Teach your kids poker, not chess

If you're talking about Libratus (the CMU AI that beat poker pros in heads up no limit), then that's not true I believe.

During the competition, Libratus used 4 million core hours on the Bridges supercomputer for analyzing it's prior gameplay and changing strategy.

> During the tournament, Libratus was competing against the players during the days. Overnight it was perfecting its strategy on its own by analysing the prior gameplay and results of the day, particularly its losses. Therefore, it was able to continuously straighten out the imperfections that the human team had discovered in their extensive analysis, resulting in a permanent arms race between the humans and Libratus.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libratus

Teach your kids things you enjoy teaching them and they enjoy doing with you. Raising kids is not an optimisation problem.

At a kid level, both chess and poker will basically be the same anyway. It’s about fighting frustration and taking the time to think about what you are doing and a lot of memorisation. It’s going to be probability tables for poker and a tone of tactic puzzles for chess.

At this point and to play the optimisation game too, if you want to give your kids a way to work on their memorisation and dedication, you would probably be better served by having them learn to play an instrument. It’s also a creative outlet and is socially useful.

I initially thought the author was being metaphorical. Teaching poker to a kid is a very risky proposition. If they have any propensity for addiction, the dopamine rush of gambling may take hold of their thought patterns before they have the wisdom and mental maturity to counteract such urges.

Teaching kids the probabilistic nature of life? Sure, if there is a way to teach a kid such things in a meaningful way. But I definitely veto teaching a child poker.

OTOH, chess is great. I didn't study any chess until my 20's. I've never had a problem with the sort of intelligence that is exercised in the school system, but chess exercised my brain in a novel way that might only be experienced in academia via pure math or theoretical physics. The visualization of moves, even a few moves in advance, can initially be surprisingly challenging, especially if there are many seemingly legitimate options. For those who have not seriously exercised this mental muscle before, I suspect it this kind of thinking will feel quite difficult.

After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let's say approaching "master" level if you're familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, "felt" much easier. This is because getting to that level not only required the ability to visualize N steps in advance, but it also forces one to develop a very strong awareness of mental blind spots, which can be very humbling, and is an highly useful skill to have in this profession.

> And I’m not going to allow children to gamble with money.

Kids are likely to gamble either way, best to teach them how to handle the loss and emotions.

When I was kid a lot of us would gamble our lunch money (75 cents) playing quarters with each other. Some days I had to skip lunch, some days I got an extra milk, and some I was caught and given detention. A lot of lessons in those outcomes heh.

You make a lot of unsupported statements in this post.