Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • September 18, 2026 8:20 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

With regards,

“It’s hard to know what to believe right now.”

Every generation says something like that, because it is all to often true for all not just some.

However it was said that,

“Have trust in what you can see and touch, and not what you believe in faith.”

OK very “empirical” and what science should be all about…

The trouble is, these days it’s not just a question of “scratch and sniff” type testing, it’s,

“How do you come up with a test that meets the usual science requirments?”

These days “repeatable by all” appears to be very difficult to meet, or not met at all (see the number of papers getting retracted).

Some tests these days are almost of a,

“Only on a dry cloudless Tuesday in January at a little past dinner time”

Requirement you might only expect for observing the heavens.

Now of course the old “philosophers union”[1] joke for demarcation from machines penned by Douglas Adams in “Hitchhikers” about phone numbers seems to be almost coming true,

https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901386

[1] See,

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Majikthise

About the union for which he appears to be a “convener”.

Clive Robinson • September 20, 2026 8:59 AM

@ Weather,

With regards tic tack toe, it’s been nearly five decades since I played it “as a game” vecause I quickly fiqured out the rules (I only played it a couple of times with my son to show him the “win rules”).

So your observation of

<

blockquote>”it always wanted to win rather settle for a draw,”

<

blockquote>

Is “child like behaviour” that will loose.

The mission as given was “to win as a human”.

The thing about tic tack toe, is that you can not guarantee winning unless you go first and do the “corner move” or your opponent makes a mistake…

Put simply,

You go in one of the corners as your first move. The opponent depending on experience should not go for the center –if they do they’ve played a loosing move– but one of the side boxes in the middle of the sides adjacent, or the opposite corner.

From there you just play it out logically.

Contrary to intuition the center square is not a good place to play untill toward the end of the game.

For those thinking about it there are 4 win lines that go through the center and 4 win lines on the periphery rows and columns. So intuitively the center square looks good as it blocks 4 win lines rather than 3 or 2. However it ignores the fact there are 4 win lines around the center that the center does not block and do not block those on the other side of the grid. Thus you want to play for the periphery from the get go and only play the center as a “win block” after the opponent has got two on a line through it.

Clive Robinson • September 21, 2026 5:51 AM

@ Weather,

With regards,

“I thought Ai would easily win, if you compare what they do with chess, they normally win against world best players.”

Both games are “fully deterministic” as all such “board games” are.

The big difference is just how many possible games there are and as importantly how many “unique starting routes” there are.

In tick tack toe there is something like 1/4 million unique games with three basic starting routes there are (corner, center, perimeter center).

If you go first and start with a corner you will win unless you make a mistake.

Chess has a larger number of starting routes based on multiple moves, and “Chess Masters” learn the opening routes considered standard and the variants. The game is however fully deterministic to the end, and the starting player (white) has the very slight advantage. However the number of possible games is to large for “man nor beastly computer” to remember. So like openings there are in game plays that players tend to remember, in part because they give “a tell” as to what sort of player your opponent is.

To be honest such board games very quickly become fairly dull to play and it takes a certain form of “mentality” to want to become good at them and my experience tells me they are lets just say mostly “not any good at” “short talk” or other “social talk / communications”.

But further consider, if being a master at such deterministic games really had “advantages” in life then we would see a wide range of job adverts asking for it as a skill…

But further consider Current AI LLM and ML Systems do not in anyway “think” in the human sense they “pattern match and rule follow” based on a “lookup table” the entries of which are perturbed by a supposedly random variable used in a stochastic process.

The fact that the DNN “lookup table” is static and the DNN the equivalent of a “Digital Signal Processing”(DSP) “adaptive filter” that “lifts signals from noise” should give further warning that it is not “thought” but “statistics” with a little “fuzzing” that determines the DNN function.

But I suspect that the “tick tack toe” implementation has been done badly.

Because whilst still in ordinary teenage education back in the 1970’s I wrote several games in “Prime BASIC” for fun. Two were deterministic board games, one was Tick-Tack-Toe and the other was Mastermind. And on the suggestion of one of the tutors I realised I really had to add a random loose function and player level setting in both otherwise they quickly became boring due to the fact they were initially “written to win” and they mostly did (I still have the punch paper tapes somewhere and rewrites in Microsoft’s BASIC for the Apple ][). The important point being the “Proof if you ever need it”, that you can not use pure technological solutions to solve social problems 😉