Here is the background, if you want to read further.
Today, this morning, Saturday, August 20, 2022, while comfortably sitting in the bathroom while bodily functions went through their prescribed routine, I played 5 games of Solitaire and played out (or <won> if you will), each of the 5 games <in a row!>, one after another. Only on the sixth game did I fail to win. I thought, what are the odds of that occurring? It must be very rare. Is there something special about today and the occurrence of rare events? Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket or play the number 555. On the other hand, maybe I should just stay indoors and avoid that uncommon stroke of lightning that can strike without warning.
But I did want to know the probability of it happening. At first, I went to Google to ask what were the odds of winning 5 Solitaire games in a row; but as usual, too many cards popped up in Google’s card case. I remembered that sometime back in time I had been interested in Solitaire and even wrote a computer program. Maybe something was still sticking on my hard disk so I searched it for “Solitaire”. Bingo.
My fading memories were correct. In 2017, I had written a computer program to play Solitaire. I thought it was pretty cool and I sent the following letter, pulled up from my hard disk’s past, to see if I could drum up interest in marketing it. The recipient of this letter never answered, and the program probably lies in a forgotten dusty digital drawer.
October 24, 2017
Dear SoAndSo
A few months ago, I tried searching the internet to find the odds of winning, playing the Window XP computer’s version of Solitaire. [How much of what we do in life is repetitive!] I found (to my surprise) that this was still an open question. Having done some programming in the past, and being semi-retired, I decided to see if I could write a program that would shuffle, deal and play solitaire, determine winning games and store statistics. By brute computing force could I then discover the baseline expected win rate.
I read that you have also created a solitaire simulator program and cite a win rate of 7.7%. My program is currently playing 3 card draw, no limit to deck cycles. My first win rate was about 7-8% (after 100000 games). Lately I’ve added enhancements and with my most recent modifications, my program has achieved a win rate (after 100000 games) of 12.09%. I think that is close to the best that anyone can do. (After all, a computer program never gets tired, loses focus or makes perceptual errors.)
My program is written in Visual Basic 6, which limits its development. If you want to compare experiences in this burgeoning field, I would be happy to share any or all of my work.
I am a 75 year old psychiatrist, living in Manhattan. My wife, watching the many hours I have devoted to this project, tells me with mock solemnity that my computer solitaire playing program will surely advance world peace. I realize she is joking. Nonetheless, sort of like building a model of a sailing vessel in a glass bottle, I find a sense of beauty in the work.
I’ll be happy to discuss any of this further.
Arnie Rosen
So that’s the background for what you see as you have opened my latest submission to Substack.
With this letter, from my own library of stored information, I can calculate the odds of playing out in Solitaire 5 times in a row. It’s remarkably easy. The odds of winning any random game is 12.09% or a little more than 12 times in 100 games. The odds of winning 2 in a row is 0.1209 x 0.1209 or 0.0146. That means you should win 2 in a row a little less than one and a half times out of 100 tries. To get the odds of 5 games in a row, you simply multiply the single game odds, 5 times, or 0.00002583. That only says that, based on the calculated odds, you would have to play somewhere around 39,000 Solitaire games to <expect> to win 5 times in a row.
So… Yes, what is my ‘So’ to this story? It better be something big to make this all work worthwhile.
So there are a number of things… Obviously I play <a lot> of Solitaire. I will leave aside what that tells another person (or me) about me, but I confess that I do play it a lot. I try to limit it to times when I have nothing better to do, or need to have a distraction, like when I am sitting on the subway, or trying to fall asleep. Solitaire is my pacifier when bored. I use it to comfortably pass time; it functions as my digital sheep counter at night on my pillow. It is a paean to progress in our modern world.
It makes me more aware of my ‘rational’ conviction that even the rarest of random events can never function as an indicator, an omen, or a harbinger. A random event by definition has zero connection to anything else. We know that to be true <logically> and can even prove it mathematically. However, there is an <element> of our endowed neuro-cognitive machinery that is probably hard-wired to look for <significance> in these strange uncommonly rare events, like winning 5 Solitaire games in a row. My particular mental makeup allows me to dismiss any significance to the lottery or lightening. I’m not buying a ticket and I am not staying in. Nonetheless, I recognize that where ever that machinery is located within our head, it must have strong emotional and spiritual connections, causing us, as Cavemen, to fall in awe in front of a total eclipse. Only until logic and science became able to explain and predict eclipses was this impulse to bow and worship conquered.
Musing about all this makes me more aware of my own set of beliefs, which I hold to be true because they are in accord with how I explain the world. I see them as logically true, although to parts of our present ‘culture’, they may be unpopular, seen as heretical, or even, when pushed to absurdity be termed ‘racist’. If I continue to write and you continue to read what I post on Substack, you will find expressions of these beliefs of mine. I believe that as people, and [beware!] even as <groups> of people, we will differ in what type of mental machinery ‘elements’ we possess, and how they are configured, connected and programmed. Different neuro-cognitive mental sets for different folks. Different <proportionally strong> neuro-cognitive mental sets for different <groups> of folks. Having these differing elements of neuro-cognitive mental sets will mean that some people can do the math but still fall in a state of awe before an eclipse. Some people will let themselves be guided by the planets even though we know the orbits of heavenly bodies so accurately that we have sent Voyager satellites out of the solar system entirely. We are all capable, in a neuro-cognitive sense, of easily holding in our mind two conflicting and contradictory ideas simultaneously. My beliefs will advertise my own admitted bias that the ‘culture’ of the West is more ‘advanced’ than other cultures; cultures that have been described as ‘tribal’, another word which will raise warning flags.
Finally, this present Substack post puts into play an underlying strategy of mine for dealing with the vicissitudes of the advancing years, something that you, like me, are dealing with also or will have to in the future. I fell in love with computers when they first hit the market as “personal computers”. I acquired my first, a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 4K memory in 1978, around the time of my son Kenny’s birth. I try to put into practice, (see my 2017 letter above), my belief that the computer should function as a memory assist, and should be as handy as reading glasses are to people who have reached their late 40’s. That is when the lenses of our eyes become less flexible, making it difficult to focus on close objects, a normal condition called <presbyopia>. Likewise, I believe studies show that our <immediate> memory begins to show gradual impairment, probably around the same age or later. This doesn’t affect our <long-term> memory, like remembering the name of our second grade teacher, but will account for our <senior moments> that we all struggle to manage. I don’t presume to know the neurophysiology behind this; I assume it is the consequence of a normally aging hippocampus. What I do know is that, baring some neurological disease like Alzheimer’s, your frontal lobes — your executive, planning and organizational centers — should continue to function unaffected by time, as long as you live. Thus I believe we should practice using our computers as ‘memory glasses’ for our hippocampi. I have been consciously trying to put that into practice for many years, and some of my ideas and experiences using a computer in this manner may find their way into future Substack articles.
Let me close with a personal note. This is pretty weird stuff and it’s maybe not the taste of most people. I am curious what you think. Only if you like this and want to see similar stuff, click the <heart> icon at the end. Thank you if you click the <heart>; if not, thank you for your honesty. (No matter how you respond, I expect to continue to write these pieces. It’s just that they won’t go to Substack but will be saved in a special place on the <iCloud> and on my hard disk. There they will sit for probably 39,000 years, until someone in the future needs to research the thoughts of a newly elderly man in the early twenty-first century.)
An ode to randomness takes on a romantic quality of its own, something weirdly human between you and your “harem” of computers since 1976.
Like memories of past loves your computer tales have meaning to you so that an unusual, rare outcome in Solitaire has no external significance to Dr. Rosen, the mathematical rationalist, whereas it raises the eyebrows of Dr. Rosen, the emotionally oriented psychiatrist who dissects out the meaning in personal events. Cannot the complexity of the hippocampus-cortical connectivity put us in thrall of benign arrays of Jekyll and Hyde differences in the internal configurations of who we are and what we feel about this and that, whether trivial or not so?
Thanks again for your mind-piquing ideas
When will the psychiatrist in you approach the most intriguing Jekyll-Hyde dilemma of our day — gender fluidity in children and adolescents from classroom to the clinic?
As usual, you have caused me to think while at the same time stirring my pot of still remaining memories. I appreciate the memories that bubble to the surface (including my finding the DOS software an enemy to be conquered at my first encounter), but appreciate even more that the underlying karma of all of your articles cause me to think a lot more and for a lot longer (than my usual span of attention) about both Time and Life. My hope is for you to continue writing. My brain continues to enjoy the challenges and the memories as they bubble up.