SciShow Tangents - Play

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

This month on SciShow Tangents, we're celebrating the sense of childlike wonder present in science by discussing a bunch of stuff kids like! We're calling it Kids Month, naturally, and we're kicking it off by talking about a thing all kids (and lots of animals) love to do: play! And if you know a kid who loves science, have we go the show for you! It's called SciShow Kids, and it has all the great, rigorously-researched content you expect from SciShow, but for kids! Plus, it has puppets! Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/scishowkids!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsto find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley, Tom Mosner, Daisy Whitfield, and Allison Owen for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive Science Knowledge Showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me as always this week is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. I would like to give you both a suggestion. Oh, no. And that is to renew your driver's license before it expires. Oh. That's a great suggestion. I don't want to be without a driver's license. Yeah, it's somewhat that. And it is also that apparently the company that handles your international business compliance regulations will notice that your driver's license is expired

and then they will need you to send them your social security card, which you do not have. You don't have your social security card? I thought I did. When was the last time I looked at it, though? Ten years ago? So I went to the folder that has it in there, and there's Catherine's. I lost mine in the dorms of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which seems really bad, but it's in there somewhere. Yeah, artists are notorious identity thieves it could be someone being doing nice things with my identity perhaps yeah sometimes

yeah it's just like getting real weird yeah what's the weirdest identity theft that you could do you just get a call one day from nasa and they're like so we've accepted your application yeah that would be a good one. You're going to space. Yeah. I mean, paying off all your loans. Oh, that'd be amazing. That's not weird. That's just nice.

Yeah. It's pretty weird. There's not really a lot you can do with just your social security number, is there? I don't know. I think that they're more careful about it now than they used to be because all information is available to anyone everywhere.

Everybody was getting signed up to be astronauts, so they had to crack down. It was a real problem. Well, that's too bad, Hank. My brother and my dad went on a trip and my brother didn't renew his driver's license and he was getting on a plane or something and they were like, hey, your driver's license is expired. You're in trouble. And my dad got really mad at him and started yelling at him and then he handed him his driver's license and they said your driver's license is also expired you're also in trouble is your driver's license expired do you learn from that story it probably is very

close to expired is every seven years in montana it's like 10 i think okay i mean i i'd had mine for so long i forgot that they expired oh my god it's just long enough that you're like i don't have to ever worry about this yeah i haven't had to worry because i've never lived in one place that long like every five years or so up and move again well or you could be like me and you move and you just don't update your driver that's what I also do. Yeah. I found my passport card so at least I can go to VidCon. That's good.

You could drive there. Oh, you can't because your driver's license is expired. I absolutely cannot. I need to get an Uber. Yeah. It'd be very expensive. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play.

At the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. For the whole month of July, we will be celebrating the childlike wonder present in science with a bunch of topics inspired by the sort of things that kids love, like dinosaurs and spaceships, things like that. Now, we're calling it Kids Month, but that does not mean that you shouldn't enjoy tangents with your kids necessarily, as we still will swear maybe sometimes and also definitely talk about horrible things. But something you can enjoy with your kids is our sister show, SciShow Kids on YouTube. It's like SciShow, but for early elementary kids. It's hosted by the lovely Jessie Knudsen Castaneda, who you may know from her channel Animal Wonders, and Anthony Brown, and also Squeaks the Robot Rat. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's kidsy topic

with the traditional science poem, This Week from Sam. The world can be a scary place for everyone, both man and beast. There's hate and war and violence, or you might just end up someone's feast. And it's easy to fixate on the bad, and important too in many cases, but it doesn't hurt to seek the joy that's evident in many places. Like countless YouTube videos of a kitten pouncing on a kid, or a raven sledding down a hill on a discarded yogurt lid, or dolphins leaping from the sea for no particularly important reason.

Or a dog bounding through piles of leaves on a bright chilly day in the autumn season. So fear and pain and hunger are felt by all creatures every day. But it's important, I think, to keep in mind another thing we all do is play. Play is the topic of the day's episode. Thank you, Sam, for your lovely poem and for reminding us play is the topic of the day's episode thank you sam for your lovely poem and for reminding us that despite the fact that every day i do experience all of those negative emotions we're all very sad maybe some days i might miss one of them but uh i should also hunger is pretty much always going to be there unless you eat really a lot of food the day before

sometimes i don't have hunger because i just eat all the time not a great way to do it uh but uh i i get to play quite a bit because of how i have a five-year-old and he forces it on everybody which is great i'm glad he does sari what is play this one you really gave me a hard we're starting off kids month with the one of the hardest definitions on tangents thus far. Do you want me to tell you what play is? Well, I have sources. I have literature. But yeah, what's play?

You know it when you see it. You and Sam should both define it. It's like... It's like... I got nothing. Well, you looked so confident. Yeah. What is wrong with you?

Do you know what play when you say, okay, you play with Oren. What does that look like? What's that play? Well, it's happy. It does not have a purpose. And we laugh, I guess. You don't have to laugh, though, I guess, for it to be play. I like the idea that you can play an instrument.

That's the verb for using an instrument is to play. Despite the fact that oftentimes it can be quite serious. But other times it can definitely be quite fun. Don't you think some people would say, like, play is really just training you to do, like, your, what's it called when you're hand-eye coordination? Or, like, to do things when you grow up right like combat yeah right right like that the lions play so that they can later kill yeah i mean sure maybe that's why we have the instinct but that's not what we experience when we perform the instinct so that's like i think that's the foundational knowledge upon which a lot of theories of play were built in the past few decades.

They were like, we got to connect play to some sort of survival instinct. But now we're finding more and more animals that aren't better at the things that the play is supposed to help them be better at. They don't get better. Mice that play fight aren't better at protecting themselves. They don't become warriors. Or otters that play with rocks and just kind of like toss them around aren't faster or better at cracking open shellfish. And so these constructs that we've created,

all these hypotheses that we've made that like, okay, play is just a training state. Like that's why it's evolutionarily in our brains to do is slowly being deconstructed. And more and more people are trying to explain why these spontaneous fun behaviors exist. we've moved on to like the mental health level of it of like play just helps you adapt to different scenarios and be resilient when things surprise you and like reduce stress and that is because of a lot of play in like social development like stages of play as children and like the way that adults and children play or that children play by themselves or with other kids. You can't do an unethical experiment where you're like,

you're not allowed to play child. But you can look at different ways that kids play and how they grow up and kind of guess conclusions. But I feel like this is one of the things where if they discover this episode in 100 years, they'll be like, they were so wrong. You fools. Yeah, you idiots. I hope so. Sari, I bet the word play doesn't have a very clear etymology. No, it doesn't. But it comes from a lot of like physical aspects. So I think in the way that play

is most immediately associated with like play a sport or like play tussle or I don't know, throw a stick around. That was the first definition of, you know, the very fun game of throw a stick. Stick throw. Is to like occupy oneself. So there's the Proto-Westermanic Plagojanon, which means to occupy oneself. And then Plagan in Old English meant to move lightly and quickly, amuse oneself, engage in active exercise. that you did you did a brisk activity and then you were playing uh probably because a lot of kids ran around and so it became like quick motion or exercise but then as the word evolved then play ended up being something to describe time something that you can stop and start and that's where like playing a role and playing an instrument and uh like playing a part all came from where play

as a word started being used in broader and broader contexts. And like in this episode, we're talking about play as like the fun thing because it's an episode about kids, but like as a verb, that's how it ended up in so many different contexts where we're just like, you move your body and you do a thing. So that's playing. You're playing. That's how it ended up in so many different contexts where we were just like, ah, you move your body and you do a thing. So that's playing. You're playing. That's playing. Okay. And that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show.

This week we're playing a little game called The Scientific Definition. So playing is fun. The only way to make it more fun is to spend a significant amount of your life studying, documenting, and describing how we play. In the process, scientists have come up with a very impressive set of words and phrases to define different kinds of play. So for today, we're going to be playing the play edition of the scientific definition. I'm going to give you a word, and you're going to have to try to define it, and whoever comes

closest to the actual definition is going to get a point. Okay. Do you understand? Yes. Yes. I do. Okay. Word number one we're

playing right now we are well no i'm too stressed to play i'm not happy to breathe i'm worried about a lot of things people people watching i might lose it might look silly the first word is thanatosis thanatosis a character on gargoyles but also from the play a midsummer's night's dream i think is he i don't know i believe sam you're so educated you're so well i learned about the gargoyles character before i learned about the shakespeare character i took the back way uh so i'm gonna guess it has something to do with acting uh or you you guess for a minute let me think about what thanatos did in that play okay thanatos to me and i don't know where this is coming from because it's not in in the persona video games it's tart, but I feel like Thanatos is like death.

Somewhere in my brain, the clouds of thought are overlapping where I'm like, it's like a death thing. It's a death thing. It's a death thing. It's like, it's a morbidity thing. And so I'm going to guess that Thanatos is like when a possum plays dead or when a snake plays dead to like, I'm dead.

Don't pay any attention to me. Oh, like X is for eyes. Uh, I'm really bad at myself. That sounds really good, but I'll just guess something different than what you said anyway. Cause I think you're right.

Uh, I'll go with long with my original train of thought. It's maybe like pretending to be a thing that you're not like a, like a, something pretending to be a snake that isn't a snake. Oh, and that is that a, uh, is that something that the gargoyle Thanatos did? No, I think in a snake that isn't a snake. Oh, and that, is that a, uh,

is that something that the gargoyle Thanatos did? No, I think in the, I don't, first of all, I'm really doubting that there's a Thanatos in either the Midsummer Night's Dream or gargoyles at this point. I think it's Xanatos.

And I think he's a different guy. So I was just going off of how they turned a guy into a dog. It is Xanatos. I remember Xanatos. He was like the main bad guy in producer. Yeah, he's like, he's Will Riker. Yes, he's Will Riker. And he likes to cosplay as a gargoyle.

There is Xanatos in Shakespeare as well. I think there's a Thanatos somewhere, but I think you're right about it being death. Anyway, Hank, humiliate me now, please. Sari is 100% correct. I knew it. That's exactly what it is. It's playing dead. It's done by a variety of organisms, mostly to avoid getting eaten.

And though sometimes it is done to avoid getting eaten by your mate, male nursery web spiders will present an insect to a female. And if she accepts, they will mate. If she doesn't he immediately is like i'm not don't worry about me just you didn't like my insect that that's not only the shame i feel is so deep i've died don't worry about me anymore because otherwise she will eat him is that why i think yes. Yes. Because of sexual cannibalism. What an extra horrible wrinkle that some animals have to deal with in that.

Yeah, really? I'm so glad we don't have that. The eastern hognose snake turns its belly up and lets its tongue hang out of its mouth and releases a bad-smelling liquid from some glands it has. So it's not like, I don't just look dead. I smell. I'm rotting. Like, you don't want anything to do with

this so thanatosis is a uh pretty pretty common thing in the animal kingdom uh it's it's interesting evidence of how animals have a concept of death maybe both for the animal playing dead and for the possible predators avoiding them so like they know that they know that that's something that's not alive or different from alive in some way and that's not a fun play either that's like i'm in moral danger yeah i'm gonna excrete my glands and pretend to be dead play yeah yeah yeah possums uh definitely also do this that's not a myth or anything possums totally play dead now on to the to continue the theme of gargoyles our second word is gargalesis wow oh yeah can anybody give me the scientific definition of gargalesis um okay gargling makes me think of

like gargling fluid rather than gargoyle i feel like the gargoyle is to throw us off or to throw me off specifically um i'm gonna say it's like when you're a kid or when you're an aquatic animal and you suck water into your mouth and you spray other people with it. Or you like blow a raspberry. Or an aquatic animal. Yeah. When you don't think about how gross it is, when you have no reason to think it's gross. But you like suck water in your mouth and you spit it out at someone or you like blow a raspberry.

So like any sort of like spit play is that yeah you know spit play that's very normal way to phrase it it just really hit me how much public pool water i've had in my mouth in my life and that was not a good idea ever it's wild to watch my son in the bath just put bath water in his mouth. And that's almost your own water. Stop! And he's like, I can't. Can't, Dad. Yeah, it's instinctual.

It's part of this evolutionary urge. And so now you can call it, Oren, stop gargling. Stop gargling. Well, you're both wrong, but Sari's definitely closer to the truth. It is a heavy, laughter-ari's definitely closer to the truth. It is a heavy, laughter-inducing tickling. Oh. So there's two kinds of tickling that were defined by G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allen in 1897.

Okay. They wrote papers including The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and The Comic. And the other kind of tickling is called kinesmesis and that's more of the like light tickling that's more irritating than like laughter inducing which you can do to yourself you can like do this and like i don't want to stop touching me that way yeah yeah uh whereas you kind of can't most people can't though apparently people with schizophrenia can tickle themselves um sometimes and we don't know why but uh we uh the the kind where you get tickled or tickled someone else and there's lots of like big giggles that's called gargalesis apparently apparently according to these yeah two guys who decided they would call it that

who i bet were really fun guys i mean they were into it um they were tickling a bunch of people kinasmesis is found across um many mammals but gargalesis is is very rare um and it may be that chimpanzees and other primates may experience it some research think that young rats emit like a high frequency vocalization uh when when fingers move across their back uh though it's not clear if this is related to gargalesis. So it's a weirdly specific-to-humans thing. It's not that much that we do that other animals don't do. Chins and gargalesis. Yeah.

And the internet, those three things. That's it. Also, the television program Gargoyles. The last word is two words it's a term i guess you would call it it is shannon's number what is shannon's number shannon's number definitely didn't i did not know what this was i'll tell you that interesting okay my first thought is like a seven degrees from Kevin Bacon, like your bacon number or something. But I don't know how that applies to play. I mean, that's a game, isn't it? Kind of. I don't know.

I can't get into Hank's head and see what counts as a game or not a game. To him, the whole world could be a game. Like the Joker. He's got a Joker mindset, you know? He's pulling the strings over here. Yeah. You have no idea. I feel like maybe it's... I'm actually Elon Musk. Oh, no. All the time. You've been causing all this chaos on Twitter.

Yeah. It's your fault. Yeah. You thought that was a real guy? Yeah. Ha! He's just another book character. Oh.

he's just another book character I think I'm feeling sports for some reason I think it's like a spread of some sort of like it's baseball I'm gonna say it's baseball it's a baseball spread yeah whatever that means is what it is it's definitely a game

there you have that so you both are very non-specific but i'm just going to cut you off so we've got something to do with uh some kind of relation to other people through a person named shannon and we've got something to do with a baseball it's basically to do with a baseball which baseball the game does have to do with a baseball, which baseball the game does have to do with baseball the ball. And that one's going to go to Sam because it is an actual game and it is a number about a game. That is a game that people play. But the game is chess.

Ah, very different. Very different, but closer than I think the Kevin Bacon game. Yeah. And it is the number of possible moves in a chess game. So how many different ways a chess game could go. And it was based on the work of an American mathematician, Claude Shannon, who wrote a 1950 paper, basically making the argument that you cannot create a computer program that could beat a person at chess. that you cannot create a computer program that could beat a person at chess because there's no way that you could, like the computer program could predict

the total number of potential moves in a chess game. And so calculated that number, which is 10 to the 120th power, which is going to seem like, I don't know, that might be big, that might be small. It's very big. The number of atoms in the universe is 10 to the 80th. Oh, dear.

It's much, much bigger than that. I was going to say, it seemed like a pretty small number to me. Big. It's a big number. It's, you know, it's one with 120 zeros behind it. And that's going to be a tricky one for a computer to figure out. But artificial intelligence solved that problem. And Shannon, it turns out, was wrong.

There are, in the game of Go, 10 to the 170 possible moves. So that's even another way, way beyond chess. Where are computers at with that one? Totally better than people. One, not computers, but one particular computer Totally better than people. Ah, yeah. One, not computers, but one particular computer. Sorry, Shannon. Sorry, Shannon.

I guess you're gonna have to live with that. Probably not, because you're probably dead by now. Roll over in your grave, Shannon. You were wrong about math. I hope that none of his, like, loved ones are listening. Well, good work, everybody.

Sari got two of those, and Sam got one. Next, we're going to take a short break, then we'll be back for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. Get ready for the fact-off. Panelists have brought science facts to present to me

in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they have presented their facts, I will judge those facts and award Hank Bucks to the one that I think will make the best TikTok. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Let me read it to you. We just talked about the Shannon number. Claude Shannon assumed that a typical chess game,

to get that number, he assumed that it would be about 40 moves. So that's the average number of moves in a chess game, being conservative. But games can go longer than that, much longer. How long was the longest game of professional chess? Question of clarification. Yes, sir. This says 40 moves per player. Are we guessing per player or total games? You are right.

Per player. I feel like 40 moves per player feels low to me. That feels high to me. I get beat way faster than that, I think. Oh. I just... Okay. Maybe I play against equally bad. Maybe you're really beat way faster than that, I think. Oh. Yes. Okay. Maybe I play against equally bad. Maybe you're really good at chess. No, I'm horrible at chess.

I think I've only played against my dad, and we're both bad. The longest game of chess was 500 moves per player. Oh. So 1,000 total moves. I was going to guess. Okay, you have now changed my expectations once more. Well, I didn't know. I don't know anything.

I'm going to guess 150 moves per person. I think that, ooh, who wins that? Sari wins. It's 269 moves, I think, per player, though it doesn't say in the show notes. So either way, Sari wins. The game was played in Belgrade in 1989. It was played by two Serbian players.

The total game lasted 20 hours and 15 minutes, and it ended in a draw. They just gave, they fell asleep. They must have like i'm so done now i don't even want to play against you anymore yeah i mean like what they kind of must have just been chasing each other around the board what do you even do yeah you're not good enough to like trap your other person in some clever way chess players we're really good at the beginning part of the game uh-huh and then everyone's got queens

and so you're just like moving and moving yeah yeah sari that means you get to go first or if you want to um sure i'll go first so howler monkeys are known for their distinct fur colors loud raspy roars and for being pretty lackadaisical resting for about half the time they are awake they live in trees, mostly in South America, and are herbivores that eat the leaves around them. And primates aren't the best at digesting leaves, even with specialized digestive enzymes, so it's been commonly assumed that howler monkeys' not-so-nutritious diet means they don't have an abundance of energy, which is tied to their lazy behavior. Sometimes, though, they spend some of that energy playing with each other,

doing classic cartoon monkey things like hanging from their tails or making funny faces. And a big question in any kind of play research is, why would you waste your precious leaf energy doing all that? A paper published in April 2022 in the journal Animal Behavior attempted to find some answers by studying seven groups of two subspecies of howler monkeys. There were some hinted at developmental reasons where adult monkeys would play with juveniles, especially in big groups.

But the most unusual thing these researchers found was that adult howler monkeys would play with other adults most often when they were going on a special foraging trip for fruit. And fruits are a fairly rare and high value food in the treetops because they're full of sugar and easily digestible. And howler monkeys surprisingly don't really fight over it. Even for a social animal, that's a little weird given that they don't have

a social hierarchy like some other primates for who gets to eat the fruit. And they don't use more well-studied kinds of primate social bonding like grooming each other to like get close and share maybe because they're too busy napping to groom each other i don't know uh that wasn't in the paper that was my speculation so instead these researchers supposed that play like making silly faces at each other helps diffuse tension when one monkey finds a really good fruit kind of like someone cracking a joke to break the tension at an awkward dinner howler monkey adults could just play around to keep each other from getting stressed out or getting too grumpy at each other fighting over a delicious fruit prize so play is still incredibly mysterious and nuanced but this is another grain

of evidence that it might have to do with just coping with the world and what it throws at you and i guess the lesson is that when you're feeling a little grumpy because you didn't get a yummy fruit just do a little goof and then it might help yeah so who gets to eat it just whoever found it i think so i don't know i'm eating this but don't worry i'm gonna make a silly face say, you won't be mad at me. Okay. Yeah. Just does this work on people? So if I'm having a disagreement with my wife, can I just make a little goofy face? Or if you find a buried treasure in your life.

If I find a buried... What do people want? Probably buried treasure. Yeah. Yeah. So if you find a buried treasure and you're like competing with your arch rival obviously john to get to the buried treasure you both arrive there you arrive there first you're hoisting the chest above your head yeah make a heart definitely can't do by the way okay you're hoisting like a really

a really crappy yeah just nothing good in there. It's a blanket! Pillows, too! You've picked up one gold doubloon and you're flipping it in the air luxuriously. Which is plenty. Yeah, which is plenty. You should make a fart joke

and then maybe he'll be like, ah, man, you deserve that. I can't say I'm mad at you. I can't say I'm mad at you. That's the monkey's whole ethos in life. I can't say I'm mad at you. Yeah can't say I'm mad at you. That's the monkey's whole ethos on life. I can't say I'm mad at you. Yeah. I like that.

Sam, what do you got? Of all mankind's inventions, video games are surely one of the finest. They're just a joy to play. But what about animals? Don't you think that bird eating bugs outside your window or the cat sleeping at your feet would rather be performing triple jumps and butt stomps with our friend Super Mario? Well, some scientists thought that and they did something about it too.

Scientists at Purdue University Center for Animal Welfare Science released a paper last year which was the result of studies of pigs playing video games going back to the early 1990s. And these pigs got pretty good at video games for animals with no hands so the team set up a computer and a heavy duty joystick in a pig pin and trained four pigs hamlet omelet ebony and ivory to approach the machine and manipulate a joystick with their mouths and snouts to play a game which was originally designed for chimpanzee

research and the goal of the game was to guide a dot into a little goal area, and the goal would like move between rounds once you got it in there. When they'd hit the goal, a dispenser would give them some dog food, which, okay, maybe that's not so much playing exactly, but isn't the serotonin that humans get from playing video games sort of like microscopic dog food for the brain plus the research pointed out that there were times when the dispenser would malfunction and not give any food but the pigs still kept playing the game anyway so after about four months the pigs were first of all super excited to wake up every day and go play the game they would like wait by the gate and like be really happy but they were also performing above how they would have performed if

they were just making random movements so that showed that pigs had the motor skills and the ability to recognize that what they were doing by moving the stick was affecting the thing on screen the best pig player was hitting the goal 76 percent of the time though overall they weren't as good at gaming as monkeys from another study but they were much better than this dog that I found footage of who was trying to play a game. And they had tried to teach the dog the game for a whole year, and the dog still could not figure out how to play the game. Was it the same game? Doing better than the dog.

The dot game? It was the same game, yeah. Okay. And the dog was just like, he looked so sad. He was just like, I don't know how to do this. I'll lick your face. Should I lick your face? But you may be asking, why are they doing this?

A little bit. The researchers were interested in animal welfare because they were from the Purdue University. That's what was in the name. This is right in there in the name. So they were using games to test the pigs' intelligence and self-agency, which in turn would help us figure out how we should be treating pigs and how to make them more comfortable related studies showed that pigs could also use climate control devices and lights installed in their pens and one weird conclusion of the study the researchers suggested that they would look into if animals could learn how to use touch screens to communicate which if animals are

using touch screens i feel like that is one of the points at which we should say we can't eat this animal anymore yeah so in conclusion we may be approaching a future in which when you get killed in fortnight you might hear oinking coming from the other party mouth the the fact that came to my mind when you were talking about this was that um in the first air force one which uh was richard nixon's air force one i think i don't know from not for sure that this is you're not a president guy you're a science guy yeah that uh he always complained about it being the wrong temperature. And so he would say, can you turn the heat up or can you turn the cool on?

And eventually they installed a thermostat so that he could control it himself, except it didn't do anything. What a rude fact about Richard Nixon in this context. Well, it made me think, like, if the pigs can control their own climate, like, I can't eat them because they are as advanced as Richard Nixon. I thought you were implying that. Just give them a little thermostat. Don't let them control the temperature.

And they'll just go over to it. They're doing it. They're like, God dang it. I turned it all the way down i'm still quite warm yeah oink oink yeah we gotta get these boys a touch screen so that we can move away move we have to i think it was disturbing i was watching there's lots there's videos of these pigs and they're like having a hell of a time playing this little arcade game so sari came into that with a one point lead and i think that sam made it back because i want to tell tiktok about these pigs there's videos too

it's cute i can film the video with my camera that's's how they like it on TikTok. They're like, don't import footage. That's work. Just film your screen. That's so weird. Those monsters. What are you guys doing over there? It doesn't seem authentic if you edit it. That's how it works.

Well, congratulations, Sam. Thank you. Also, I think that we should all be eating less pigs, including me. I have an important lesson in mind. We're going to make that case for the world. Alright, that means it's time to ask the science couch where we've got to ask a listener question to our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. This question is from Drungus Prophet on Discord, apparently. What is the most complicated game and why is it Magic the Gathering?

We just talked about the Shannon number of Go and how it's, so you could sort of count it as like the Shannon number, which is how, like as an actual sort of objective metric of complexity, there's one to the 170th potential moves. That's pretty complicated. But is there another way to think about this? Yeah, I think that is how a lot of mathematicians think about complexity.

So in mathematics and computer science, to my understanding, so this is not my field, I'm going to do my best. my best uh complexity is how difficult is it to look at a game board and see how many potential moves are left and from and also like potentially guess a winner like go to a win state and so when you're studying the complexity of a game like magic you have to take into account like the deck order the number of different cards you can pick from to put in those decks, and the ways that games can play. And decisions can be made if a computer were to play Magic and how many outcomes. Because it's not just the card you play, it's how you use the card and how also cards can be interacted and affected by other cards, which might get, you know, you get some exponentiality going on there. Yep, yeah. And like what happens when you discard a card

or what happens when like a card has you draw two more, like there are so many effects interwoven in a game like Magic and they just have created so many freaking cards. Right, yeah. It definitely, it's definitely closer to the most complicated game if you can play with illegal decks yeah which which uh increases the number of of playable

cards by a lot yeah so so that's their definition that's the mathematical definition of complexity is like can you plug it into a computer and brute force your way to a win condition by like playing through those those qualities so so that's the complexity as far as like mathematics and computer science and based on that definition of complexity a couple of nerds did the math and were like how complex is magic oh with magic specific with magic specifically. With magic specifically, yes. And so it's published on Archive, which is like the public domain. Open. Open source.

Yeah. Not necessarily peer reviewed, just submitted, but still quite rigorous. And they determined that magic, the gathering, And they determined that magic, the gathering, it is impossible to just brute force your way to predict who's going to win a game of magic by looking at a deck of cards and the layout. There are too many decisions to make, which is different than can you train an AI to play magic, which you can. Sure. Because that's based on probability rather than at some point you hit a threshold where there's a better decision or a worse decision.

And it's different from how long the rulebook is. And the way that they defined this was in the context of Turing machines. And this is where my computer science knowledge gets a little wibbly, but I'll try my best. And Sam, call me out if something's too confusing. Prude. I thought you were going to be like, call me out if something's too confusing. Crude.

I thought you were going to be like, if I get something wrong about it. Oh, yeah, if I get something wrong about Turing X. And I was going to say, I don't know shit about that. So Turing machines, in my understanding of them, this is like old knowledge plus rapid Googling. It's not a real computer. It's like a theoretical computer. It's like a theoretical computer.

It is the simplest possible thing that you could compute where it's just one symbol after another, after another. So a lot of visualizations, it's like a ticker tape of ones and zeros. Like hypothetically through a long sequence, through an infinitely long sequence, this like strip of paper can do everything that your laptop or like the computer in front of you is calculating right now like you can brute force

any calculation and no one actually builds them because they're not useful to build it is useful as a thought experiment for computer scientists and mathematicians because it it says that if you have a long enough string of numbers and a long enough thing like referring to each other, then you can do computations. And you can compare the length of the piece of paper for different situations. Yeah. And so based on that definition, these computer scientists said that you could create a Turing machine out of magic cards. Like you could line up a sequence of magic cards that are mapped to something else. And then like, there are enough functions within the cards where it's like, go look at this one. This one does 30 damage. This is that you can create a rudimentary computer to create calculations like do calculations

with magic cards what i'm gathering from this sari is that yes please translate it to another word magic the gathering is complex uh whether it is the most complicated game we i don't think that they did this for other games so we can't really say but definitely is a complicated game and we need these computer scientists to do this to Uno and Chess and Settlers of Catan and tell me which one is the most complicated game

or maybe, question asker maybe it's your job maybe Drungus Prophet on Discord needs to do these calculations if you want to ask the science couch your question you can follow us on Twitter Maybe Drungus Profit on Discord needs to do these calculations. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to AtTheBlackLight, AtQuillAndBean, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode.

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And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Unsurprisingly, there's not a rich historical record of poop-centric games. But at least in recent decades, people have held cow chip throwing competitions where contestants throw big dried discs of cow poop as far as possible. The Guinness World Record holder is Steve Werner, who threw a cow chip 266 feet, or 81.1 meters, on August 14th, 1981. If you're going for a Guinness World Record, I bet that's one that might not be too hard to take on. No, don't take this away from Steve. You know that people are still buying him beers off of that, right?

Someone can do it. Someone who's listening to this podcast right now, I bet you're strong enough and have the technique to throw a disc of cow poop. Find some cow poop and start throwing, guys. Come on.