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Maybe you’re referring to another book but there’s just the briefest mention of chess in The Player of Games. It may have special significance for Elon because of the Grimes song (see video below, which even uses chess pieces to tell the story) so maybe he recalls that but I doubt it.
The criticism in the book is that games that don’t have a random element are an intellectual waste of time because they don’t include that essential aspect of reality. But “waste of time” is subjective and it may not even be true that chance is fundamental.
It’s kind of funny that chess, a simple and useless game played on an inconsequential planet briefly visited by Contact 100 years before even rates a mention in the book.
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I dunno I can kind of see the hate on chess, personally some highly gifted team sport coach is way more impressive than a chess master. Chess just feels like a task for a computer to do instead of a human.
Player of games, is imo, the best culture novel by far.
Side note. It is a fucking TRAVESTY that there hasn’t been a screen adaptation of the culture universe yet.
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It’s probably the most accessible. I would like to see a movie but that’s balanced by apprehension they’d screw it up. I also kind of hate it that I share a lot of interests with Elon and Bezos.
AI is doing all the creative stuff humans used to do, time for us to take their jobs.
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In excellent news for Elon, Biden is quadrupling tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100%.
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Smart move by Biden, now Elon will endorse him and all the Elon stans will fall in line
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I think you could use animation. I think Inversions would be adaptable.
That would be interesting. Not really a Culture novel but I liked it a lot.
It’s good, but it’s ultimately a bit one-dimensional, because Azad is so cartoonishly evil. The thing about that book that wants to stay with you for a long time is how manipulative the Culture is towards Gurgeh, but it doesn’t really land, because Azad is so over-the-top awful that any kind of behavior is clearly justified to get rid of them. It’s a frustrating book for me.
But even among people who don’t share my take, Player of Games isn’t clearly better than Use of Weapons or Excession.
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Finches machine never “solved” it but was beating grand masters in no time
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Um Azad is literally capitalism…j
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This is what I’m saying. If that was true, the book would be great. It’s what the book wants to be. But textually, Azad is only masquerading as a vanilla hierarchical exploitative capitalist empire. The secret reality is that Azad is run by a bunch of Hannibal Lector types who torture people to death on pay-per-view and chop up families to make musical instruments. Indeed, the only reason SC shows Gurgeh the torture killing PPV channel is that he’s ambivalent about overthrowing their government when he thinks it’s “just” hierarchical and unfair.
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How would you feel if GPT-5 escaped the lab and orchestrated an online misinformation campaign to secure the reelection of Donald Trump as part of a long-term plan to ensure the collapse of American democracy and its replacement by a new political order where humans live lives of plenty and personal freedom, but all meaningful political power is exercised by AIs? Player of Games explores these questions, but from the perspective of a QAon true believer who thinks that normie politicians are secretly buying children on Wayfair and using them in sadistic sex killings.
Such a great businessman
I interpreted that different.
I.e. violent and exploitative porn and actual sexual exploitation and sexual assault are things that the rich do in capitalism. And they gets rich off the deaths of babies. I mean, there’s a matter of degree of course.
I thought this was just. Capitalism but worse, not a new and different thing.
You can tell this article was written by a hack sports reporter and not an real business reporter, because instead of taking what Elon says at face value they go out and ask actual chess/computer experts if Musk is correct or not. They could have shut down Elizabeth Holmes from day 1 pulling that kind of crap!
Could someone make a list of 80s/90s business villian cliches and mix them with things Elon did and have people guess who is who?
That’s pretty thin, but it’s beside the point. Because Azad is so baroquely evil, it’s not really possible to see the plot from their perspective, which makes the story land less strongly than it could have.