Translations:Chapter One Trey/20/en

All the while, I studied her. In computer science there’s a thing called a state machine, a part of a program that receives an input and, based on the state of a set of conditions, takes the optimal action. My grandmother had a finely tuned state machine for cards; her mental algorithm methodically worked through probabilities, decision trees, and game theory. I couldn’t have articulated these concepts, but slowly I started to intuit them. I noticed that even at unique moments in a game—a combination of possible moves and odds she probably had never seen before—she usually made the optimal move. If she lost a good card at some point, later in the game I’d see she had sacrificed it for a reason: to set herself up for a win down the road.