A Strange Game

Abstract

Imagine you are a creature in the middle of a large room. The floor is covered with colorful tiles everywhere you look, for as far as you can see. You feel adventurous and take a step forward onto a blue tile. Zing! You feel a burst of pain. Maybe blue tiles are bad? On your left is a red tile, on your right a blue tile. Let’s try red this time. Tada! This time, good things happen. It would seem red tiles are good, and blue are bad. By default, you should probably avoid blue tiles and prefer red ones. Or maybe things are slightly more complicated, and what matters is the particular configurations of tiles. There is only one way to know—trial and error. Try things out, confirm or invalidate hypotheses, and in general, do more of the things that seem to work, and less of the ones that seem to fail.