Games and board games have been around since ancient times. They can be found on almost every continent and have diversified in their form and amount of play over time. The oldest recorded board game is a simple game called Senet, which dates back to about 4500 BC. Kodan Tonic is another ancient board game that is believed to have been played as far back as 7750 BC. Throughout the years, there has been a massive amount of research into the reasons for people playing games, how it affects their minds, how it can be used to treat illnesses and even how it can be used in the workplace. Take a look at these 5 unconventional knowledge about games that you can’t learn from books!
5 Unconventional Knowledge About Games That You Can’t Learn From Books :
1. In 1891, Franz Reuleaux invented the first 4-bit adder.
Remember when you were in school, and you had to learn how to add numbers in your head? Well, a lot of people actually use calculators instead of their math skills these days. However, a German engineer named Franz Reuleaux invented the first 4-bit adder in 1891 and later on published a scientific paper on it.
The very same paper that he published is still considered relevant to this day by mathematicians. It’s not just the use of calculators that has changed since then; the society itself has changed significantly, so it is important to note that even basic arithmetic remains useful for some professions today.
2. In 1914, William Higinbotham happened upon the idea of using shuffling as a way to analyze a game.
William Higinbotham was an American mathematician and statistician who lived in the early 20th century. He made some interesting discoveries regarding strategy games like chess, go and poker and found out how they could be analyzed in an unconventional way. He came up with the idea of using shuffling to analyze the game in an unconventional way, which is one of many approaches that would later be used throughout history to solve problems related to numbers, statistics and probability. He was also one of the first people to work on developing more complete mathematical tools for casinos, which would have far-reaching effects throughout history.
3. In the 1960s, the Manhattan Project played games at lunch to help them solve problems.
If you’ve ever seen the movie The Imitation Game, then you probably know how important Alan Turing was to solving complex mathematics problems. However, one of his lesser known contributions also deals with games – he was a part of an elite team that worked on cracking German encryption codes in World War II.
If a machine couldn’t solve an encryption problem, it would be fed into a computer and the best minds in America would try and solve this problem through mathematical means. These mathematicians focused on using unconventional ways to find solutions that can be easily represented by this equation: G = A (equation). The Manhattan Project is the creation of the atomic bomb and it is widely believed that without this, World War II would have been far more violent.
4. In 1971, Claude Shannon published his paper on the ‘Winning Poker Hands’.
If you’ve ever played any kind of poker game at all, then you probably played with a strategy known as ‘poker-stealing’. It involves trying to win by putting your cards face down on top of other people’s cards so that they don’t notice that you are taking their money away from them. A lot of people know about poker-stealing, but not many people know about the game theory that went into Henry Edward.
This is one of the most refreshingly creative ideas in all of game theory because it completely ignores the old school factor of randomness, which was dominant in games like poker. Claude Shannon didn’t think that playing a game with randomness involved would be very interesting, and his thought process when he came up with this strategy was as follows: “I’m going to show you some interesting things about combination poker hands. I’ll show you what combinations are most likely to get you money. But I’m not going to tell you how to play your hand. I’m not going to tell you when to bluff. I’m just going to tell you how it works.
5. In 1990, IBM created a board game called ‘Twisters’ with the goal of creating more productive employees.
Whenever you are working on a problem, it is very easy to let yourself get distracted by all of the busy work that you have to do just so that you can make progress on your goals. To combat this, IBM decided to turn their employees into board game players and tasked them with coming up with their own board games using the company’s newest technology – software. This new way of working led their employees to actually make more progress in a shorter amount of time than if they had been doing work manually in an office setting.
