Today we talked to Alex Cloud, who founded Doran’s Lab and now works for Riot Games as a data scientist.
Alex spoke about luck and skill used in games, using Randochess as an example. Randochess is a game in which you’ll first use a random number generator to determine whether you’ll flip a coin to see who wins or play chess. The idea here is to decide whether this game involves more luck or more skill if the numbers that correlate to flipping a coin is greater than the numbers that correlate to playing chess. Personally, I’d say that it still involves the same amount of skill, since if you’re better than chess than your opponent, you’d always have a better chance of winning.
Alex also showed us DALL-E 2, which creates art based on what the user puts in. The program was trained by feeding it a bunch of images with captions so that the program could start to identify patterns, so for example if you feed it two images with a dog in it, it’ll recognize that there are two similar animals in both images and both the captions mention a dog. However, it’s not completely perfect. An example of it not working as intended is if you feed it something like “tree bark”, to which it’ll give you an image of a dog barking at a tree rather than actual tree bark.
