Odd Lots · Thursday, July 16, 2026
A philosophical question is raised about whether soccer, despite its artistry, is ultimately just a complex computation problem, similar to chess. The discussion ponders if sufficient data and compute power can 'solve' the game, reducing its perceived beauty and intuition to a series of micro-binary decisions.
“People did say this about chess thirty or forty years ago, and there was actually some people who held out the belief computers will never be able to beat humans at chess because of it as an art. And it almost seems hilarious that like this view held on for as long as it did.”
“But it turns out that no, chess is just a calculation problem, and when you have enough data to compute, you could solve the game. Kind of is soccer in the end? Like, is it just a series of lots and lots of discrete events that our eyes are not capable of, But at the end of the day, with sufficient compute and data collection, is it just like chess?”
“I find it a little depressing that probably most things in life are probably just computation. You know what I'm saying. It's like a lot of thing that like that there is something called art and beauty and intuition and something. It's probably just computers all the way down. Binary events that can be chunked and analyzed by microchips.”