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Comment by sfkgtbor | Hacker News Reader

I really like seeing references to the Culture series when naming things:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games

Allusions are fun and all, but I disagree. These are important problems that a lot of people have put their whole careers into researching. Silly names like these lack gravitas.

If anything the caliber and lore of the series gives the project an incredible amount of gravitas. Plus the scheme is just plain beautiful in my opinion.

You may find this Iain Banks interview enjoyable. TLDR search for "gravitas" ;-)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/11/iainbanks-scie...

Brilliant. "Absolutely No You-No-What" is fantastic.

Nothing can top "Ultimate Ship the Second".

My favorite is Eschatologist (temporary name) lolololol

Always sad to see these projects suffer from A Shortfall of Gravitas

I see what you did there :-)

Gravitas? What Gravitas?

Indeed they would do well To Consider The Lack Of Gravitas.

Very little Gravitas Indeed.

Ah so its __you__ that took that one

Sorry, to explain the joke. The ships name themselves, and when they pick jokey names they're often mocked by the humans (which are in every way essentially ants to the spaceships) for not having enough gravitas. So the ships start naming themeselves things like the "Death-ray 9000 super-killer deluxe", to essentially take the piss.

Funnily enough you can see the exact same effect in principal game-engineers or computer-hacking.

I believe the user you are replying to was also joking, given that many of Banks' ship names reference the g-word

Edit: if not that's even more amusing

I'll make a minor contribution to the discussion by mentioning the Culture ship normally referred to as the Mistake Not..., which is shorthand for

"Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath".

Unsure if this name is also a sarcastic stab that the lack of gravitas in ships' names, but regardless it's very sad that Banks died young :(

Yeah, it's making fun of the human desire for gravitas when it comes to ship names, since it's just exponentially more and more over the top.

indeed

I suppose it's better than "Use of Weapons".

Why not have a seat, take that chair over there.

One of the best, and executed to perfection! You can sort-of-see the point coming for a long, long time in the book, as he gradually builds the suspicion by dropping the occasional hint here and there, but it's always so that it must remain a highly uncertain speculation until he drops the reveal. Just the right balance between "How should I have suspected that?" and "Those hints were too much on the nose!".

Its such a crime - of war and all else, its like a blindspot of imagination. That a man would do such a thing - to what is essentially family, as tactics.. the horror..

I think it is also a reference to "PogChamp", although it's disappointing that PoG apparently wasn't evaluated against the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) corpus of Atari 2600 games.

much more refined to think a spam of "POG!" stands for Player of Games when reading twitch chat

Banks should have named one of Culture's General System Vehicles 'Don't be Evil'.

https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft

Kinda ironic since in the novel, a human player is better than the strong AI (albeit a little inexplicably).

I thought the protagonist wasn't nearly as talented as the culture AIs (even the ones that are not all that powerful)?

I don't think a full Culture Mind is present but he outstrips his spacecraft's ability to help him with preparation in later stages of the competition. I clearly remember this.

At least that is what the ship (SC) wants him to think.

Indeed. (spoiler following) The plot basically revolves around SC manipulating both Gurgeh and the Empire of Azad in an ever bigger and complex game than the one in the book. Given how Banks describes the Minds in other books it would be extremely curious if they wouldn't crush any biological player in any normal game the same way chess computers crush humans these days. But, it is possible that a more limited mind like the security drone could be outstripped by Gurgeh. In one of the other books they do mention that "smaller" machines like environmental suits and small drones get more limited minds than full starships as it would be cruel to put a fully capable Mind in such a limited body.

How did I miss this plot point? It's been a while, but I remember focusing on the game Gurgeh played. Maybe I just don't remember it now.

The last page of the book gives it away: (MASSIVE SPOILER OBV) The security drone who came with Gurgeh to Azad was the same drone he meets during the introduction chapters who was "rejected" from SC and offers to let him cheat (though it was wearing a disguise at the time). Then, after he cheats he basically gets blackmailed into going to Azad and conveniently this "non-SC" drone comes with him in a very "non-SC" ship that claims to have its weapons removed but doesn't. At some crucial points the security drone influences Gurgeh to play the best he can, such as when he takes him on a tour of the slums and the Culture-educated Gurgeh gets so furious at the mistreatment he witnesses that he absolutely crushes his opponent in the next match.

They mention in one of the final chapters that the minds wanted the Azad empire to become a better place since it was really shitty to its citizens. However, they couldn't just invade and impose laws because they're the Culture, and the Azad empire kept claiming moral superiority because they had this one thing (the Game) that they thought the Culture couldn't match. The Minds knew Gurgeh was talented enough to get far enough in the tournament that the Azad Empire would be seriously shaken, because if this single foreigner can beat so many of the best and brightest in the Empire at the thing it claims to do best then what could the entire Culture do? This turns out to have been correct, at the end of the book the Azad empire starts to collapse because they no longer trust their leadership, who have been proven to be incompetent at the very thing they claim to do best. Beaten by a human btw, not even by one of the god-machines that the Culture also has. Having predicted that this would happen, the Minds set out to manipulate Gurgeh into going to Azad to play the Game and by doing so bring about regime change. The Minds and/or SC were playing a much higher level game than Gurgeh all along, he was merely one of the pieces they used to play.

Ahh, thank you! Now that you recount it, it all comes back to me. I should read more Banks, he's a fantastic writer.

Yes, at the end you start to question just who the player of games actually was.

that was a beautiful feeling after completing the book: who has been played here? i, the reader, certainly was.

Is that clear from the text? Gurgeh supposedly perceives the result of the last game before the AIs so we’re led to believe he’s seeing deeper. Obviously he could have been wrong and still won. The AIs lied to and manipulated him the entire time so it’s hard to know, but it would seem a very odd weakness for an AI to have. I think Banks pretty quickly recanted on the subject of the Culture’s ‘referrers’ but I don’t think he plays a full Mind, so it’s not a clear cut conversation.

My recollection is that by the end of the novel its clear that Gurgeh was never competitive with the ship, although he might have been competitive with his security drone (although even that isn't clear, since <spoilers> imply that the security drone is a better game player than it pretends to be).

To me it felt like the whole point of the novel was that Gurgeh was a piece in an even larger game and he didn't even realize it. So the idea that the people playing the "bigger" game couldn't compete in the smaller game seems silly, and I think they mention that they used Gurgeh instead of an AI to make it appear fair to the inhabitants of the planet.

Yeah, I thought it was clear from the beginning of the book that no humans were even remotely competitive with any AI (including the main character) but that human game players were sort of an aesthetic throwback, like dog-racing in an era of F1 cars.

This was my understanding as well, but I might have read into it. The culture minds are in freaking hyperspace to get around lightspeed limitations on computations. He for sure can't beat that, but he could beat someone on another planet at their own game that he literally just learned in the year it took to get there. A game that permeates every aspect of their civilization.

I do assume his drone could beat him as well, but I'm not sure.

One of the reasons that Contact (and Special Circumstances) have (some) humans[] around is for intuitive leaps. I can't say I recall which Culture book this is mentioned in, but it is, in one of them.

[] let's go with "human" as a general term for Culture biological citizens, it is probably a bit incorrect, but gets the point across.

The 'referers' are in Consider Phlebas, a small group of humans among trillions who are able to reliably predict the future better than Minds. This would be one argument in Gurgeh's favour, but Banks later admitted how flimsy the idea was.

I agree with you that Gurgeh was just a piece getting manipulated and that that was the point, but Gurgeh was still the best piece that they could use for the job.

The Culture is (in this story) pretty much only bound by their own constraints. They chose Gurgeh for the role, since he had enough skill and talent to actually be able to accomplish the Culture's (or the SC's, winkwink) objectives without having the whole thing being taken over by an AI.

The Culture worked very much like the PoG this thread is about: it minimised potential loss and considered the constraints it had to get the best possible outcome.

The Culture is mostly constrained by only ethical rules, which, admittedly, can get flexible, especially with regards to the SC. The practical restrictions, like it being easier to send one capable human than to conquer a small galaxy, are in my mind lesser in comparison.

As such, I think they got the most out of the operation, just by being confident in their assessment of a single human who played games good. And there's absolutely no reason to believe that the overminds that guide the Culture can't model human behaviour down to the smallest variable, especially considering how augmented humans are in the Culture.

I'm also 100% onboard the idea that all the drones could outplay Gurgeh in a blink in any game, intuition be damned.

A non-drone player was necessary, as Azad would never have acknowledged defeat by a drone. But, defeat by a human accomplished the Culture's goal and Gurgeh was the best bet (or at least the best available one) on the desired outcome.

I see their selection as mostly being about Gurgeh having enough pride to accept the small cheat, coupled with enough skill to not actually need the AI assistance. It's been a while since I read TPoG last, but my recollection is that there were a handful of players at essentially the same level as Gurgeh and from a pure skill and intuition level, I suspect any of them would have worked, but only Gurgeh fell for the entrapment.

Remember the "ambassador" aka Zakalwe? They had boots on the ground and even set up interactions to prevent him getting to friendly/embedded with the "host" culture.

The whole thing was about to blow up anyway, so they brought in the Player of Games, to do it in a style that would prevent any recovery. Gurgeh was not there to defeat the empire, he was there to defeat the whole idea of the game being "holy".

He was the Jesse Owen shipped to hitlers olympics.

Yeah, of course the culture could just obliterate the empire militarily. I think only a few civilizations (pre ascension) could hold their own for awhile.

You bring up a good point about shattering the view of the game though.

No he is not, but AIs are not allowed in the competition the story centers around.

Near the end of the competition, as he is deep in his analysis, the light craft AI gives up on helping him since it gets overwhelmed. Granted it's not a full Culture Mind (kinda hazy, been a while) but still a point for the meatbag.

I think the main character can be so strong at the game by the end because of his immersion in Empire culture. The ships AI would likely be at least as strong with the same experiences. Plus, as you mention, the ships AI is not smartest AI around.

I always interpreted the end reveal as showing that control was highly confident of both the outcome of the game and of how Gurgeh got to that outcome.

It's been a while but I am pretty sure that the ship lied when saying that it got overwhelmed and did so only because it was confident he was on the right path but needed to get there in a specific way which wouldn't have worked quite the same if the ship intervened

Yep, basically the nebulous, unknown minds of Control predicted the main character would win, and set up as many conditions as possible to push him to do so. Including bluffing about help from the AI.

It was part of an even bigger game but I'm not going to get into spoilers.

Yeah, he wouldn't have reached such a good solution with help, and that was also originally taken into account by the Culture when they sent him out in the first place, since they knew him that thoroughly.

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