Have Fun

Every day we worry about global warming, the stock market, medical insurance coverage, falling real estate values, and the wars in various parts of the world. How depressing! Life is better when we enjoy living. Sometimes, a little amusement can distract us from our problems and improve our mood. When we are happy we tend to be more optimistic and we feel better.

In the following link you will find several classic arcade games that you can play online. Pong, Tetris, various versions of Solitaire, and Pacman are non-violent, whereas Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong require you to battle aliens and monsters. Play a little and unwind!

I visited Atlantic City during the Labor Day holiday.  The weather was perfect and it was very pleasant to walk along the beach wading in the warm water.  However, Atlantic City is also known for its casinos.  Atlantic City is the Las Vegas of the East Coast.

The casinos are dimly lit, the atmosphere is always filled with cigarette smoke even though there are separate smoking and non-smoking areas, and there is the constant din of the slot machines 24 hours per day.  I risked $20 Dollars in a 25-cent slot machine, and cashed out when the total went up to $50 Dollars after several plays — a $30-Dollar profit.  Other people around me were not so lucky.  I saw several who started with $50 or $100 Dollars and had nothing 30 minutes later.  In the $5-Dollar machines, the money goes even faster.  One pull with a bet of 3 credits costs $15 Dollars.  You can lose $100 Dollars with seven pulls of the handle in less than one minute.  No wonder that the casinos are so rich.  New Orleans is still a disaster zone full of rubble two years after hurricane Katrina destroyed the city in 2005, but the casinos in Biloxi, Mississippi which were also wiped out, were reconstructed in record time.  There is no financial incentive for rebuilding New Orleans, but the casinos would have lost billions of Dollars if they had not been rebuilt promptly.

During my stay in Atlantic City, I paid attention to the players.  I tried to figure out why they kept putting coins in the slot machines even though they kept losing.  I risked another $20 Dollars, and this time I got nothing.  I quit while I was $10 Dollars ahead for my two-day stay. It seems that humans are no more intelligent than fish who go after a shiny lure, get hooked, and become a meal for a fisherman. Casinos have refined the art of taking our money using techniques that take advantage of our greed and our lack of discipline.

Play Checkers

Professor Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta have announced that the game of checkers is solved.[1] Dr Schaeffer is a world authority in artificial intelligence applied to computer games. He developed Chinook, the first program to win a human world championship in any game, and this accomplishment is noted in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Checkers became popular in Spain in the mid-16th century. It is a game played between two players by moving 12 red and 12 black pieces on an 8-by-8 square board. The opponent’s pieces are eliminated by jumping over them. The player who first runs out of pieces or moves is the loser.

Schaeffer and his team proved that checkers, when played perfectly by both opponents, ends in a draw. The scientists worked for 18 years analyzing 500 billion-billion (5 × 10²⁰) possible combinations of moves to find the perfect strategy in any situation.

[1] Checkers Is Solved, Jonathan Schaeffer, et al, Science, (19 July 2007),[DOI: 10.1126/science.1144079]