The simple codebreaking game Mastermind turns 50 this year. Vice goes into some background regarding the now classical game and its heyday.
If you only know Mastermind as a well-worn and underplayed fixture of living room closets and nursing home common areas, you may have no idea just how big this thing was in its early years. Invented in 1970, Mastermind would sell 30 million copies before that decade was up, and boast a national championship at the Playboy Club, a fan in Muhammed Ali, official use by the Australian military for training, and 80% ownership amongst the population of Denmark. "I never thought a game would be invented again," marvelled the manager of a Missouri toy store in 1977. "A real classic like Monopoly."
[...] If you don't know Mastermind at all, i.e. you never lived in Denmark, it's played over a board with a codemaker who creates a sequence of four different colored pegs, and a codebreaker who must replicate that exact pattern within a certain number of tries. With each guess, the codemaker can only advise whether the codebreaker has placed a peg in its correct position, or a peg that is in the sequence but incorrectly placed. According to the game's creators, an answer in five tries is "better than average"; two or fewer is pure luck. In 1978, a British teenager, John Searjeant, dominated the Mastermind World Championship by solving a code with just three guesses in 19 seconds. (In second place was Cindy Forth, 18, of Canada; she remembers being awarded a trophy and copies of Mastermind.)
Mordechai Meirowitz, an Israeli telephone technician, developed Mastermind in 1970 from an existing game of apocryphal origin, Bulls and Cows, which used numbers instead of colored pegs. Nobody, by the way, knows where Bulls and Cows came from. Computer scientists who adapted the first known versions in the 1960s variously remembered the game to me as one hundred and one thousand years old. Whatever its age, it's clear nobody ever did as well out of Bulls and Cows as Meirowitz, who retired from game development and lived comfortably off royalties not long after selling the Mastermind prototype to Invicta, a British plastics firm expanding from industrial parts and window shutters into games and toys.
The story relates a couple of tales of intrigue related to the game.
Pertaining to the models whose photos appear on the cover of the game:
While Bill Woodward continued to pose for the covers of successive editions of Mastermind, Cecilia Masters had no further involvement, though not for lack of interest on her part. After the photo shoot, Masters did not hear from Invicta, but did happen to run into one of the agents who had selected her. He promised to contact her, but again, Masters heard nothing. "I started to notice my flatmate always ran to the post box every morning before me," she remembers. "I found out later she was destroying letters from the studio."
Masters' flatmate, a fellow computer science student, was with her when she was approached for the photo shoot, and Masters thinks her flatmate may have been upset that she was not chosen instead. "She said she was curious [about] the results of the photo shoot and once she opened and destroyed the first letter to me, she had no choice but to keep on destroying all further correspondence."
Further on, the story proceeds to recount tales of "spy vs spy" where a computer version of the game (called MOO) was hacked:
King also wrote in what was then a new feature for computer games: a league table, or leaderboard, on which players could record their score. "For the first few days people vied with one another to get higher on the league table," he says. "People were clearly getting better and better, and then someone was at the top of the league table with an impossibly ridiculous average."
It was a new kind of security vulnerability against which the operating systems of the day had no inherent defense. If a MOO player was allowed to update one of King's files—specifically, entering their name and score in the league table—they could, in theory, just as easily input a fake score, delete another user's score or even change the source code itself.
King's hackers would come clean, but every time King tried to fix the vulnerability, he'd be hacked again. "This was a very friendly 'war,'" he clarifies. "No trying to say 'I'm better than you are,' no oneupmanship. Everyone was cooperating [to improve the system.]"
[...] Nonetheless, King, distracted by his PhD, fell behind the hackers' efforts, prompting an intervention by the attention of Cambridge's then-informal computer security group, who told King that the problems he was dealing with in MOO were "going to be very important in the future." If allowing a user to update a MOO league table with their own score opened the door for them to make unwanted changes, the same thing could happen to a bank allowing a customer to make remote electronic withdrawals. Both, as King explains, are just users making changes to someone else's file.
Previously:
Magic the Gathering: The World's Most Complex Game (2019)
Essen 2017: Best Board Games from the Biggest Board Game Convention (2017)
Google DeepMind's AlphaGo Beats "Go" Champion Using Neural Networks (2016)
Ancient Board Game Found in Looted China Tomb (2015)
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Pieces from a mysterious board game that hasn't been played for 1,500 years were discovered in a heavily looted 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China.
There, archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board. The tile when reconstructed was "decorated with two eyes, which are surrounded by cloud-and-thunder patterns," wrote the archaeologists in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.
We finally know what happened to Andy when he disappeared after casting Time Warp...
Researchers from Google subsidiary DeepMind have published an article in Nature detailing AlphaGo, a Go-playing program that achieved a 99.8% win rate (494 of 495 games) against other Go algorithms, and has also defeated European Go champion Fan Hui 5-to-0. The researchers claim that defeating a human professional in full-sized Go was a feat expected to be achieved "at least a decade away" (other statements suggest 5-10 years). The Register details the complexity of the problem:
Go presents a particularly difficult scenario for computers, as the possible number of moves in a given match (opening at around 2.08 x 10170 and decreasing with successive moves) is so large as to be practically impossible to compute and analyze in a reasonable amount of time.
While previous efforts have shown machines capable of breaking down a Go board and playing competitively, the programs were only able to compete with humans of a moderate skill level and well short of the top meat-based players. To get around this, the DeepMind team said it combined a Monte Carlo Tree Search method with neural network and machine learning techniques to develop a system capable of analyzing the board and learning from top players to better predict and select moves. The result, the researchers said, is a system that can select the best move to make against a human player relying not just on computational muscle, but with patterns learned and selected from a neural network.
"During the match against [European Champion] Fan Hui, AlphaGo evaluated thousands of times fewer positions than Deep Blue did in its chess match against Kasparov; compensating by selecting those positions more intelligently, using the policy network, and evaluating them more precisely, using the value network – an approach that is perhaps closer to how humans play," the researchers said. "Furthermore, while Deep Blue relied on a handcrafted evaluation function, the neural networks of AlphaGo are trained directly from gameplay purely through general-purpose supervised and reinforcement methods."
The AlphaGo program can win against other algorithms even after giving itself a four-move handicap. AlphaGo will play five matches against the top human player Lee Sedol in March.
Google and Facebook teams have been engaged in a rivalry to produce an effective human champion-level Go algorithm/system in recent years. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed his company's AI Research progress a day before the Google DeepMind announcement, and an arXiv paper from Facebook researchers was updated to reflect their algorithm's third-place win... in a monthly bot tournament.
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (DOI: 10.1038/nature16961)
Previously: Google's DeepMind AI Project Mimics Human Memory and Programming Skills
Every October, the German city of Essen becomes the epicenter of tabletop gaming geekdom. Tens of thousands of visitors descend on the International Spieltage fair, where publishers from around the world debut their up-and-coming releases over four frantic days of dice chucking, card shuffling, and cube pushing.
For gamers, it’s an enthralling, bewildering, almost intimidating spectacle. Where gaming events in other countries, like Gen Con in the US or the UK Games Expo, incorporate celebrity guests, panel discussions, and side attractions, Essen is focused squarely on the games—everything from light and fluffy family favourites to impenetrable brain-melters.
Given that it’s the highlight of the global gaming calendar, I headed along for a barrage of board games and bratwurst. Here are the best new games I saw.
A Pandemic sequel is among the reviewer's favorites.
"Magic: The Gathering" is officially the world's most complex game
Magic: The Gathering is a card game in which wizards cast spells, summon creatures, and exploit magic objects to defeat their opponents. In the game, two or more players each assemble a deck of 60 cards with varying powers. They choose these decks from a pool of some 20,000 cards created as the game evolved. Though similar to role-playing fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, it has significantly more cards and more complex rules than other card games.
And that raises an interesting question: among real-world games (those that people actually play, as opposed to the hypothetical ones game theorists usually consider), where does Magic fall in complexity?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alex Churchill, an independent researcher and board game designer in Cambridge, UK; Stella Biderman at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Austin Herrick at the University of Pennsylvania.
His team has measured the computational complexity of the game for the first time by encoding it in a way that can be played by a computer or Turing machine. "This construction establishes that Magic: The Gathering is the most computationally complex real-world game known in the literature," they say.
Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete (arXiv:1904.09828)
Related: How Magic the Gathering Began, and Where it Goes Next
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @03:52PM (1 child)
I refuse to play and game that requires me to do linear algebra in my head. Do that shit properly on a computer, for God's sake.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @04:12PM
*sigh* Millenials...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @04:32PM
"underplayed fixture of living room closets and nursing home common areas"
don't worry, we'll all be dead soon and you can try eating it while you starve
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:02PM
Another piece of trash from Vice.cuck passed off as journalism.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:52PM (1 child)
That sounds like how passwords or nuclear launch codes work in Hollywood movies.
No you didn't get the password correct (or "sink my battleship"), but the 3rd character is right! Please try again!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:21PM
I think it is a way to teach why password verification cannot afford to be leaky. As it demonstrates just how devastating that leaked information truly is to the secrecy of the code.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:58PM (2 children)
I had a bit of fun learning this as a kid. I played this with my Grandpa. Might still have one somewhere.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 25 2020, @07:32PM
My neighbours bought that game when I was a kid, but it proved too hard for them or something, and my family wound up in possession of it, I am unsure how.
There is no way it was 50 years ago, I remember playing with my sister quite clearly, so it can't have been more than about 10 years.
OK, maybe 20.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday March 25 2020, @07:53PM
I had fun times as a kid playing Mastermind. Tracked one down bought and gifted to my 10 yo niece last summer. She likes it, we played a few dozen times together.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 25 2020, @09:00PM
it seemed to be fairly big in Canada too: i remember playing with my parents and older siblings. I think they 'dumbed' it down for me a bit so that i could have successes like my sibs....
...damn...i was 7 at the time....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 26 2020, @01:15AM (1 child)
I played its predecessor Moo in the late 60's; I implemented it on the university's interactive APL system in order to do so.
The really nerdy version was intimated to me when the prof that had told me about the game (which he had encountered while he was a Bell Labs) asked me about the first player strategy.
What? I thought. All he has to do is to choose a random four-digit number. And then I realized: He didn't have to do that at all. All he had to do is provide counts of bulls and cows (correct digits in the right and wrong positions) that were consistent with there existing a secret number ... Suddenly the first person had a nontrivial strategy -- far more difficult than the guesser's.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 26 2020, @09:52AM
Wit is intellect, dancing.