We all know Elon Musk as the funniest man alive.

tweet: I will use the power of irony to defeat villains! “Oh you call yourself “The Joker”, then why can’t you tell a joke! How ironic …” (an image of iron man with musk's face photoshopped on)

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.

black and white photo of some kids in suits

grew out of that though.

musk tweet: Chess is a simple game. Understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels 🐿 and rocks🪨, but now we have computers 💻.

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.

musk tweet: Chess is such a simple game

musk tweet: This is cool, but I am quite certain that Chess can be fully solved, like Checkers

he knows how to tune it up, though.

musk tweet: Chess has a tiny number of degrees of freedom compared to reality: only 64 squares, no fog of war, no tech tree, no terrain differences, same starting pieces & positions every time and you can’t invent new pieces during the game. All of those factors and more are present in reality. So it may seem like someone is close to checkmate in reality, but that doesn’t matter if they suddenly vaporize the opponent’s king with lasers from space that never existed before! Given that there are even winning moves in chess that seem like blunders to humans, then when it comes to understanding winning moves in reality, it is vastly harder to tell.

hmm. fog of war, tech trees, randomized starting positions. that actually sounds a little familiar. could it be…?

musk is asked if he still plays chess. in a tweet, he says "I did as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc. Polytopia addresses these limitations."

OH YEAH BABY! you knew it had to be polytopia!

what the fuck is polytopia?

this is polytopia:

low poly computer game image. a knight, centurion, archer, etc pose under the words "BATTLE OF POLYTOPIA"

low poly computer game image. isometric view of a tiled landscape

sophisticated Gamers will notice three things here:

  1. 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.

  2. this game is for children. look the bright primary colors, the character’s huge eyes, and the low poly style, which evokes minecraft.

  3. this game looks a LOT like civilization. specifically, it looks like civilization 3:

screenshot of 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:

7/10: The Battle of Polytopia plays a little bit like a “babies first 4X” game. It’s good fun and has you trying to expand your tribe across a tiny cutesy little world. It’s easy to play, easy to understand, and fairly easy to lose a few hours too as well. While it’s going to be a little too simplistic for some people, it’s a very good game if you’re looking to introduce somebody else to strategy games, then it might well be the perfect chance to do so.

Cubed3 Rating. 6/10. The simple gameplay of Battle of Polytopia is actually a pretty fun breakdown of the genre - the problem is ultimately its simplicity is its undoing. Despite what it says or looks like, every starting race is nearly the exact same, which is a huge missed opportunity to diversify them. Battles late-game are very dry. For some casual players it is a fun romp, but anyone looking for depth or longevity won't find it here.

While I like the Civilization series along with other popular 4x strategy games, they can be a little on the lengthy side. That's why the idea of The Battle Of Polytopia appeals to me. It offers a bite-sized version of the typical 4x strategy experience with an adorable art style and a simplified tech tree of upgrades. However, this game's act of dumbing down its 4x strategy gameplay adds its own complications. There are a lot of features and gameplay elements that are sorely missed. Thus, the real battle of The Battle Of Polytopia involves fighting with its clunky visuals and struggling to stay engaged with its voxel world.

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.

Elon Musk's Intense Obsession With A Video Game Influenced His Business Strategies, Caused Fights In His Relationship And Served As A Reminder Every Move Matters: 'You Only Get A Set Number Of Turns In Life'

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:

But it's not just Musk who brings this level of intensity and passion to his pursuits. As someone who transformed his startup ventures into empires, Musk is a testament to the potential lying dormant in the world of startups. Just as he was once a lesser-known entrepreneur striving to change the world, there are countless others out there with ideas who are awaiting the right investment to catapult them into their own universe-altering trajectories. The potential to invest in the next Musk — someone with a fervor and strategic mindset capable of transforming an industry — is not just a possibility; it's a reality waiting to happen. Anyone can invest in startups with as little as $100.

that’s the image of musk they want to convey. anything they include is in support of that.

Elon Musk's passion for video games is far from a casual affair. It is a window into understanding the complex layers of the tech mogul's personality, his approach to business and his personal relationships. His latest biography explains his love for the strategy game "Polytopia," a multiplayer game where you strive to build an empire. Musk became so skilled at it that he bested the game's developer Felix Ekenstam. "I am just wired for war, basically," Musk said, illuminating how he perceives his proclivity for strategy and competition.

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:

This passion isn't just a pastime but a tool for honing skills and discovering life lessons. As Shivon Zilis, who downloaded the game to play alongside Musk, points out, "There's so many life lessons you learn, so many weird things about yourself and your opponents." Musk's games of "Polytopia" aren't casual diversions; they are intensely competitive sessions. In the wake of a heated argument with engineers, Musk retreated to a parking lot and drowned his frustrations in two back-to-back games of "Polytopia" against Zilis, winning both times. "He just absolutely crushed me both games," she said.

Elon Musk and Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis conceived twins through IVF: report

flexing on mom almost shows up more than once in the article…

Even in his personal life, the game has significant implications. Grimes, his partner at the time, was also coaxed into playing "Polytopia."

… 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.

The game even transcended into his professional life. On a trip to Tesla Inc.'s Berlin factory, Musk delayed important managerial meetings because he was engrossed in "Polytopia." "But it's the best game ever," he said after a mild scolding from his mother, who was on the trip with him.

his brother seems to feel the same way

Polytopia seems to be a metaphorical battlefield where Musk practices life's strategies. His brother Kimbal Musk learned the game to understand his sibling's mindset. "He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was," Kimbal Musk said.

(and from another benzinga sourced yahoo finance story):

Kimbal Musk told Isaacson that his brother regularly counsels him to avoid being overly empathetic in his work. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal Musk says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”

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.

  • zeezee@slrpnk.netEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    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!

    • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      22 hours ago

      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) to be true of 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.

      • 9bananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        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?

        • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            2 days ago

            the first playet to press X 10,000,000 times wins

            Hey look, you found another one of Elon’s favourite games.