How this game works

You are holding a real person. Every coin in the room carries one figure from the history of statistics, computing, and machine learning — Thomas Bayes to the transformer authors, 152 in all. Tap your coin against your phone once, pick a 3-digit PIN, and that figure is yours for the whole event. Add your name if you want the roster to show who plays whom; leave it blank and you're anonymous.

Battling is one tap. Touch your coin to someone else's phone (or theirs to yours). The game draws a problem both of your figures were scored on — a real problem from the field's history, in its original stakes — gives the room ten seconds to argue, then reveals the winner.

Nothing is random and nothing is generated on the spot. Every figure was scored ahead of time on every problem they can draw, with a written judgment of how their actual methods meet it: 15,324 precomputed judgments in all. Fisher beats Hinton on eight field plots; Hinton buries Fisher on sixty thousand digits. Higher score wins; a tie goes to whoever got there first. The same matchup on the same problem always ends the same way — the explanation is the point, and it's worth reading.

Losing costs nothing. Records are public, rematches draw fresh problems until a pair has exhausted what they share, and there are nine different awards — most wins, most connected, most battles fought, and an Overachiever award for whoever most outperforms what the matrix expected of their figure. Weak figures with brave players win trophies here.

Go deeper if you want. Every figure has a full biography and every problem a page of its own, cross-linked into the AI Mind Map where the same ideas live as concepts. A coin with an ask the professor badge means John has a personal story about that figure — find him and ask.