The Universe is a Game
The Game
A few days ago, at Vijnana Dal, we gave students a challenge. This is the story about that activity and how we connected it to a larger pursuit.
The dadas (guides) had designed a simple card game by themselves, whose rules were known only to them. Two of the dadas sat everyone down in a circle around them and started playing the game, which was later dubbed 'Gillu' (because, why not!). It was a modified version of "Bhikar-Savkar" or "Beggar My Neighbour" where some choice and startegization were introduced in an otherwise random game. The students could only observe. The challenge for them was to figure out the rules of the game through observation.
[The 2-player game starts with each player having 26 cards in hand. They are not allowed to look at the cards. Player 1 begins by compulsorily playing the top card (violating this gets a penalty of 2 cards). Player 2 now, can look at their top card. They can either play it on top of the previously played card or put the card on the bottom of their stack having to play the next card compulsorily. Player 1 now plays the next card in the same fashion and this goes on back and forth. If a played card matches the suit of the previous card, then the rank of the two cards is compared. The player with the higher rank card wins the round and gets to pick up the whole stack. The winner plays the first card of the next round. Another way to win a round is if the ranks of the two cards match, then if the colours also match (red-on-red or black-on-black), the player who played the last card wins. In all other cases, the game keeps going. The player whose cards end first loses the game and the other player wins.]
Now, the game commenced. Everyone started observing the moves and their results. Students quickly began chatting among themselves.
One of them proposed a rule- "Oh, I think if the suit of a player's card matches the card that was previously played, then the player gets all the stack!".
"Yes, this must be a rule of this game!" agreed a second student.
"Wait! But right now, player 2 played a three of hearts on the previous ten of hearts. Still player 1 got all the cards! How?" interjected another student.
"So, I think, when the suits match, the player who played the bigger of the two cards gets to keep the stack! Would it be so?" chimed in a third one.
"Let's keep looking to confirm.", said the first.
This went on for quite a while. Everyone would observe. Someone would call out a distinct observation- it may be a new way of winning the round or a case of a 'foul'. Then everyone worked together to find out the rule of the game that would allow this observed move to happen. One student was writing down all the rules that were discovered as of yet. The students had the option of declaring that they had found out all the rules of the game any time they felt like it. The reward was a treat afterwards; but if they hadn't discovered all of the rules, they would be penalised with a minor punishment. For them, their main incentive was beating their dadas as soon as possible!
The discovery of the first few rules took less time as they were simpler. As the occurrence of the same rank-same colour cards on top of each other is quite rare, that rule's discovery took quite a bit of time. They weren't sure about the rule of playing the first card of the round (remember- looking, skipping, and playing the next card was not allowed for the first card of the round). This was because it took quite a lot of time before a dada made the mistake and was penalised. At that point, the students were confused as to why a dada shouted "foul" and received 2 cards from the other dada. "What happened differently right now?", they had to go back and analyse the game more intently. They also had to actively distinguish between the strategies of a player and the rules of the game. "Why did this player not skip his card right now? Was this his decision or some kind of an undiscovered rule?"
After nearly 1 hour had gone by, the students started discussing among themselves whether or not they had discovered all the rules. After much deliberation, and with a little bit of anxiety, they declared that they were confident that they had found all the rules- starting from how to distribute the cards to how to win the game and all the fouls and penalties. They explained the rules one by one and Dada cross-checked. Yep! They had found out all the rules!
The students were very thrilled to have completed the challenge! They celebrated and then we sat down for the next discussion. Dada said- "Congratulations! You successfully found out the rules of the game. Now, let's talk about how you did it. Tell me."
Reflections
The discussion started. The students reflected on the process they did for the past hour. They told how they made observations, found patterns, guessed the rule, and verified if it held true on further observations. Dada showed them a clip named 'Suicide or Murder?'¹ from an episode of Benedict Cumberbatch's 'Sherlock' TV series. It is a very interesting scene where Sherlock Holmes discovers a particular case to be murder rather than suicide by observing the house, finding a pattern that nearly all the objects in the room were in a position as if used by a left-handed person, and concluding that the victim must not have killed himself, as the pattern suggests he was left-handed and the bullet-wound was on the right side of his forehead. Through this discussion, they discovered the process they had already used, of finding out something new through observation and pattern-finding: Inductive Reasoning.
The Equivalence
I now sat down with them and asked them- "What do you think was the point of all this? Why did we do an activity involving playing cards at Vijnana Dal, of all places?". The discussion went on further. We tried establishing an equivalence between the task they did and the philosophy of science. Pretty much the only thing we can do in science is- observe, find patterns, guess the rules, verify, and repeat. This is basically how science works, isn't it? Experiments are just better ways of generating newer, refined observations.
(There is a parallel and equally important thread of Deductive Reasoning, which is used to test out the validity and extent of previously discovered rules; we start by taking a theory and then generating and testing hypotheses to test it.)
Just as the students thought at first that "match the suits, matcher wins" was the rule, only to discover the improved rule- "match the suits, then bigger rank wins" through observation, in science too, we modify our understanding based on new evidence.
Some rules take a large amount of time to get discovered. Students discovered the "top-page foul" quite later on in the game because it was a rare event to happen. At the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) we do so many millions of particle collisions to discover particles precisely because these are rare events by themselves.
For pattern-finding, we need to observe and find out relationships between two events. The students discovered the foul rules by observing which event was succeded/ preceded by which move. In science, we find correlations among different variables.
A higher level of reasoning was required when the students had to distinguish between the strategies of a player and the rules of the game. "This player is always performing this particular move after that particular event. Is the action of that player a part of their strategy or a direct consequence of some inherent rule of the game?". The students had to distinguish between mere correlation and actual causation.
The Point
"What is the point of science?", we ask after all of this discussion.
There is no point to science. The point is only of human curiosity. Science is just a tool, and the best one we have discovered so far, but just a tool. "What is this human curiosity? And what is the point of that then?" That It is summed up nicely in a song sung at Jnana Prabodhini, "Vijnana Geet"-
Line-by-line literal translation-
1. On which principles does the surrounding world operate
2. Somewhere a king orders, and somewhere else the troops move (cause-effect)
3. Whatever felt mysterious and scary in the beginning
4. No fear was left once the nature of the world was understood
5. What a wasted life it is, having lived without discovering the crux of the universe
6. Learn to find out why everything is how it is
Finding out the 'Marma', the crux of the universe. Isn't this why we are here?
Imagine a train journey. The journey is entirely underground, through a tunnel. Everything is pitch black. You are not even aware that you are travelling through such a tunnel. The journey itself has begun underground, you know no other world. For you, this is your world- darkness and silence. But somewhere in the journey, the tunnel ends, just for a brief moment. There is a small window in the journey, just for about 30 seconds, where the train will be out of the tunnel. Just for those 30 seconds, you will be able to see outside. See the green mountains, and the trees, feel the breeze, hear the waterfalls,... Then the train is going to enter the next tunnel, as dark and as silent as this one. Who knows when you will exit this tunnel; probably never. Will you not thoroughly enjoy the 30 seconds looking outside? Or will you close your eyes, lost in your own thoughts and petty little problems?
What a waste it would be to have been born into this world for such a short time and not experience it, not understand it to the maximum extent one can! Isn't this a good enough, I would say the best, motivation to learn more about our universe?
The Universe is a Game
How to learn about the universe then? Well, just the way the students at Vijnana Dal learnt the card game. Isn't the universe just like a game? Each action that happens in the universe is governed by some rule; we call them laws. There are the rules that govern the falling of an apple, the blooming of a rose, the flowing of a river and the bursting of a star, the way a glass shatters, how a lion hunts,... even the behaviour of humans. We haven't found out all of the rules of the universe, just as the students didn't have a clue about the rules of the game. But we are on a continuous quest!
The universe is a single entity. We break it down into Physics, Chemistry, Biology etc. for our convenience. These are labels of our knowledge and not of the universe itself. When this oneness of the universe is understood, once our goal is set on finding out the rules of the game of the universe, then all the barriers of 'subjects' fall down. There are no questions in Biology or Chemistry or Physics. All that there are, are questions about the universe. The disciplines are just categories of the answers that we have found and not of the questions themselves.
I am curious about everything in the universe. No question is taboo. My questions, my curiosity does not belong to any of the narrow, artificial divisions. It belongs only to the universe, in its entirety.
I am not stopping until I've found out everything that is to know about this universe. I am not stopping until I discover all the rules of the game of the universe. Are you?
References:
Suicide or Murder? | The Blind Banker | Sherlock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PKr_BVo4hg
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ReplyDeleteदादा, तू दिलेली 'The Universe Is A Game' ही analogy पटली, पण in the case of the rules of the universe, how can we actually make sure that the rules we've found out are the actual ones? The rules we've just discovered is how it actually, really works in the universe? Here, in this game, we could make sure because we had the option to ask those people. But what about when no one knows about your question or your answer, or basically, your rule?
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