Category: hobbies

I read this article today about how more and more students are using ChatGPT or some kind of AI to write term papers. The title gives you a clue what the author’s opinion of it: “AI Chatbots could be making you stupider.”

For about the last 3 years I’ve been writing about how AI is not the greatest thing, in fact both Sena and I say it should be “dislodged.” It won’t be, so we need to keep our brains limber. Hey, we exercise our bodies. There are ways to exercise our brains and some of them can be fun.

For example, we regularly play cribbage and there are variations of the game that make scoring more challenging.

Sena regularly says that 6 card cribbage as typically played in tournaments sponsored by the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) is too easy those who participate in them. I think that might be an overstatement, but there’s no doubt a lot of variants make you think harder about scoring, what cards to throw to the crib, and how to think your way through the pegging phase.

Take 9 card cribbage for example—please! I almost hate this game because the hand and crib scores are often too hard to count. You have to resort to using a computer scorer that, so far, you can find in only one place and it’s the Reddit site where you also can find the rules of the game. It’s not hard to play because you follow the basic rules of 6 card cribbage. It’s just mind-bendingly difficult to score most of the time.

You can check out our YouTube video of 9 card cribbage for the Cribbage Wars game if you like, which took hours (no, days) to put together because of the scoring complexity.

I still can’t get over the fact that Sena got a 29-hand playing 6 card cribbage on Cribbage Wars a while back and we never even recognized it until days later. The context of playing 6 card cribbage on a Cribbage Wars game board somehow made us oblivious to seeing the 29-hand right in front of us. Most people never see it because the odds of getting it are 1 in 216,580.

I realize playing cribbage isn’t the same as writing term papers, but it’s still good for your brain. Some think people are still better than AI at playing cribbage.

There is a computer player called Brutal on a computer version of cribbage called Cribbage Pro. I got a 28-hand playing Brutal once. Google Gemini calls this an AI player and says, while Brutal uses algorithms and statistics, it can falter when facing the psychological tactics used by humans.

Google Gemini summary and a video of a Cribbage Pro game using ChatGPT:

• “AI Performance: High-level AI, such as that in the CribbagePro app, is very competitive, with top human players only beating the hardest bot 55% to 60% of the time.
• Techniques Used: AI in cribbage uses a combination of techniques, including reinforcement learning and minimax algorithms, focusing on maximizing scores in both the discarding and pegging phases.
• Challenges: While analyzing the best cards to discard is a “static” problem, teaching an AI to excel at the “pegging” (card play) phase is harder, as it requires anticipating opponents’ moves.
• Vision Technology: Recent developments include using AI for real-time computer vision, such as apps that use machine learning to identify and score physical cards on a table. 

While AI is capable of playing, it often focuses on statistical optimization rather than the psychological aspects of the game used by human players.”