How to Win Every Game, with Marcus du Sautoy, Part Two
33:13 Share

Yeah, sure thing.

Hey, you sold that car yet? Yeah, sold it to Carvana. Oh, I thought you were selling to that guy. The guy who wanted to pay me in foreign currency, no interest over 36 months? Yeah, no. Carvana gave me an offer in minutes, picked it up and paid me on the spot. It was so convenient. Just like that? Yeah. No hassle? None. That is super convenient. Sell your car to Carvana and swap hassle for convenience. Pick up fees may apply.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash tech.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. For this episode we're rejoining for part two of our conversation with the mathematician Marcus de Sautoy. Marcus is professor of mathematics at Oxford University where he holds the prestigious Simone Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. His recent book is Around the World in 80 Games.

This is the second part of our two-part episode, How to Win Every Game, with Marcus de Soto. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed. Now it's time to rejoin the conversation, recorded recently at the Pleasance Theatre in London. Here's our host for the evening, science communicator Dr. Shini Samara. Let's talk about gender for a second, because you mention how men and women were sort of

different in the way they designed games and the way they play games. And you talked about Bridge. What did you discover? Yes, so I said that Phileas Fogg's game of choice was Wist. And Wist was a very silent game. And so it's a trick-taking game. Actually, the very early car games that appeared in history are probably dating back to India and are trick-taking games. But

Anyone who plays bridge here knows that the bidding round beforehand, which is a very verbal and it's a talkative round, you actually use it to tell your partner something about the cards in your hand. And there are all of these conventions.

And actually, Wist had this as well, but it was the way you played cards would indicate something about the cards in your hands to help your partner play. But there was a feeling like, well, you're wasting a lot of cards being laid down in communicating this information, which is why Wist grew into the game of bridge. They said, this is quite fun, this communicating game.

Some would say maybe you're cheating. I think we'll come to cheating because it's, but actually it was regarded as just a clever part of the game. But it was so much fun, the communicating of what you've got in your hand. And there were whole kind of schools, people meeting cafes in London to teach the way you could use cards as code. But people said this is too much fun, so let's have a round where you're actually speaking out aloud about how what you've got in your hand in coded way.

And it was at this point that Whist became, which used to be a very male-dominated game, suddenly Bridge saw a lot more women coming into playing the game. And it's said that Whist was just so quiet and silent and, you know, this is a terribly stereotypical... He likes to talk. But it seemed like, you know...

the fact that there was a side of talking round and everyone was allowed to sort of be social, which is a very important part of games, of course, the social side of games, that this actually drew more women in. But in modern day, what's also interesting is that the game developing world was very male dominated. And it was...

a lot of, most of the games are warfare or goblins and castles. But what we're seeing is a really interesting new movement of women developers. And they're bringing a very different style of game. They're not so interested necessarily. Of course, some women love playing war games as well. I'm not saying that. But actually, there's a really kind of nice...

development of new games coming from women game developers. One of the ones I really like,

it's called Wingspan. Has anyone really played Wingspan here? Yeah, great. Actually, Wingspan. It's wonderful because this is a woman who said she was holed up in a ski resort and the only games that there were to play were just war games. And she was like, I really don't want to play a war game. And so she developed, her passion was nature. And so she developed a game which is a real classic Euro game with sort of point scoring. But the idea is you collect

birds in a sanctuary and you have eggs, little eggs and it's a wonderful game partly because there are all of these expansions for different North America birds, the European birds, the Africa birds and it's a really beautiful game to play but just has a completely different story side to it so yeah I think the fact that more women are coming into game development is really bringing new styles of games

I really enjoyed how personal you got in this book. One thing that sticks out in my mind is when you talked about how you could literally play games with a piece of paper and a pencil, and you did that with your daughters. When you talked about taking games into schools and introducing mathematics through...

Yeah, there was also... Chilies and chocolate. Yeah, exactly. But the other one, which is quite... The personal story I tell about Dungeons & Dragons as well, that one Christmas, my mum loves fantasy. She writes fantasy novels. And she saw this new game, Dungeons & Dragons. And so...

We often had a game for the whole family at Christmas. And this year, we opened it up and there's this amazing looking box with dragons and knights and wizards and things. And we were so excited. And we open up the box and there's hardly anything in there. You know, it's like no board.

There were a few dice, I mean they were nice dice because they were very mathematical, you know, 20-sided dice and things like that, so I was getting off on those. But then there was this huge, great big document about the rules of Dungeons & Dragons. So I was assigned to be Dungeon Master and I had to go off. It was like I spent the whole Christmas as if I was doing some 20-day exam.

And I basically, I worked so hard and I put together this whole saga of Dungeons and Dragons for the family to play. And the three of them then chose their characters. And I found in the box, it was down in the cellar in my mum's house,

And there were still all of the choices that our family had made. And so my mum is quite, she lives down in Cornwall and she's kind of a wizard, basically, a heart. And so she, of course, had chosen to be a wizard. My dad was a knight, but my sister had chosen to be a dwarf. But it was the things that she decided to take with her because she had a bottle of Southern comfort.

and avocado and salmon sandwiches, which is like, it's so funny. Anyway, we played this game for an afternoon and the whole thing just ground to a halt and we just didn't really understand because I think when you play a game, you really need one person who really knows what they're doing and none of us knew really what we were doing. - Back to the India drunkenness snake thing again.

Well, it was a bit, yeah. She had a good time with us, I would come for her. But actually it was those kind of moral dilemma that we hit because they had this ogre that they were fighting and my mum used a kind of magic spell on the ogre and then it was put to sleep and then they cut off the ogre's head whilst it was asleep. And everyone just felt really bad.

"Have you done this?" "I don't think I really want to play this game anymore." So we stopped playing the game once his ogre had been sort of... - Wow, with family Christmases. I can't imagine.

My mum still plays games, and it's really important. So my dad died a few years ago, and she lives on her own in Cornwall. But she plays online games, and she doesn't really have any friends in Cornwall. But she has a load of online friends that she plays, kind of Dungeons & Dragons-type games. But, you know, she's part of some incredible tribe in Villages and Heroes or something. But she discovered...

She had this game that she was playing, she was like the head of this clan. And she got this message from Pedro who said, "I'm afraid Jose's not going to be able to join our battle this week or for some time actually." And my mum asked, "Yeah, why?" He said, "Well, I'm afraid Jose's gone to jail."

And my mum said, oh gosh, what? She says, oh, well, it basically transpired that the rest of this tribe were basically a Mexican drug cartel in Chicago. And they were using the game as a kind of, you know, light relief for actually where they were writing. My mum was head of this...

drug cartel running the whole thing from so yeah games kind of have interesting consequences that actually leads us nicely on to the subject of cheating my dad works in b2b marketing he came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.

Right now, up to 55% off your Babbel subscription at

Babbel.com slash Spotify podcast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Spotify podcast. Rules and restrictions may apply. Nerds! Listeners, as we go into a new year, we all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan, personal bets to crush in the gym, and capsule wardrobes to create. Good thing our sponsor, NerdWallet, is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products.

Introducing NerdWallet's 2025 Best of Awards list. Your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you. Researching and reviewing over 1,100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balanced transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that. Or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals? They've got a winner for that too. Know you're getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself.

So let NerdWallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of Awards at nerdwallet.com slash awards to find the best financial products today.

Cheating is an interesting part of a game, actually. And sometimes cheats, like in Wist, are introduced actually as part of the game. And it turned out there's a game called Truco, which is a card game. And people were-- it's, again, a sort of partner game. And you sort of want to indicate to your partner the cards that you have in your hand.

And there was a kind of, started to be sort of personal systems that were like you would wink and that meant you had the three of hearts, which is a very powerful card in that game. And then people would, oh, you're cheating because, and then people realized actually this is quite a fun part of the game is actually trying to indicate without the other pair

saying what you've got in the card. So often cheating is introduced actually as part of the game play. And now when you play Trucco, it's absolutely acceptable to use these signals to indicate what's in the game. Even Monopoly is another game where a lot of people cheat and they just rifle a few hundred pounds from the bank and things like that. Or

But monopoly realized this and there's now a cheat version of monopoly where sometimes you take a chance card and you have to achieve the cheat and by the end of the game which like Nixon money from the bank or Shorten the game. I think it makes it slightly more interesting exactly, but it can shorten the game but Actually, if you want to know how to shorten the game, which is to win it. Here's my little mathematical tip for you So what's the most visited square on the monopoly board?

Jail, exactly, because as I've already said, you can throw three doubles, you get to jail. You can visit jail. You can be sent to jail by the one opposite. Chance cards can send you to jail. But you can't buy jail, so that's not very useful. But then you say, well, okay, a lot of people are... Jail is visited three times more likely than any other square on the Monopoly board. But then if you throw two dice, what's the most common throw of two dice coming out of jail?

Well, it's six, seven, and eight because there are lots of ways to make those scores. I mean, seven is the most popular because you can do a six and a one, five and a two, four and a three, three and a four, two and a five, and a one and six. I mean, two is almost impossible. There's a one in 36 chance of that because each one has got to land on one.

So here's my strategy. That gets you into the orange region of property. So if you want to win Monopoly, buy up all of those orange regions of property, stack it with hotels, and then as everyone comes out of jail, you basically bankrupt them and win the game. So that's how I always try to win at Monopoly, in fact.

I love the way you say Monopoly causes family unrest, because that is exactly my experience. Really, is it? Yeah, yeah. But isn't it, I mean, it was a game we always played at Christmas. So why do people always play it? I don't know. And you talk about how long the game is. Oh, gosh. And it just, it did go on forever and ever. Yeah, exactly. And you don't really like Monopoly, do you? No, it's my least favourite game, I think, of all of the 80 in the book. What's your most favourite game? Am I allowed to choose three?

- Okay, so I'm gonna choose-- - In order. - Okay, well, I'm gonna do them in kind of, so my ancient game of choice is Batgammon, and it's the first game in the book, 'cause I think Batgammon hits all of the, it emerged out of this Royal Game of Ore as a racing game, but I think it has a lovely combination of strategy, but I don't like just pure strategy, because then you need very equally matched players.

It always has chance as well. And I love a game which has both because I think that gives a beginner a chance to win the game. I mean, I think that's one of the things where chess suffers a little bit because if you're playing somebody who knows their openings, it puts you in a very weak position. So one of my other rules of a good game is it shouldn't finish before it starts, meaning that you shouldn't know who's going to win before it starts. And I think chess suffers that a little bit. You know, if you've got

Garry Kasparov against Donald Trump at chess. That game is finished before it even starts. But snakes and ladders, well, I could win. So backgammon is my ancient game.

My modern game of choice, I'd probably choose The Settlers of Catan. Yeah, exactly. You see, anyone who's played it, they know that it's the best game ever. It's got a beautiful combination of everyone's playing all the time, it's got a social element to it. That's a game which somehow right up to the end, I feel you don't quite know who's going to win. But my third choice is a futuristic game. And it's the last game in the book. And it's a game we don't know how to play.

It's a game that is described in a novel, one of the novels that I fell in love with when I was a student, which is The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. And this is a game that this futuristic society, the peak of society is to be able to play this game. And you sort of, you leave society to join a monastery almost to go and play the game. And as you read the book, you sort of understand, okay,

The way you play this game is somehow to synthesize knowledge that you bring together ideas of history, of geography, of mathematics, of music, of art. And a great move in the game is almost like telling a story.

and to bring these things together. And when I read that as a student, I thought, oh, wow, that's the game I want to spend my life playing. Because, I mean, when I was a student, I loved doing mathematics, but I did a lot of music and I still do a lot of music and theatre. I've got a play that I've written that we're doing in a month's time in Oxford, so please come along to that. And so I just loved all of these things. And the idea of this game, I thought, yeah, that's...

That's what I want to do. I want to bring together all of these things that I'm passionate about. And I would say, in some ways, this book is my latest move in the Glass Bead game because it is a book which synthesizes, you know, it's got mathematics in it, but it's got a lot of history and culture, philosophy, art and novels as well that feature games. So it is kind of my latest move, I think, in trying to play this game that we don't know how to play.

It's amazing how games can be basic. We talked about the pencil and paper, but the actual components, physical components of the game can be very basic. But what about sort of incorporating the digital age and AI and what's...

What's your view on that? Yes, I wrestled with how much to talk about video games, for example, in this book. And I do have some IC journeys I use to actually talk not about the games in a particular country, but sort of game themes like the philosophy of games or psychology of games. And one of the sea journeys is dedicated to video games. And I had a kind of slight problem with that because early video games, of course, are

are very solo. You play Tetris, and I talk about Tetris as it's more like a puzzle rather than a game. The other one I talk about, which I have to be very careful about video games because I get very addicted. So I went to the Hebrew University for my postdoc, and I spent the whole first two months basically playing Prince of Persia, and I didn't do any mathematics at all because that's just an amazing game. But

But again, it's a sort of, and I tried to make it social because I found that the secretary in the department, she also quite enjoyed playing this game. And she was really good at all of the battles that the prince did. And I was quite good at all of the puzzles. So we sort of shared the playing of this game.

But the digital world, I think, first of all, it sort of caused games to become a bit too solitary. But I think that's changed because as my mum is now highly social and gameplay again is something that you do and connect with a lot of people because multiplayer games just are fantastic digitally. But I do love the...

the physicality of games and i think that's why you know games came so mac i think they were back in fashion actually pre the pandemic that people were again playing and i think it was a sort of reaction a little bit against the amount of time we were playing candy crush on our phones that actually we wanted something which was social around the kitchen table and physical so i think that um uh

Board games, I mean, my son is 28 and he plays a lot of board games. He used to spend a lot of time playing sort of his PlayStation and things. But now what he really enjoys doing is Saturday they gather around at somebody's house and they play board games together. And at some point you mentioned AI. Yeah.

And machine learning, how does that sort of tie into game playing? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of examples of sort of test case for how good our...

abilities to code are often matched about how good is a machine at playing a game. So when we developed a machine that could play a code that could play chess at a very high level, that seemed to be a real threshold moment that code had become so good. But that was really code written in a very top-down manner. We were writing instructions which the machine did at speed and at depth that was beyond

Garry Kasparov's ability to kind of match that. But what's very interesting is that a game, again, and code being able to play a game really marked what I believe is the beginning of a new revolution in the way we're writing code, which is machine learning. We're probably 10 years into this revolution of a new way that code is allowing us to do things.

And that's because code is written in a very bottom-up manner where you allow codes to learn, change, mutate. And so the game of Go, which is one of the great strategy games developed in China, it's a very visual game. So it's a 19 by 19 grid where you put black and white stones down and you have to surround more territory than your opponent does.

And traditionally, this was very hard to write code to play because it was very visual and visuals always were things that visual recognition software was always useless before machine learning.

But if you allow a piece of code to learn as it plays games and change the weighting of certain places on the board according to when it wins or when it loses the game, this turned out to actually develop a piece of code that played this game at an incredibly high level, so much so that DeepMind...

Thought that they could challenge the world's best lease at all and sure enough at least at all at the time He'd never seen a piece of code which got anywhere near even amateur play and he said I'll be able to beat this thing so easily and

He was a bit shocked to emerge the other side of this five-match series, having lost four games to one. And he now regards that one game he won against this code as the greatest game that he's played in his life. But what was so interesting was what happened in game two in Move 37. Because...

okay, we got used to computers doing things better than humans, but this was something that, you know, I read another book called The Creativity Code, and this move I regard as the first moment that AI started to be genuinely creative because it was a really new style of move that,

Most of the players, human players, when they saw this, kind of gassed because it seemed to be such a bad move. It was very deep into the center of the board, and you don't play that sort of move early on. And people said, oh, well, at least we'll be able to win the game from now because that's a really bad move.

But by the end of the game, this move, this one piece was the one that won AlphaGo the whole swathe of territory. And it's now changed the way humans play this game. AlphaGo taught humans to play the game in a new way. I talk about it in the book. There are three revolutions in the game of Go. One happened in the 16th century, one at the beginning of the 20th century when a new style emerged, and now, thanks to AI,

there's a new style again. So I think that's exciting. That's why I'm quite positive about the role that AI can play in pushing the human species into new areas where we can be creative in new ways. But one of the interesting questions is, if a computer can play a game better than any human, does that kind of kill the game? If there's kind of a perfect play...

For example, Connect Four. I love Connect Four. It's so... Planning your kind of strategy for how you're going to get... Is there one place? Yes, there is. What is it? It's the place in the middle. So if you're playing... The first opening move should be... Symmetry is often... But it's not... It's an odd number of columns. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Which middle? No, it is an odd number, I think. Yeah. I think so. It's way down. It's bang in the middle. So you've got... I think it's nine. Is it nine? Nine.

Seven. Okay, so there you go. There's three, and you put the one in the middle. Symmetry is often a really powerful tool in playing games, actually, to understand symmetry can really reduce the number of possibilities of things.

But the point is, what do you do after that? There is an algorithm that mathematicians with computers came up with which guarantees you a win. Whatever you do, if you follow this algorithm, it's a very big decision tree because when you put your one in the middle, there are six different places. Well, the symmetry says there are really only three. Is it the one next to, the one far away, or the one in the middle?

But if you think about the way that this game can emerge, it's quite a large decision tree So there's no way any human could keep in mind all of the if then if this then do that So when humans are playing the game the fact that this has been solved really still means the game is quite exciting But if you play a computer the computer goes first you're sunk. You'll never win this game So does that kind of destroy the game?

So I think that's why pure strategy games actually are destroyed if somebody discovers a perfect way to play the game. - Playing Connectful with a mathematician just took hours because it was like, you just didn't drop one of those

whatever they're called, in because you just needed to go through the decision tree. - Yeah, exactly. I mean, that can be, that is a really interesting thing about, I think, which makes a good game, which is you want a game to somehow involve everybody all the time. I think that's why sometimes I get frustrated with Scrabble, that it seems like you're all just doing separate puzzles

And the puzzle slightly changes because of the way somebody's put-- they've just destroyed what you were going to do. But I know what I'm going to do, and I'm sitting there waiting for everybody to make their moves. And often people just take ages thinking, I'm sure I can get all seven out. So I do think a game should somehow involve everybody all the time is a really good way to play that game.

And the interesting thing about Scrabble is, of course, everyone says, well, at least there's a game that mathematicians can't play because it's all about words. But I explain in the book that that's not the case, actually, because the people who always win the world champions at Scrabble do not play using fancy words. They play very numerically and use all of these just like they put one tile down, but it does so many different words. And so the winners are very often...

A New Zealand guy won the English Scrabble World Champion. He said, but all I do is I've got this strategy. I know all the acceptable two-letter words, and I learn the common seven- and eight-letter words that might be possible for high scores and things. I said, I could do this probably in French. I don't speak French, but I'm going to see whether... So he put himself in for the French Scrabble World Championship and won it, not speaking... You can imagine what the French thought about that.

Thank you for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Bea Duncan. Don't forget, Intelligence Squared premium subscribers can listen to the event in full and ad-free. Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more, or you can hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple for a free trial. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.