In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato Page A

human brain—even if he becomes as smart as a human brain—this does not mean he will be as intuitive as a human brain.”

The Sacrifice Game was like Go, and unlike chess, in that people could still play it much better than computers. A low-intermediate human player can still beat the world’s best Go program. And Go’s a very describable game, close to what programmers call a clean environment. The Sacrifice Game’s a lot more anecdotal, more connected to the world, so it’s at least a few million times messier.

“Well, don’t sell yourself short,” I said, “at least, not to any grant committees—”

“They guess that already,” he said. “That is why we have so . . . gone corporate. At any rate, at this stage LEON is primarily of value as an assistant.” He led me over to a bank of OLED monitors. “It helps improve the performance of novice adders. Like advanced chess.” That is, what chess players call it when they play in consultation with two computers. I nodded.

He sat. I sat.

“We are working with five student players,” he said. “Two of them learned the Game in Maya communities, and the others have trained here. One of them is very promising. He was not an adder before, though.” I waited for him to say “Still, he cannot hold a candle to you, you ace,” but he didn’t. Instead he showed me some charts and pointed out where the spikes were on what, for want of an elegant term, we’d called the “worldwide event space.” Basically, it confirmed that the Game did best at guessing what groups of people will do in crisis situations. “This is, of course, still very useful,” Taro said, “and over time it could be immensely profitable.” But it wasn’t the sort of prediction his backers wanted. For instance, it didn’t do a good job of predicting the markets per se, but just what people will do in the markets. You’d think this would be the same thing, because markets depend on psychology. But in fact there are still all these nonhuman factors going on in market fluctuations, too, industrial lag, capital flow, weather, and on and on, and getting that stuff together with the psychology requires interpretation. It’s one of those things that is very hard, or maybe impossible, to teach a computer.

So Taro was having roughly the same problems I was . . . but still, I thought . . . hmm. Suppose their simulated trades average, say, 0.02 percent over industry standard, then that’s still enough for a company that size to make a few million a minute. These days, even less of an edge could turn whoever had it into a market-devouring monster. The Warren Group could be on their way to being the richest company in the world. Although you’d think they’d be bigger already. Maybe they’re just spending a lot more than they’re reporting. Which might also explain why they’re being so secretive about the Game thing. They’d be bragging about their investment results all over the place unless there were some specific reason not to. People don’t dismiss game studies out of hand anymore. If anything, they’re all trying to get a piece of it. Everybody wants to hire the next Johnny von Neumann.

Or maybe they don’t want to manage other people’s money, they want to grow their own. Maybe Lindsay Warren and some of the board members want to buy back the public shares before any word gets out. Or maybe they’re afraid that if the government finds out they have something militarily interesting, they’ll take them over. Maybe that’s even something to be a little uneasy about, isn’t it? Suppose Warren or somebody else does take the Game to the next level, then what? Maybe they’re going to end up owning everything and just take over the world? It’s like if Taro’d been running the Manhattan Project, except instead of working for the War Department he was sponsored by Marvel.

Maybe I should just post whatever I know about the Game. Maybe even later today. I’d been thinking about