Advancing to the Next Level: The Science of Video Games (Part 1)

How dangerous are video games? Do they provide value beyond entertainment? Neil finds out from video game expert Jeffrey Ryan and Sims designer Will Wright.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York City. And there I also serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium. Where I went to as a kid. It had a big impact on me, actually.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Apparently. Really?

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pete, the peanut gallery here is Eugene Mirman. Eugene, welcome back to StarTalk Radio. And I've got with us our special guest Jeffrey Ryan, author of Super Mario Brothers.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  How Nintendo conquered America.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How Nintendo conquered-

• 0:53Speaker 01

  I keep letting you get away with this, but really, how popular is Nintendo now?

• 0:57Speaker 02

  They're one of the top three companies.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Ah-ha! Is that what you'd say about Germany during WWII as it's conquered? Ah, one of the top three European nations? You know, conquering, like, the third one.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  They silver medaled WWII.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask, which region of the world does most of Nintendo's revenue come from?

• 1:15Speaker 02

  It comes from here, from the US. We are the dog, we are not the tail.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  That doesn't prove anything, that just proves that most of it comes from here. That's like, you could find a restaurant where all its money came from New York.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, what I'm saying-

• 1:25Speaker 01

  But you wouldn't say it conquered New York.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well...

• 1:28Speaker 02

  You would if it was a Japanese company of Japanese guys that came over here.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  If there's one Japanese restaurant that makes all its money in New York City, there's no way you would describe that as conquering New York. Just because they send it all back to Japan.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, let's ask it another way.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  This is the only science here.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You raise an important point. Just because most of the revenue comes from America doesn't mean that most Americans play Nintendo games.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let us ask that question.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the number one video game manufacturer in America?

• 2:01Speaker 02

  The number one manufacturer in America because Nintendo.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, in the world. No, no, no, no. What do Americans spend most of our video game money on?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. Probably Xboxes.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Xbox.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Xbox. Xbox. That sounds different from the word Nintendo, right?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  No, but they're very close to each other. They're both in Redmond, Washington. Two of the three video game giants both have headquarters in, like, across the street.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that where Bill Gates' house is?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. What if he's both of those companies?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  They actually tried to buy Nintendo about 10 years ago.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  They did the right thing.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to get back to a point about the computing power. I remember when Mighty Joe Young came out, the film, the remake, back in the 90s, I think.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  98.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a big deal because they were able to show hair. You know, the texture of his fur. And so...

• 2:50Speaker 02

  And then Monsters, Inc. came out and you could do the same thing.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  With the Sully character.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Harry and the Hendersons, which predates, but it's not a big deal.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was Bigfoot. That was Bigfoot. Harry and the... I remember that. I remember that. So it's just interesting how every next advance in computing, there's something else that gets included in the representation of a reality. And I think in The Limit, you might want to simulate everything.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Simulate every phenomenon, every process on Earth. And guess what? I have a clip with Will Wright. And in this particular clip, he talked about the effort it took to simulate the entire planet. And we're reminded of the Gaia hypothesis, where the planet is itself an organism. Whereas one thing rises, others fall, but then they rise back again, and there is this prevailing equilibrium. Let's find out what Will Wright has to say.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About simulating all of it.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Sounds a little hippie-ish, but I'll go along with it.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Sim Earth, I did after Sim City, pulled way back, and I get interested in the entire Earth as a system, basically looking at the biology, geology.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the interaction of these forces.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  All these different forces, yeah. People had done serious climate models or evolution models, but really, these things are all interrelated at some timescale. In researching that, I came across the work of James Lovelock, who in fact ended up being an advisor on the game. And I would send him copies, and he would sit there and play with his grandson, and he's a wonderful man.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I be an advisor?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want the test game.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Well, James Lovelock was one of the few people that considered the Earth as an entire system. He was the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, along with Lynn Margillis. Really, the idea behind the Gaia hypothesis is perhaps the Earth as a system is even more complicated than we think, and in fact is self-regulating. And we have some theories as to what the...

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, most people think of Earth as just this planet, right?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not as some place that has an active interaction with forces that go beyond just the rocks.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  In some sense, the idea is that the Earth is a living thing, and it's composed of millions of other species of living things. But at the Earth level, there are interactions and feedback cycles occurring, almost like within a cell. And this is still a somewhat controversial idea.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was a natural extension of sim-ant. There's an emergent order to the little bits that don't necessarily know the whole picture.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's a general term that scientists use for these systems called complex adaptive systems. These are systems that have internal feedback structures and are able to regulate themselves in some way or another. The idea that the Earth as a whole, the entire biosphere, could be a single complex adaptive system is still not widely accepted in science, but an intriguing idea.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Certainly enough of an idea to base a game on it.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And in fact, he was building little models himself that he called Daisy World, showing how the Earth might regulate its temperature. And there's some interesting data out there. You know, the sun is something like 30% hotter now than when the Earth was formed. Yet, the temperature on Earth has remained fairly constant over that entire period. So, something seems to be potentially regulating at least the temperature of the Earth.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to put some science on the table, here's my issue with the Gaia hypothesis. Because those who are proponents of it assert that if something goes slightly out of equilibrium, forces will bring it back in.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's self-regulating. That's what this phrase means.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Meaning, if the global warming is a thing, that eventually there'll be a bunch of mice that happen to eat, you know, heat. That's a bad example, but...

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A really bad example!

• 6:06Speaker 01

  But say there's 2,000 mice. That's enough to eat up all the heat of the world. Now it's scientifically accurate.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some heat-consuming phenomenon.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Something on Earth will correct the mistakes that are happening on Earth.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, that's the premise. However, I look at planet Mars, which once had running liquid water over its surface.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  But then they ran out of the heat-eating mice.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it is. So whoever the Gaia hypothesis people were on Mars, they're all dead now. Because Mars could not regulate itself. Mars is far out of today whatever equilibrium it might have been in the past. And take a look at Venus, it has a runaway greenhouse effect, 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And I almost calculated, you can cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Sounds like you think you could build a windowsill on Venus.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Why would you open the window in the first place? When it's so hot outside?

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would vaporize. Bad idea. And so the Gaia hypothesis, while intriguing, surely it's intriguing enough to base a video game on. And to watch the forces compete.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  But in terms of actuality, it's flawed.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll work over some period. I don't think it's a fundamental truth of the cosmos, that's all.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  I know what happened to Mars, though.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Oh, what happened?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  What happened to Mars was chronicled in the video game Doom, where demons from hell invaded Mars.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Uh-huh. That's it? That's what happened?

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all it takes.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Does Doom take place before right now?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  It takes place in the future.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  In the future? Wait, you said I know what happened, not what will happen.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Are you saying that Doom isn't true?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying that it hasn't happened yet?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Okay. Just testing you.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 7:44Speaker 01

  That was all worth it?

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where am I going here? What's interesting, he didn't stop with the Gaia hypothesis. Will Wright went on to write the video game Spore. And after the break, we're gonna throw in another clip from my interview with Will Wright. And just hear what he says about Spore. We'll be back in a moment with our conference.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here with my co-host Eugene Mirman. Hello. Tweeting @EugeneMirman. Yes. M-I-R-M-A-N. Yes. You got it. Yeah. And Jeffrey Ryan, thanks for coming on to StarTalk Radio.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no problem.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Author of Super Mario and How Nintendo Took Over.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Conquered America.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conquered. Conquered. Those are battle words there. Where we left off before the break, we had a clip from my interview with Will Wright, the creator of Sim and other creative video games. And we're just gonna get him to talk about Spore. Spore, I mean, nothing is out of his reach, apparently. Now, first he tries to create all of Earth, replicating the Gaia hypothesis, that you have this sort of system of self-regulating interconnected forces. And Spore, this is based on the science of astrobiology. What life might look like someplace other than Earth. Right. This is cool. I mean, is he one of your heroes?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, he's fantastic. I mean, Spore starts off at the Angstrom level and then goes into...

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Angstrom. Not bad. That's probably a thing. I'm gonna bet that means a thing. What does it mean?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I learned that from MTV.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it because it's very small? And Angstrom is 1/10 billionth of a meter. Oh, really? Very small. So the size of viruses and things.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Yes. And it ends, Spore, the game, ends with you conquering entire galaxies.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. With larger forms of life that evolved from these... And these are alien life that take on features that are unfamiliar to Earth. Let's see what he says in my clip, from his office in San Francisco.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Most people that can imagine the Earth and our solar system surrounded by stars, and that's about where it ends, they have a very dim idea what a galaxy is, how big a galaxy is, and the fact that our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies blows people's mind at that point. There was actually a thing done back in the 60s by some designers named Charles Nureyem's called The Powers of Ten. And it was a way of looking at our universe at all these different scales. A lot of people might have seen films or a book of this where, basically, they start with a guy sitting in a park, and they zoom into his hand, they zoom into cells, they zoom all the way down to atoms and subatomic particles, and then it zooms all the way back out.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because The Powers of Ten can go both directions.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In and out.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Right, and so it actually goes through about 40 Powers of Ten, all the way down to subatomic level quarks, and all the way up to the extragalactic level, where you're seeing galactic filaments and voids. But at every level, there are interesting structures. And Charles and Ray Eames were designers. They were designers. They're your peeps. Yeah, they're giving credit for the concept, but in fact, there was a Dutch schoolteacher, Case Bolken, that actually came up with the idea. In the 1950s, I have that book, yes. Yeah, Cosmic View. But anyway, I was intrigued with the idea, could I build a game that allows you to traverse through a lot of these levels centered on the idea of life? Because life is this amazing thing in that it started out microscopically, this very small scale, slowly it's becoming more and more organized, building more elaborate structures,

• 11:06Speaker 03

  including shells, brains, cities, spaceships, and now it has the potential to have a huge impact on the universe. We potentially could go out and colonize the galaxy, start building self-replicating robots, and I thought life was a great tour guide through these scales. So the goal of the person interacting with Spore, what is their objective? Well, you start Spore as a single-celled organism. Oh, you are the single-celled organism. Yeah, you are, a little tiny microbe living in the ocean, and you have to evolve. And you go through many generations, you get more elaborate, eventually the creature can become intelligent, they can start forming tribal structures, social structures, using tools, eventually advancing up to cities, and then eventually going into space. And at that point, you're actually flying around a simulated galaxy with millions of

• 11:50Speaker 03

  stars, interacting with other alien races. It's a crazy idea, I mean, it's great, brilliant. How did it do commercially? It started very well, I mean, it wasn't as big as The Sims. I think it was a little more esoteric than The Sims for a lot of people, The Sims is very personal. Spore had some amazing creativity tools, though, because the player is not only designing the creatures, but they're designing buildings, spaceships, all sorts of stuff, and eventually planets, you know, you can start terraforming your own planet. And these things, whenever you design them in the game, they're automatically shared with all the other players, and that's how we populate the galaxy. Now suppose I run across your creature and I say, "Oh, you're good food for me," and I eat you. Yeah. Then what? Well, first of all, you can find out who I am, you know, maybe you like the creature I made. Like because you taste good, or like because I want to be your friend? Well, maybe like aesthetically, you think I've designed really nice creatures.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  On the other hand, if you like the way they taste, you can abduct them in your spaceship, bring them back to your home world, use them to populate a new planet, you can in fact build a farm planet. To serve man. Exactly.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, at the bottom of this is an ascent in scale, and I like that concept. Because, as we said, Anksström is named after Bengt Anksström, who studied very small phenomenon. So he started small, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, many, many powers of 10. When I think of that from a video game programming perspective, these are scales that have to be in there somehow, built into the fabric of the software.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  They found a way to actually make separate games. So when you're actually as a cell, they don't need to make 800 million cells to make one person, and then 800 million people to make a planet.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be stupid programming, yes, right.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, they found a way to make it invisible when they switch from one scale to another. But you can't tell when you pull out.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's just the clever graphics to make that happen. Because you go on all these scales. On Earth, there's life, a virus scale, and the biggest life there ever was, you know?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, it's turtles. Space turtles. Uh, I don't know.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  It was that clump of trees, right?

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a whale. It's the whale, the whale, yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, Star Trek IV.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, duh, right, right, right, it was Save the Whale, that was the name of that one, right?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you can imagine, in principle, scales greater than that. And so, nothing stops the video game designer.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Like a double whale? The biggest imaginable animal?

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, nothing would stop that imagination. And now, when you look at how that has influenced other forms of imagination, when I think of some great adventure films, how about Lara Croft?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would later learn that that was a video game.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I went just to see, you know, Angelina Jolie, and then I say, wait, wait, wait a minute, this is a video game.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  This is just like a video game. This story is a video game story.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  It was Pitfall.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I can't control it.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  In Indiana Jones, except they realized when they're making...

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, it was what in Indiana Jones?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Pitfall, which was an Indiana Jones knockoff for the Atari. But they decided, since this is going to be 3D, and there's going to be a shoulder camera hovering over someone's head invisibly the whole time, you're just going to be looking at their butt the entire time. They figured, why not make it a nice-looking butt? And that was the origin of Lara Croft.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the origin of Lara Croft.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Does the game which I've maybe played follows a butt? I don't remember that.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  The butt is attached to...

• 14:53Speaker 01

  There's a movie I remember having a person in it.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  It's attached to a person, but the way your view is, you're always seeing her back.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. Right.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You never see her front?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Well, when she turns around, but then the camera reorients itself behind her.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they had to invent what she looked like from the front in the movie?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they figured, why not go with Angelina Jolie?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  They have a series of women that they hire.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  There was gonna be a lady, her back, and then Brad Pitt's front. Sort of androgynous.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, how about other films like...

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Adventurer.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, these are... There's this...

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Terrible movies.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interplay between, but they have video game origins.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Because who doesn't love money?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Mortal Kombat was a fighting game, Resident Evil was called a survival horror game, where you have very limited control over your character. There's a zombie coming, you can't just pick up a gun and shoot them 100 times. You very slowly reach out and pick up the gun, very slowly come up, and then you have like a 50/50 chance of missing. And that makes you really scared, because the game isn't letting you play that well. And that duplicates the fear that you would make a mistake.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not saying the games are very fun.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I love our language, that we have a word for the undead. That's just...

• 16:03Speaker 02

  We have like a million words for the undead. We have revenant, wraith, undead, zombie.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zombie, I mean, I'm going with zombie.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Walkers.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Elephants have no word for the undead. Those dummies.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Tron was a recent film that came out?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it came out.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that one crossed many generations of...

• 16:24Speaker 02

  The original Tron is from 1982, and then the sequel took place like 30 years later, but they found a way to make Jeff Bridges when he's like 31. They had a digital Jeff Bridges that looked 31, next to his 60-year-old self.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did they do that?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Computers.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Computers.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they used the technology from Avatar. They actually had one of those things plug in to a horse, and then programmed.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  And the horse walked backwards for thirty years?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  The creatures in Avatar are real, and they do a lot of the animation for our failed movies.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Closing out this segment, how about War Games? Matthew Broderick.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Oh, War Games is excellent.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that an interesting film? You know, I saw it recently, and it held up, you know? I mean, it was, yes, it was dated, but...

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Unlike Citizen Kane, War Games does actually stand the test of time. So black and white, come on! I get it, it's a sled. Next.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but that got into, we could be victim of our own creativity.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yes, the idea of thinking that you could win a nuclear war, that you could outthink the other side.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 17:27Speaker 02

  And the video game Missile Command speaks to that really well also. Because there's five cities on the California coast, you're trying to defend them against an incoming rain of missiles. Your job is to shoot down the missiles.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But now that it's not the Cold War, have those games evaporated?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yes, but that was one of the reasons, I think, that the Cold War went away. People played Missile Command, and they realized, "I can't ever win. The only way to win is not to play."

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Ooh!

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Tight it back, tight it back.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  The Gandhi of video games.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  I'd like to see his video game of Passat.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back out of this break, we're gonna bring up other subjects that have been fertile ideas for video games, like, for example, artificial intelligence. Join us here on StarTalk.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with StarTalk Radio. Here is my host Eugene Mirman, and author of Video Game Analysis. Jeff Ryan, Jeff, thanks for being on StarTalk. Thanks for having me. You know, we're folding into this conversation, an interview I had with Will Wright, the creator of Sim, and my latest clip, we talked about artificial intelligence, which has kind of been with us in the programming and video industry for so long. Let's find out what his take is on this, because he comes at it from an interesting direction, as a designer, as an architect, as a computer programmer, and let's see what his take is.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  People tend to think of AI as this giant pile of technology that we've slowly been building up and building up, but really AI is more of a bag of tricks. We can combine those tricks in interesting ways. The Turing test, which Alan Turing came up with, is really still one of the best definitions, that if you can fool a human into thinking it's intelligent, then for all practical purposes it is. It doesn't matter what's under the hood. But AI is slowly advancing, not nearly as fast as we had thought. Back in the 60s, people thought that machine translation would be something that we'd have working perfectly in 10 years. Even now, if you go and do something with an online translator, you realize-

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They really don't get it.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Nah, they give you a rough sense of it, but there are nothing like the perfect translator that we thought would be totally simple. I think fundamental AI, getting a computer to recreate human intelligence, is turning out to be a little bit almost of a non-issue. What we're finding that computers are great at is harvesting human intelligence, distilling it down into a usable form and redistributing it. In fact, that's really what makes Google useful. There's no supercomputer at Google really analyzing the web and deciding how to post the search results. All it's doing is it's looking at millions and millions of human decisions about what pages to link to, harvesting and distilling those human intelligent decisions and reflecting it back to us.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you think of Watson?

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Watson was very impressive. This is the IBM system that played Jeopardy. It was very brute force. It was terabytes of data, but the inferences it made were quite remarkable.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you say brute force almost pejoratively, as though the human mind doesn't use brute force. I guess you're trying to distinguish law calculation power from intuition or insight.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  The human brain is actually slow but highly parallel compared to modern computers, which are typically more serial, one stream, but incredibly fast. They're very different forms of process. It's actually kind of remarkable that a computer and a human brain seem even similar at all, given how different their processes are internally.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So give me an example of a parallel processing that goes on in the human mind, and contrast that with a serial processing that would go on in a computer.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the human mind is composed of 100 billion or so neurons that are operating at electrochemical speeds. The time it takes a signal to move across your brain is many orders of magnitude slower than the time it takes a signal to move across a computer chip.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're dissing our brain, you know?

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Not really. You take that time, which is kind of slow, but at the same time, you have 100 billion of these cells. Each one of these neurons is an amazingly complex little computer unto itself. The human brain is probably the most complex thing we know of in the entire universe. And it's not clear that we're going to find anything more complex. The human brain is able to make interesting associations, creative insights, connections, that we don't even know how it does it.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's important. By the way, if we don't know how it does it, we'll never be able to program a computer to duplicate that.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  Right. It looks like one of the more promising fields of computer intelligence is not one in which we engineer the intelligence, but one in which we allow it to naturally evolve.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought that's what the chess programs did. They would learn from every game they played.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Some of them do, yeah. But even then, they're learning a subset of rules and patterns that are pre-programmed. They don't have the insight to say, oh, here's a whole new thing I need to learn. The programmer can basically tell them, okay, these are the five things I'm going to allow you to learn. But even then, the computer programmer has to understand the concepts, or at least the conceptual framework that it's going to allow the computer to learn. It could be the conceptual framework you need for a certain problem solving is something that you don't even know. Here is a subset of computer science which is focused on systems that evolved to become more intelligent without human design. And in some sense, I think that's probably the most hopeful path to more intelligent computers.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Among the computer games that you know, which one best invokes artificial intelligence, or at least adaptive intelligence based on learning what had just happened?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  There was something about 10 years ago called Starship Titanic. Now, this was not the world's greatest AI program, but it was designed to have a free-flowing conversation with you. So you type in anything you want and it would come back. And Douglas Adams, the guy from Hitchhiker's Guide, made this game. So basically...

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The guy who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yes. You were able to sit down and talk with two or three Douglas Adams characters. No matter what you threw against the wall, they could throw something back against you. That was hilarious.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  But it would connect or make sense, because I could make a thing that just goes like, bleh! But then it becomes boring.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So it's got to be convincing.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yes. It passed the Turing test for a little bit, then you realize that it was a thick game.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did it have enough of Douglas Adams' personality so that you can say, yeah, this is like Douglas Adams, if I didn't know better?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  In fact, they had Monty Python guys come in to work on it to make sure that the humor was like, wow, that was left field. That was pretty good, though.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. So it's not only just what you say, but how you say it, and what kind of clever twists of phrase you might bring to it.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  And it was talk. You're saying it's audio, not typing?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  It was mostly typing, but it felt English. Felt very English.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Nice. Finally, a British video game that talks like a comic.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  English as in English humor.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Money, Python, Hitchhiker's Guide, Doctor Who.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a whole, it's a whole world that some Americans just can't even relate to.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  I think most can. I mean, other than Churchill.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so what I wonder is, people always imagined a future where computers just replaced humans in decision-making and intuition. We've got computers replacing raw computing power. Calculate pi. I'll go home, come back, there it is, right? So, how far away do you think we are from a true artificial intelligence world?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  And how will we know if it's really intelligent or just mimicking, like, what is it?

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Turing test.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Or is it, is that like the Chinese room or something, the Chinese box you know what I'm talking about?

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  No, never mind. Maybe it's the same, but a different phrasing.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  But maybe Will Wright was pulling something on you. Maybe that was actually a Will Wright robot with artificial intelligence.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I don't know, it wouldn't matter to me.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, and he's somewhere on an island in the South Pacific going, "Ha ha."

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's in the Bahamas, just laughing.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I mean, we're finishing up this segment, but there's much more about the science of video games to come. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Find us on the web at starTalkRadio.net.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. Eugene.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Professional stand-up comic. And Jeff Ryan, thanks for coming in to do this. Author of How Nintendo Will

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Good America.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conquer America and has already taken over the world, apparently. You know, for me, one of the most intriguing things about sort of modern internet game-playing is the fact that you can play with people who you've never met in another country.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and be cursed out at them.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a foreign language and not understand, but get the tone and spirit like Sims.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is this called? Multi-?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or just MMOs or online games, or just WoW, because WoW is World of Warcraft, the most popular one.

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World of Warcraft? So are these people fighting people, or countries fighting countries?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  It started off people fighting other like monsters. You'd have to team up to fight a big monster, because...

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's cooperation?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yes, no matter how big you are, no matter how high up you are, you need to band up with a bunch of people at your level to fight the monsters.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the monster is better ass than you are.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's how it began. So what is it now?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Now, it's a way of life. Now, they're playing forever. They may not even fight anyone, because they're just talking with people about upcoming events. There's different ways that you can trade. There's a whole internet currency.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Trade what?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Goods. Yeah, goods and services.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Goods, services, and gold.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Well, trade what? Food, prostitutes, and weapons?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  There's an economist, Edward Castronovo, who realized that there is an entire economy going on in these games. There are people called gold farmers that are working in places like China and India, where they're making about a dollar an hour just fighting, getting gold, and then selling it to people who are buying it, because they don't want to play the game. They just want the consequence.

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this virtual space?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  They're making a dollar in real life for virtual gold.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yes, they're paying real money and they're getting fake gold back.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see what Will Wright says about just this kind of video game.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nowadays, with the military deploying drones that are controlled essentially by joystick back at the military base, do you see video games as enhancing the ability of those soldiers to perform in that way? Was that a completely different kind of function and operation?

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I think the generation of soldiers that are going to the army playing these drones grew up with video games, and it's a very natural interface. In some sense, you have to kind of step back and say that it's hard to remove humans from our technology. We have the shelf technology around us, all the way down to the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the buildings we live in. And in some sense, that's the ecosystem that we learn in and adapt to. And so these soldiers have grown up in a environment where they have screens, they have input devices, they are controlling complex things. They're doing symbolic reasoning.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sometimes we forget that soldiers just in, they're 18 years old, 19, 20. I mean, that's the age.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, even in Iraq, you know, after they've gone and done their patrol, they come back to their tent and play Counter-Strike on their Xbox. So, these guys are, it's not like they played these games as a kid and then went to the army. They're still playing these games. Now, I know a lot of them are using them for teamwork exercises. One of the things about these games, especially some of the shooters, is it's kind of underappreciated, is that they're, a lot of them are team-based. And they require amazing levels of coordination, teamwork, et cetera.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the biggest team video game out there?

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's really hard to say. It depends what you mean by biggest. I mean, there are games like World of Warcraft, where it's a very long-term game. People play for months or years, and you develop characters, and you typically have guilds or groups that you go out with.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And these are other actual people in the actual world out there?

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, very deep friendships develop in these games. A lot of people end up meeting, getting married.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, in the game or getting married after?

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Both. I mean, I mean, you know, real marriages. They meet in the game, they get to know each other for months or years. At some point, it's said to meet up for the first time. They get along in real life, it turns out. I've heard countless number of people that have gotten married after meeting in these online worlds.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has the opposite happened? There's someone who you've been hunting your whole life, and then you meet him, they want to shoot him?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, yeah, there have been some bad results of this. This is true of any human interaction. Where people can get together, and you get good and bad. You get all the reflection of humanity. People have been killed because of things that happen in games, and killed in real life.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How?

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Well, there was a case in Korea several years ago where some guy in an online game stole some other guy's sword. It was like some special sword. He got really pissed off, and so pissed off that he even ended up tracking the guy down and killing him in real life.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he didn't get the sword back?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  It wasn't even a real sword. It was a virtual sword. It was bits in a computer memory.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's my point, yeah. This is crazy, and I've got a list here. February 2002, a Louisiana woman sued Nintendo because her son died after having seizures, which she accused Nintendo of it being caused by him playing Nintendo 64 for eight hours a day, six days a week. Nintendo denied any responsibility.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, that's an unreasonable amount of playing. Like, if he had eaten that many grapes, he might be dead. If he eaten grapes for that period of time, he'd be dead.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  August 2000, a 28-year-old South Korean, Lee Sung-soo, died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours straight. September 2007, a Chinese man died after playing internet video games for three consecutive days in an internet cafe. I've got a better one. 2009, Kim Seong-hun, a three-month-old Korean child, died from malnutrition after both her parents spent hours each day in an internet cafe, raising a virtual child in an online game.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Okay, that's crazy, but a lot of these-

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you for agreeing.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, like, a lot of these, like, if you don't eat for 20 days, you'll die.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When StarTalk Radio continues, we'll talk about some of the more positive aspects of video games.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  No, we'll talk about how people in Asia are dying because they don't know when to come inside and make breakfast for their child.

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll catch you after the break.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to our final segment of StarTalk Radio. We're talking about the science of video games. I've got with me helping out this conversation is Eugene Mirman. Eugene, there you go. And Jeff, Jeff Ryan.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I've got a couple of questions for you.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Shoot.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because professionally, you critique video games.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You judge them for their value. We spend so much of the show talking about what could be harmful about video games or weird about them, but surely there's some redeeming features.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  They can get you pregnant.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've got a question here. This came in on our Facebook page.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Should video games be included on a long-term mission to Mars? That would take about a year to get there.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If NASA asked them to design it, what might that game be?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Oh, a video game specially designed?

• 31:22Speaker 01

  A video game designed for the trip?

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  It should be a video game where you go out to restaurants on Earth.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  No, no, you're exactly right. The video game should give you what you're missing. The last thing you want in a video game is if you're cooped up in Mars in the game.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Fighting aliens on Mars. What you want is to be like, "Oh, I feel so nervous about this date."

• 31:40Speaker 02

  You want a field. You just want to run through a field, and that's your video game.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you want the opposite of what you're doing there?

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want an escape.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  In Tetris, for instance, you get to finally put blocks in the right order, which you never get to do in real life.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm on my way to Mars. That's not my video game. My video game is back on Earth.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Your video game is going to an Applebee's and sitting down and getting bad service.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Until you get better service by the restaurant and rebuild it.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so now tell me. So Nintendo has the Big Brain Academy.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I confess, I own this.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right? It tests you on various cognitive, intuitive operations of your brain.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what do you think of it?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  The idea is that it keeps your brain well lubricated because it's making you do math and different calculations that you normally don't do in your regular, everyday life, but you can do.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Unless you're an astrophysicist.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. His life is Big Brain Academy all the time.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  He's the one person who really doesn't help.

• 32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did well. I don't want to brag or anything.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I imagine you did pretty well on the astrophysics test.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that their way to make up for the fact that maybe parents were complaining that their kids were spending too much time in Super Mario Brothers?

• 32:50Speaker 02

  That was actually Nintendo's attempt to find an audience outside of 12-year-old boys. That was an attempt to find adults, seniors, people that normally don't play video games.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Astrophysicists into buying games.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  They don't care what parents think. They want parents to hate it so the kids want more and hate them when the parents aren't looking.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, alright, so but what else does it do that's positive? Do video games improve hand-eye coordination or do they make you more alert? I've seen my kids play this and there's kind of like an addiction. You know, you pull, "It's time for dinner." "No, I can't. I'm not ready. Wait a minute, I have to..."

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Have you ever tried pulling someone away from Go? It's the same thing.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is so not the same thing.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  It is. You've never pulled them away.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Super Mario will teach kids about astrobiology. You see this thing here? This is not just a regular pipe. This is a wormhole. Think about it. You go in here, you pop out anywhere else in the world. This is some sort of intergalactic transit system, which explains why the Mushroom Kingdom has sentient fungus and sentient plants, as well as sentient animals. You're in a whole other part of the galaxy.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And there's no way to just read that in a paragraph?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  You need to explore it yourself.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  To understand a wormhole and how much fun it would be.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's some learning there is what you're saying. But that's not the tactic of operating the game. That's information in the game that you carry away, leaving you a little more enlightened than when you started. What would you say was the most educational video game there ever was?

• 34:12Speaker 02

  The most educational video game that ever was might have been something like The Sims.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Not Duck Hunt?

• 34:17Speaker 02

  No, no, because think about how often you talk to other people in live and actually have the same sort of interactions that you do in The Sims.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so in those Sims then, it's training you to be more socially aware.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you call it, the emotional quotient? As opposed to your...

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Your EQ.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your EQ.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're in Duck Hunt, you may be getting your skills bettering at duck hunting, but it doesn't transform to everything else. But in this game, you're talking...

• 34:41Speaker 01

  The whole civilization is better than...

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's making an important point. You have a skill that's not just that skill, that has applicability elsewhere.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And would you say that an entire generation of kids who are now playing video games... As adults who will be running the country, will they run the country better than it's being run now?

• 34:56Speaker 02

  I think they're gonna run it very differently. They're gonna see things as a team-based approach.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Differently.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Differently.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  People will get together to a mission-

• 35:03Speaker 01

  They're gonna work as a team to destroy the world. So it's not just any one side. It's like, let's all work together to end the human race.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  It's gonna be like the teams in Warcraft, like the guilds. Instead of you have your job, I have mine, and maybe we'll have some meetings. Everyone will work together for an accomplished goal and then disband and go do something else.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  So the world started as warring tribes. It's sort of remained calm down a little and then through Warcraft we will return to warring tribes.

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And-

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Good. I'm glad.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how about puzzle solving? The ability to solve a problem you've never seen before. Who gives us that?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  All of the different puzzle games, starting with Tetris.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tetris, okay. So they're pure puzzle games and they're obviously puzzle games.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's the future of 3D? You brought to this set-

• 35:46Speaker 01

  The past of 3D.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  This is the past of 3D.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is 3D from, like, cavemen use this 3D device.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This huge visor that you put on your head and it's got a joystick with a wire connected to it.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  You don't put this on your head. The best part of this is it doesn't strap onto your head. And when I say best part, I mean the worst part.

• 36:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will not pursue that further.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  You need four hands to play.

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are running short on time. We are coming to the end of this episode of StarTalk. This has been great, a great conversation. Eugene, thanks for coming.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Sure, thanks for having me.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and Jonathan, good luck with the book, published by Penguin.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's been out for about a year.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Yep, and the future of video games, in one word, holograms.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holograms.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  That's very exciting, 3D holograms, like the holodeck.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, guys, that's our show. StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by the National Science Foundation. You can find us on the web at starTalkRadio.net. Like us on Facebook. Where else but StarTalk Radio? And actually, you can find us in our new location, on the web, on the Nerdist channel, in YouTube. All owned by Google. One day, they'll own us all. As always, this is Neil deGrasse Tyson telling you to keep looking up.

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By Grant from the National Science Foundation. And I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, urging you to keep looking up.