. the dude loves to downplay the complexity of the game.
he knows how to tune it up, though.
hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be…?
OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!
what the fuck is polytopia?
this is polytopia:
sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:
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this is clearly a mobile game first, meaning it was developed to fit into the industry’s nastiest shithole: the ios and android app markets. i’ll tell you right now that polytopia doesn’t have gambling in its microtransactions (which instantly makes it cream of the crop), but you can expect it to be braindead and shallow.
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this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character’s huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.
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this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:
For those not familiar, the civilization series is the standard bearer for the 4X genre. it’s a style of slow, macromanagement focused turn based strategy focused on the “four Xes” of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. thematically, they present societies as machines for producing imperialism. the civilization games are also fearsomely complex and famously deep.
not so with polytopia:
so yeah, it’s baby civilization. but the thing that really kills me is that musk is obsessed with this game. like… really obsessed, according to a story published on yahoo finance.
This puff piece is sourced from “Benzinga,” a tech finance news site that seems to mostly post about crypto, ai and tesla. context clues suggest the content is entirely ripped from walter isaacson’s biography of musk. I have to emphasize that all of this is intended to be flattering - right in the middle, they take a break from the content to shill some affiliate link I won’t click on:
that’s the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.
saying “I am just wired for war” because you play a lot of polytopia is classic elon cringe. beating a game’s developer is nothing to brag about, by the way. most game developers are terrible at their own games.
i would argue that ragequitting to the parking lot to smack down your employee/mother of your children in a baby game is also not something to brag about:
flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article…
… except, twist, for some reason he beat his employee but not his partner???
and yes, he sulked like a little shitbag he when he lost. one has to suspect that if his sycophants weren’t constantly throwing polytopia matches against him he’d have turned on it just like he did chess.
before you read this next bit I want to emphasize again that EVERYTHING IN THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO BE FLATTERING.
his brother seems to feel the same way
(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):
here’s what i think: elon musk isn’t learning shit from polytopia. he’s a profoundly stupid and childish man who likes moving brightly colored blocks around and being told he won. he’s projecting the disgusting and wretched pile of deficiencies which is his personality onto a game for babies. as someone who only fails upward and cannot stand to fail, it is impossible for him to learn from reality; doing so would require facing what is too painful to face.
Don’t mind me, just imagining a brighter world where the people in power learn Settlers of Catan instead of Chess or Civilization.
I love both the content of this post and the fact that it’s a self-contained torture test for our pict-rs upgrade
also, lol @ musk, war genius, starting a domestic dispute with his ex-girlfriend cause she dared to betray him in his baby mobile 4x game when betrayals are a core part of every 4x I know
I’m getting the strong mental image of musk being the guy who flips the board 12 hours into Twilight Imperium cause the other players didn’t let him win
polytopia was pay to win, my roommate would google the tier list and grab the best one lol, man would 3v1 us
A lot of these ‘there is more stuff in it so it is more complex than chess’ feeling games aren’t that more complex in a lot of ways as there are often strats that are optimal (like picking the meta starting options (thought polytopia didnt have microtransactions however)), add to this asymmetric start positions which can throw balance even more out of wack (bigger asymmetry than just white goes first). It is a bit odd that the megagamer Musk has not reached this pretty obvious conclusion about how games that have a lot of broad things (aka content/possibilities space) do not have the depth of chess.
Pretty sure the squirrel thing is a Margaritaville South Park episode reference. When Randy is trying to save the town from the economy:
We must all wear sheets instead of buying clothes that need detergent! Instead of cars that take gasoline we can… get around on llamas from Drake’s farm! Instead of video games that take batteries and software, our kids will play with squirrels! We must let the Economy know that we are capable of respecting it! No more needless spending! [everyone begins to cheer] The Economy is our shepherd. We shall not want. [stretches out his arms as the audience cheers him on.]
“Hi. I’m Elon Musk, and welcome to Jackass.”
[No disrespect to Jackass.]
I have some minor things to say. First a correction (people keep saying this and it is a weird mistake) Grimes was his girlfriend, never his wife.
Then the whole thing where people say you gotta play this to understand his genius or whatever, that is all just cargo cult behavior, it is the black turtlenecks. (I recall a story of a university with a beloved, genius but somewhat odd professor to which the students looked up, they wanted to be like him. So eventually the students started to touch the walls when walking through the halls, as the professor also did that while walking, the cargo cult).
Zilis clearly understood the assignment of playing Polytopia with your emotionally stunted boss/owner (as in the business sense, clearly the workers should be their own owners), as do prob a lot of other employees he beats. Let the Wookie win.
“I am just wired for war”
Reminds me of the sort of image of the military general aristocrats of WW1 who made the war last longer and did one more assault just before the peace was signed because of their warrior honor whatever. Unrelated, here is a blog post of acoup (a real historian), listing various articles that the USA needs soldiers, not warriors (and explains the distinction), halfway somewhere.
“when you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
That is a darkly revealing quote (like the whole thing is). More points for Zilis and the others who let Musk win.
First a correction (people keep saying this and it is a weird mistake) Grimes was his girlfriend, never his wife.
whoops! edited
on my part I think it’s because I keep seeing Elon described as having “divorced energy”
on my part I think it’s because I keep seeing Elon described as having “divorced energy”
It is also a very common mistake people make (or a ‘joke’, in some way I don’t get but there are a lot of weird jokes/rumors about musk which people take for granted (which is worse as blueanon people are now on the job and are just making shit up (yes, im talking about and still angry about the Seth A. post))) so it happens. Wonder if it would have been better or worse for her and the kids if they had gotten married.
finger draggers
Could be the same story which got telephoned into my story. I also only heard it from a different person ages ago.
@sc_griffith he is a Pathologically Divorced man
We’ve got Chess 2, the Sequel and 4D chess that have solved any problems chess may have
Iirc there have been various sequels to chess, it being tried so often and never succeeding like chess is actually a interesting point of discussion in game development.
Perhaps the most successful “sequel to chess” is actually the genre of chess problems, i.e., the puzzles about how Black can achieve mate in 3 (or whatever) from a contrived starting position that couldn’t be seen in ordinary (“real”) gameplay.
There are also various ways of randomizing the starting positions in order to make the memorized knowledge of opening strategies irrelevant.
Oh, and Bughouse.
I always liked what we called kickchess. The purpose of the game is to get rid of all your pieces asap, and if you can take a piece you have to. Just turns the whole game upside down. Get rid of that queen!
@Soyweiser @blakestacey the only “Sequel To Chess” that matters is chessboxin’
Musk isnt allowed to box by his mom.
@Soyweiser @megaman remember when the Netflix show about chess got its own tie-in game? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/346101/the-queens-gambit-the-board-game
My 3 seconds of looking at that make it more interesting than i thought it would be. I really hoped it was just a “branded” chess board, which would be very funny.
But it looks like everyone sets up 3 pre-moves and then goes from there (if i read it for a whole minute i would know).
Feels like someone thought up a chess puzzle game and then when the biggest show on TV was about chess they finally got a chance to put it out there
I didn’t remember as I didn’t know.
I am quite certain that Chess can be fully solved
Certifiable genuis thinks an impartial game can be solved, I wish I were capaple of making brilliant insights like that. No, seriously, I missed the first day of game theory 101 and need Sprague-Grundy explained to me.
Wait i thought chess was not an Impartial game?
Aw shit, I haven’t played in an eternity and forgot stalemates were a thing, which is something there’s no excuse for not taking five seconds to consider. I’m deleting my snarky comment and hoping that you and the person who upvoted you are the only people who saw it.
I think what makes it not impartial is that the white player cannot move black pieces (or vice versa). in an impartial game which moves are available is only allowed to depend on the game state, not on which player you are
the existence of stalemates prevents chess from being a combinatorial game at all, although I’m sure there are workarounds (I guess a lazy one would be to declare that white always wins stalemates)
Declaring black wins draws would be more in the spirit of how the game is actually played at high level. I don’t think anyone seriously considers the possibility that black could have a forced win in chess from the starting position.
whatever. I’m just indicating you can turn it into a combinatorial game if you want
white always wins
this is the method Elon prefers
And now I wish I knew what it said! I only just recently started getting into chess and it’s really complex but I’m having fun lol
you got me worried for a minute that he’ll leak classified info on warthunder forum (it’ll be on twitter instead)
you can’t invent new pieces during the game
Yeah. That’s what my (chess) captain keeps telling me.
Elon prefers Command & Conquer 4
I just want to focus on this extremely ridiculous quote as if one understands how unfathomably silly it is - it becomes impossible to take anything elmo says seriously (not that you should need more proof)
What elmo is trying to talk about is called game-tree complexity - the number of possible games based on the number of possible moves.
For checkers this is 10^54 - massive but obviously computable (took 18 years and finished in 2007)
For chess this is 10^120 - called the Shannon number is unimaginably massive - like if we counted it in Planck times (smallest unit of time) - checkers’ number would convert to about 300 years - chess on the other hand comes out to around 10^58 universe ages
What’s more - there’s about 10^80 atoms in the universe - so it’s physically impossible to store that many game states in a usable manner to compute a full solution of chess.
Even giving him the biggest benefit of the doubt and turning the whole observable universe into a black hole (the most information dense object imaginable) the Bekenstein bound still dictates you only have 10^96 bits to work with - so it’s seems totally impossible to store a full solution of chess in our universe.
Overall this proves the point of this post - elmo literally does not believe he lives in the real world and any proof otherwise will get rejected by his solipsistic brain.
The way Checkers was solved was actually pretty cool. That he dismisses chess for this reason (even though it hasn’t even been solved) speaks to the kind of dorky dipshit he is.
PS: this solution was considered AI in 2007.
[Schaeffer] carried out a mere 1014 calculations to complete the proof in under two decades. “This pushes the envelope as far as artificial intelligence is concerned,” he says.
I’m splitting hairs here, but wouldn’t the 10^96 number just need to be a bound on the Kolmogorov complexity, whose value would be uncomputable? I don’t think it’s possible (even theoretically) to conclude solution storage is impossible, it’s possible the Kolmogorov complexity is astonishingly low and there’s an algorithm that could be stored on a drive today. It would just require brilliant insight to find it and no one is going to devote time to that for a variety of reasons, one of which is that unless they’ve successfully finished the task of finding such an algorithm there’s no way to know if they’re searching for something that doesn’t exist.
That’s fair - I guess that’s why I said “it seems” as I can’t confidently state something whose unknowns I don’t fully understand.
But yeah theoretically there might be a way to compress the final output into a physically possible form. Still considering the magnitude of the numbers we’re talking about - this would still be a mind boggling undertaking.
I guess my point was more around elmo confidently stating that chess is solvable and using the actual complexity of the task as a way to highlight how being that confident in such a statement is absurd.
Then again maybe I fell in a similar trap so thanks for pointing it out!
Still considering the magnitude of the numbers we’re talking about - this would still be a mind boggling undertaking.
Nowhere near to the degree you seem to think. If you want your computer to output a number in binary that has 10120 digits, it sounds completely ludicrous, but if every digit is ‘0’, then a computer program to generate that number will take up virtually no space at all relative to storing each letter directly.
The algorithm is just outut ‘0’ 10120 times and then halt, so the only difficult part is storing the 10120. (This is trivial for literally 10120, I’ve already described it in six characters counting the exponentiation operator, but let’s imagine it’s actually a similar-sized number that’s less friendly.) The number can be described in log_2(10120) = 120log_2(10) bits, which is somewhere between 360 and 480 bits and can probably still be compressed more. So you’ve represented a binary number with 10120 digits with a program that says repeat the digit ‘0’ and stop after you’ve done it x number of times, where x is a specific number that takes up like 400 bits of storage, probably less. That program can fit on a floppy disk, while the original 10120-bit string itself is a bit too big.
So that’s an extremely simple example, but it shows that there exist 10120-bit numbers that can fit on a floppy disk.
More generally, a massive amount of strings with 10120 letters will have some pattern that can be exploited by a program requiring relatively minimal storage. The ones that don’t have a very high degree of randomness, but that’s extremely unlikely (I’m inclined to guess impossible) for a string solving a real-world problem like chess games. Finding such an algorithm for your string though could be a herculean task.
I edited this comment about 500 times to make it readable and I feel inclined to apologize to everyone who saw this before it was done.
if I’ve followed the comment chain here correctly, the problem remains that you first need to compute all possible game states, which is probably impractical, right?
and you still need to save the data for computing the numbers’ compressed version, or is there a way to compress the numbers on-the-fly that i haven’t heard of?
You don’t necessarily need to. There’s a possibility of defining instructions for winning without that. The idea may just be hard to imagine because chess is complicated.
You can make up stupid examples of games that defy this. Maybe we dream up a game with an ungodly number of states that has an action X that is an available option every turn. If the winning strategy is just “player 1 chooses action X every turn”, you can imagine there may be a way to show that’s true without needing to simulate every single state, and there’s certainly a way to easily store and communicate this strategy.
For a ludicrously dumb win condition, maybe the first playet to press X 10,000,000 times wins, in spite of having lots of other options each turn which introduce lots of other gamestates. You should be able to show that pressing X every turn is a winning strategy without computing every potential state. This can be true of more complicated games too, it would just be much less obvious. Just because no one has conceived of a way to do that yet with a game such as chess doesn’t mean no one ever will.
the first playet to press X 10,000,000 times wins
Hey look, you found another one of Elon’s favourite games.
There is a concept I was once taught through a very long winded story about a master and his pupils, but thankfully the great Bruce Lee summarized it: “Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer just a punch and a kick was more than simply a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch - a kick is just a kick.”
One becomes a beginner when they can see the thing. You become a novice martial artist when you can differentiate a punch from a person’s arms flailing around.
One becomes an expert when they can define the thing. When they can lock down what a punch is, and can systematically separate it from other things that aren’t it.
One becomes a master when they can intuit the thing. When you can use, identify, and understand the thing no matter what shape or form it takes.
One becomes enlightened when they can apply their specific masteries as generalization. When they have mastered the art of mastery itself.
Elon is certainly an expert. He can describe things. He can define things. He can reframe things into contexts that he understands. He’s so tantalizingly close to seeing the truth, but is so far away from even comprehending how to begin connecting the dots.
I see where he is coming from regarding gaming and economics or organizational tactics. I have played many games at a competitive level, and a select few at a professional level. I know what he’s trying to get at because I was very similar when I was like ~20 and didn’t realize that the art of mastery of goes so far beyond anything an expert could fathom. I am by no means a master, but I see the trap of expertise and… maaaaannn… It’s just so disappointing to see people in positions of power get stuck running in circles and holding everyone else back.
Elon is an Expert Beginner: he has become proficient in executing the basics of the craft by sheer repetition, but failed to develop meaningful generalizations.
The original Expert Beginner concept was defined here in terms of the Dreyfus model, but I think it’s compatible with Lee’s model as well. In your wording of Lee’s model, one becomes an Expert Beginner when their intuition is specialized for seeing the thing; they have seen so many punches that now everything looks like a punch and must be treated like a punch, but don’t worry, I’m a punch expert, I’ve seen so many punches, I definitely know what to do when punches are involved.
Elon is certainly an expert. He can describe things. He can define things.
I don’t know what context you are referring to, but I don’t think Elon is an expert at anything
I am referring to the context in which it was written and defined above, and also inheriting the concepts laid down from the original post regarding the p2w mobile game that he clearly has achieved some level of expertise in.
it isn’t a p2w mobile game and I see no reason to believe he’s achieved any level of expertise in it
One becomes a beginner when they can see the thing. You become a novice martial artist when you can differentiate a punch from a person’s arms flailing around.
One becomes an expert when they can define the thing. When they can lock down what a punch is, and can systematically separate it from other things that aren’t it.
One becomes a master when they can intuit the thing. When you can use, identify, and understand the thing no matter what shape or form it takes.
One becomes enlightened when they can apply their specific masteries as generalization. When they have mastered the art of mastery itself.
Thank you for sharing that concept, that’s really good and I will keep that for future reference. It’s a quality way to describe beginner to master and the difference at each stage.
this for the specific concept in japanese martial arts (and sometimes applied elsewhere too)
I’ve played a lot of Polytopia in my time. Probably haven’t touched in over a year but I used to participate in Discord tournaments and the like. Knowing I have likely beat Musk mercilessly in a strategy game is nice.
I hope you have, tho I suspect he only plays against sycophants
I’d prob have more respect for him if he said it was Plants vs. Zombies.
Gotta know when to drop that nut.
