Cultural Subtleties and how they manifest in language and leisure

Im forced today to ponder over the differences between how, in my opinion, culture can find itself manifesting in the language and leisure of a people

A recent documentary called "The Thinking Game", which follows Demmis Hassabis, the CEO of Deep Mind, made me think about all the thoughts that are flowing through me right now 

The documentary, to tell you a little about it, maps out feedback, or rather positive-feedback based reinforcement learning and how it is changing the landscape of what humans once thought was possible. Its an interesting approach to the frontier of AGI or Artificial general intelligence. 

But thats not the topic of my musings - on this very hot evening of June in my home city of Lahore. 

No. The topic on my mind is what the RL algorithms in the documentary were being trained to play - Games. 

Today I am thinking about the difference in games and how they manifest and what they tell us about culture and people and how they seem like precursors to how a people will prosper and flourish 

Take for example Pakistan, notoriously South Asian, humid and infatuated with the idea of chance. Chance in life, chance in skill, Chance in connections. Everything runs on chance. Our people dont think too hard I feel, instead we leave it all to chance. A large portion of these people end up justifying their approach or at least build up on it by citing religion. While my latest study on religion has changed my opinion of the notion of chance and an everlasting blanket of Qadr, I'm not certain most Pakistanis, or even you the reader, might feel the same way that I do: the fact that rules are in place for us to use them. 

Now the game in question that started this blog post is called Ludo. If you have been raised in a south asian household, if youve had the fortune/misfortune with being associated with our people even at a distance, will have noticed a board, square, with 4 different colored squares in the large one. A dice and some colored pieces to play the game 

I vaguely recall the Mughals, the rulers of the subcontinent for about 500 years, were rather fond of this game as well, and would use actual people as pieces in on a life size board for their entertainment. 

Now whats interesting is the dice. That is my main concern. You see, the game is not one of the mind or of skill, it is a game of chance. 

Now think of other countries, like Japan and China where the Japanese version of chess 'Shogi' and the most intellectual board game of all time "Go" are played, respectively. 

It seems to me that these cultures reward thinking in a way that we do not. And it manifests at a cultural level. And now I am exhausted, so I will write more about this later. 

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