If you have a pressing need to sink a battleship, a local space science centre has you covered this week.
Hundreds of Edmonton-area science fans will be at the Telus World of Science Edmonton tomorrow for Dark Matters, a semi-regular adults-only event where people can learn science and have fun over drinks. This month’s event is based on the science of games.
“We’ll be exploring all matter of games,” said Marie McConnell, staff scientist at the science centre, especially video games, as Edmonton has many video game developers.
Guests from the game giant BioWare will be at the event to discuss game development. Visitors will get to help build a video game with the help of the group Canada Learning Code and try out ones made by students from the Edmonton Digital Arts College. There will be board games, virtual reality, Dungeons & Dragons, escape room puzzles, speed-cubing demonstrations, and video game matches played on the science centre’s Imax screen.
The event will also feature a game of Battleship that uses large markers for hit and miss indicators and oversized ships made from scrap materials, McConnell said.
“You actually build the pieces,” she said, and play with them on a six-foot square board.
Part of this event’s aim is to expose the science behind everyday activities such as games, McConnell said. Computer games are very science-heavy, for example, involving complex hardware and calculations to produce their onscreen graphics. Today’s 3D characters require knowledge of musculature and skeletons, while sports games must accurately simulate friction, wind, and gravity.
“To make a ball arc, to make a puck go in the right place, all those physics have to be calculated for every second that you play,” McConnell said.
Many modern board games have a distinct scientific bend to them, said John Engel of St. Albert’s Mission: Fun & Games. Compounded has players simulate creating compounds in a lab from different elements (hopefully without blowing themselves up), for example, while Cytosis involves collecting adenosine triphosphate and other molecules in a cell to score points.
“The laws of probability are very important in winning games,” Engel continued, and studying the science of them can make you a better player.
For example, probability states that the most likely outcome when rolling two six-sided dice is a seven. If you’re playing Monopoly and an opponent is seven spaces away from one of your properties, you should shuffle more houses there so you can get more of their money.
Games can also make for better science, said Dustin Morrill, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Alberta who will speak at Thursday’s event.
Morrill helped develop the U of A’s DeepStack program, which gained fame last year by outplaying 10 pro players at heads-up no limit Texas hold ‘em poker. DeepStack worked by using its “intuition” – a database it developed by playing millions of games against itself so it could know which move, in any given situation, would lead to the best result if the game were to end in a few moves.
Morrill said guests at Dark Matters would get to challenge DeepStack to a match.
Morrill said games are a great test-bed for artificial intelligence, as they have well-defined rules under which you can safely test a program’s learning and decision-making abilities. He’s now working to apply the technology behind DeepStack to challenges such as medicine and autonomous cars.
The event runs from 7 to 10 p.m. this Jan. 25. Tickets are $25.95. Visit telusworldofscienceedmonton.ca/dark-matters for details.
