The intelligence of solitaire online

The intelligence of solitaire online

In 2003, human beings spent over 9 billion hours playing solitaire online. This factoid, brought to us by Luis Van Ahn, the brilliant Guatemalan-born professor from Carnegie-Mellon, has now made the rounds. But then he contrasted the number of human-hours it took to accomplish other highly significant works in which humanity takes pride, say the Empire school of golf State Building (7 million human-hours) or the Panama Canal (20 million human-hours), and the results were just jaw-dropping. If you could take the amount of voluntary human effort that was going into playing solitaire and channel it to these grand projects instead, the Empire State Building could have been completed in 6.8 hours and the Panama Canal could have been built in one day.Today, of course, most of us are participants in a variety of games that we play either on or offline. Crossword puzzles, word acrostics or the many flavors of sudoku-like numbers games abound. You cannot ride on a bus, train Will Nick Watney Win Golf’s Cadillac Championship or airplane without seeing a significant percentage of the passengers engaged in some such gaming activity.Online games such as “Dungeons and Dragons” have been around now for decades, and there are so many other games and variants (e.g., one-person, two-person, multiple person teams, identified, anonymous, avatar-played, etc.) that online gaming is a multibillion dollar industry. We owe very significant advances in technology to the industry.