Puzzles and Games

Of my earliest memories, I remember my father teaching me how to read, showing me magic tricks, and later giving me books on astronomy, along with a telescope. Later, at a book fair, I picked up a book on karate. It discussed martial arts but also discussed focusing the mind and explained that karate wasn’t just about karate--it was also about everything else. As the saying goes: how you do one thing is how you do everything. And later I developed an interest in music because my father was a musician. And so my father built and gifted me my first guitar. I found all of these things fascinating. And even more so in hindsight.

I think these early experiences instilled in me many ideas. One of those ideas was a habit of looking at things as puzzles, mathematical tricks, patterns, contraptions, or games.

Math, somewhat like magic, is a game of balancing or generalizing from numbers. Mathematics is a kind of sleight of hand--not to conceal, but to clarify. Like a magician who reveals wonder through precision, the mathematician discards distraction to reveal underlying truths.

Building a guitar is a game about carving, organizing, and gluing resources together in order to produce an instrument such that it is capable of harmonious sound. The study of philosophy is a game of math, but it is also about the nature and essence of truth.

Language is a game involving phonetics and grammatical rules--nouns, verbs, adjectives, predicates, objects, prepositions, and so on. We use characters to make strings or words, and with the grammatical rules, we concatenate words to make sentences in order to make meanings.

As an aside—a fun koan: what was the original language? And no, I don't mean Sumerian. Assuming that actions are more real than words, I am pointing at a gap—that the original language was most likely not a spoken nor very audible one. Perhaps actions, rather than words, were a kind of song.

Music is a game similar to grammar in that it’s a language game, with various modes and types--majors, minors, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, diminished chords, augmented chords, ninths, and more. Sometimes music is about the notes you play, but sometimes it's about the notes you don't. Almost everything is a language.

The relationships you have with others are a language. The beliefs you let live in your head and the actions you take are a language.

The design of a city or a neighborhood is a language. The way you organize your room is a language. The way you schedule or go about your day is a language.

The way I see it, these things are games to explore, optimize, or reverse engineer. They are no different than playing with letters and words to make pangrams--or combining a for loop and a dictionary to construct a computer program.

But another curious thing about both games and languages is that they tend to recurse or be self-reinforcing.

For example, a person who is unable to experience joy may be more likely to self-justify their own dread and lack of presence in their own life. But on the contrary, a person who refuses to wax indignant and instead carries on with cheerfulness--he learns and grows.

In constructing a pangram, anagram, or computer program, we take some elements we are given and rearrange them to explore concept spaces we may have overlooked--hidden worlds, right under our nose—and then occasionally, we get a bolt of insight or understanding that leaves us seeing with new eyes. But the game doesn't stop there, not yet, so we play the next round.

Sometimes the rules of the games we play seem to change a bit. But there's almost always a meta game--a game that acts as a guide and gives us an idea for how future games might change or why past games were.

The meta game is the one that lets us adapt, anticipate, and operate even when the rules shift, viewing things from the level up above this one. Meta means going "one step beyond." But sometimes it means going one step below.