The man who conquered Pac-Man

The best of the week’s long reads in science and technology, including how to get the perfect Pac-Man score, and the city that ate itself.

Science and society | Nineteen natural experiments

How much starvation can an unborn child endure? Are poorer people more prone to psychosis? Is military service a good career move? You can’t run controlled experiments to answer questions such as these because you can’t starve mothers-to-be or force random civilians into the army. But if nature or government does the sorting – as with the Vietnam War draft – you have the conditions for a natural experiment. (Mark Egan, Stirling Behavioural Science Blog, 6,600 words)

Mental health | Reflections from the halfway point

Lessons learned from two years’ residency in a psychiatric hospital. “If all science is physics or stamp collecting, psychiatry is stamp collecting par excellence with the world’s most interesting postal system, hunting through incredibly confused work done by thousands of brilliant people. Sometimes that involves dredging up weird drugs that no one else remembers which are perfectly suited for the precise situation at hand.” (Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, 3,200 words)

Video games | The perfect man

Profile of Billy Mitchell, Florida restaurant-owner and the greatest Pac-Man player the world has ever known. He plays “at a level unimaginable to everyone else in the arcade”, and was the first person ever to achieve “the Holy Grail of gaming”, the perfect Pac-Man score. “The feat requires navigating 256 boards, or levels, and eating every single possible pellet, fruit, and ghost, for the highest score of 3,333,360, all without dying once.” (David Ramsey, Oxford American, 5,100 words)

Cities | London: the city that ate itself

London is choking on its own prosperity. It used to be defined by its social mix and its public places. Now it is polarised and privatised. Pubs and markets are flattened to make way for blocks of expensive flats where nobody lives. Councils cut back on public buildings and social services. There is, literally, no place for the poor. “If London is an enormous party, millions of people are on the wrong side of its velvet rope” (Rowan Moore, Guardian, 5,100 words)

AI | Our friends, the bots

Turing didn't see this one coming. Bots can make enjoyable and seemingly intelligent conversational partners precisely by saying things that no sane human ever would. The best of them range like Shakespearean clowns between nonsense and wisdom and comedy. “A bot can reflect aspects of ourselves or systems in a way that is slightly distorted, creating moments of cognitive dissonance that help to reveal the edges of a system or structure.” (Alexis Lloyd, NYT Labs, 900 words)

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