TETRIS, ANYONE ?

So this 13 yr old kid in the US,   Willis  Gibson beat the AI that runs Tetris! Amazing! Human beats AI. Well done! 

 But, on the other hand , should I be worried about the future of the human race?  An evolving 13 year-old brain into a super-computer ?  Be fascinating to see a brain scan of this kid’s brain. What would we find? An enlarged primary motor cortex?  Or a jungle of new synapses?  Or a strange alien implant in his cerebellum ?  **

You’ll have to excuse me. I was forced to spend time with a fervent  Conspiracy Theorist at a New Year’s Day Lunch event.  And I listened politely, restraining  my tongue, and trying to wipe the shocked, incredulous expression off my face.  Not so my neighbour who forcefully interrupted with What Nonsense! At frequent intervals.

Driven beyond endurance, I started to weigh in with reasoned facts and logic, but I might just as well have saved my breath. It’s a no-win contest with the brainwashed.

But back to Tetris. I checked out Google Game Store, and realised I’ve been playing variants of the game for years, on my phone. The closest of which is Falling Word Search. It’s a word game, in which you compose words from falling (literally) letter tiles, which land randomly, any which-way up, down or sideways, and as the game progresses, so does the arrival speed of the letters. When they start falling outside of the framework, you know you’ve been beaten by your arthritic fingers and geriatric brain and the algorithm.  Mind you, I have achieved 4-digit scores …  but my target is a 5 digit score.

Try it, and let me know how you like the game.

**  I wrote this post in early January. Yesterday, I learn that one of Elon Musk’s companies, Neuro-something or other, has implanted a chip in a live human brain, for medical reasons; something to do with motor  movements or the like. So my off-hand remarks in para 2 were not so far off the mark, it seems !