This man thinks about time travel for a living.

Spent the weekend in Dunedin, where I met some interesting people — about whom I’ll say more in a later post. But I should say a word or two about a couple of interesting people I met on the way there and back.

The Mathematician
I met the mathematician at the domestic terminal in Auckland. We both had our Macbooks open, and as often happens in situations of obvious technological camaraderie, we got talking.

- Are you heading to the conference too?
- Yeah. Looking forward to it.
- What branch of mathematics are you in?
- Oh. Perhaps we’re going to a different conference.

Turns out the mathematician was a Canadian world-beating expert in game theory. I had once interviewed someone who specialised in that field, and so I had a couple of things with which I could maintain the conversation. Game theory’s a fascinating field that combines high-level mathematics with psychology.

We shared a love of the game of Go, but differed in that he could actually play it and win. We talked about quite a few different games along the way, many of which sounded really fascinating.

Once I get near a chess board again, I’ll be giving the game of Amazons a go. It’s a simple idea: each player has two pieces that can move like Queens in chess. You move one of them, and then it can fire an arrow in any one of the 8 directions. That destroys a square on the board, which cannot be landed on or crossed. When a player cannot move one of their Amazons, the game is over.

I’d also invented a game once, which we ended up discussing at some length. It was an okay game, apparently, but I’d always been dissatisfied with how it ends. Once you start losing, it’s pretty much impossible to claw your way back.

The mathematician suggested a couple of improvements to the very simple rule sets, and then he got out some graph paper and coins and began to try out the revised game. The best improvement was to make moving your pieces to adjacent squares an illegal move.

To make it more interesting, he substituted the circular board idea with a Moebius strip, which kind of broke my brain, but it made the game fascinating and meant that you could play on a standard 8×8 square.

As you leave the (conceptually) Moebius strip shaped board on row 1 at the top left, you re-enter on row 8 at the bottom right. We decided that the board had that twisted property in both directions, which made a potential capture very difficult to spot.

The mathematician told me about a book he was writing, and took my name so he could credit the game properly if he mentions it. Very nice man.

The Philosopher
I met the philosopher when we shared a cab from the city of Dunedin to the airport, about a 30 minute drive out of town. He was off to a conference in Auckland. His particular specialties were the philosophy of space and time (no, really) and the philosophy of language.

These are pretty huge topics, and so the conversation ranged widely from a discussion of non-representational art, quantum mechanics, Chomsky and Pinker, the idea of dimensional chauvinism (the idea that time has special properties the other dimensions don’t have, which prevent you from moving about in it) and, of course what happens when you go back in time and try to kill your parents before you’re born.

Apparently Douglas Adams had it pretty much right with his idea that the attempt was possible, but that your parents would slip on a banana skin at the precise moment you pulled the trigger, because although clearly you didn’t kill them and such a thing is an impossibility, there’s no logical reason you couldn’t have made the attempt.

One of the interesting things about being a philosopher of both spacetime and language is that you get to deal with the problem of tenses. What participle do you use to describe something you’re going to do sometime in your own past?

As it turns out, the philosopher was also a musician, which was handy because I was on much more solid footing there. He’s a bass player in an 80s covers band, so the discussions of Echo & the Bunnymen were more indepth (at least on my part) than were the discussions about the arguments against Roger Penrose’s objections to strong artificial intelligence.

The others

I also met and chatted to a couple of other smart and interesting people on that particular round trip. There was a woman who had been a research chemist, but was now doing a PhD in Marketing (the drug companies are going to LOVE her…), and an architect who was off to a Social History of New Zealand Food conference.

The man who sat beside me on the way back from Dunedin was the one person I didn’t try and engage. He was wearing a polo shirt with the words ‘New Zealand Open’ embroidered on it, and was carrying an unfeasibly large trophy cup. Seemed like he’d had a fairly good golfing weekend, but I knew from past experience that this would be one conversation I was unable to sustain, so I pretended to be asleep.