The Euchre Edition

On games, cards, and confabulation

Jason Boog leads editorial at Fable, a social reading platform for book clubs. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today and contributor of The New Masses Edition and The Roblox Edition for WITI.

Jason here. Many, many years ago, in my smartphone-free adolescence, my great friend Colin (ed: not this Colin) and I mastered a Midwestern card game called euchre while playing in school buses, church halls, family parties, and other dull locations. I won't bore you with the slightly esoteric mechanics of this card game (you can learn online or ask a friend from Michigan to teach you), but here are the basics: four players are aligned in two teams, playing with a skinny deck of nines, tens, jacks, queens, kings, and aces. Players are dealt five cards in every hand, and each team tries to take the most tricks by laying down the highest card. A good game of euchre takes less than a half hour to play, and it’s the perfect way to keep conversation flowing between reserved Midwesterners.

Colin and I destroyed our opponents with a simple strategy. At an appropriate juncture in the game, we’d slowly unfurl the most elaborate shaggy dog story possible about one of our shared misadventures. As play continued, we would stretch that anecdote like taffy, each of us adding odd details and half-baked memories; working together, we could drag out a single digression into a distracting narrative, strategically rambling until the other team’s frustration reached a breaking point and, then, and only then, we would finally deliver some stupid punchline. Everybody would groan and desperately change the subject, never noticing that Colin and I had covertly passed the deck back and forth as we spun our tall tale, repeatedly “stealing the deal” to gain a crucial advantage in the game (for the record, this activity is officially sanctioned by euchre authorities at the Chicago Sport and Social Club: “There is no penalty or shame in trying to ‘steal the deal,’ nor is there penalty in being caught”).

Why is this interesting?

I live in Los Angeles now, dwelling among heathens who do not practice my Midwestern customs, so I have spent more than a decade seeking digital euchre solutions. There are apps galore for playing on my smartphone, but this particular card game depends on the quality of your partner’s banter. Euchre bots can dutifully follow the rules but cannot replicate the joy of casually conversing while playing the game. Forget the Turing Test. I will force every fancy new large language model to take the Euchre Test for the rest of my AI-addled life. 

ChatGPT made a very promising start as I researched this piece, dutifully creating three fictional characters to play euchre with me, including my AI-generated partner Olivia "Lucky" Chang: “Olivia is a free-spirited world traveler who's seen it all. She relies on her intuition and a touch of luck to guide her through life's adventures. She's cheerful and believes that life is one big game. Her motto: ‘Embrace the chaos and trust in fate.’” ChatGPT effortlessly described the first deal and told me what cards I held in my virtual hand. In a few milliseconds, it successfully calculated the winner of the hand and narrated the start of the next one. 

Things were looking up, so I gave Olivia “Lucky” Chang the chance to confound our digital opponents with a shaggy dog story by reminiscing about some tourists we met at a jam band festival. Even though it could handle the simple game mechanics, ChatGPT couldn’t contribute even the slightest bit of banter. It just narrated the game with the same humorless tone it uses to deliver coding advice, cupcake recipes, or school essays for cheating students. 

“You play the Ace of Hearts in response to Olivia's lead with the 10 of Hearts, securing this trick for your team. As you lay down your card, you start reminiscing about that memorable road trip to a Phish concert with Olivia, and the euchre game with the two German hippies. Your story adds a nostalgic and fun element to the game. Evelyn chuckles at the story, and Samuel grins, clearly entertained by the tale. Olivia smiles warmly, clearly cherishing the memory.”

Things quickly fell apart after that. ChatGPT lost both the thread of our stoner rock adventures and the actual gameplay. The fanciest AI in the world continued to deal virtual cards, mangling the rules while radiating the smarmy confidence of an eager-to-impress honors student.

Now I am a fair-to-middling writer with no illusions that my abilities will ever compete with the sheer output of AI writing tools. But it will be a while before an AI can match me and my buddy Colin in full flight, tossing a metaphorical football between ourselves as we manipulate our hapless opponents during a euchre game. A computer scientist named Benjamin Seelbinder has thought about the problem of euchre and AI for many years. "The mix of conversation strategy and personalities is too much to simulate," he told me once. “You have to not only look at how your heuristics are determined, but you have to look at the heuristics of others. And that’s where cooperation is going to get hard.” From a Hollywood writers’ room to a months-long session with a great book editor, culture depends on humans passing stories back and forth. If ChatGPT can’t match Colin in a euchre game, it won’t be writing any great books or scripts either.   

Whenever a large language model like ChatGPT invents fake facts, imaginary legal cases, or erroneous card game rules, you could call this kind of behavior “hallucination” or, the term that I prefer,  “confabulation.” There’s no malice behind these inventions. A language model is just a meaning-making machine trying to make meaning with incomplete information. The bot is Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner off a cliff, its feet chugging over empty space.

Going back to Webster's 1913 dictionary, the word “confabulation” has a much older meaning: "Familiar talk; easy, unrestrained, unceremonious conversation.” The dictionary entry even quotes a cozy line from Robert Burton’s 17th-century masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy: “Friends' confabulations are comfortable at all times, as fire in winter.” Human conversation is the most mundane, inefficient, and wonderful of all pastimes. Confabulation is the heart of euchre. (JB)

Euchre Game of the Day:

Mark Twain immortalized some euchre-playing sea captains in his memoir, Roughing It: “[They] played euchre in the smoking room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think I ever saw.” Here’s the illustration from that 1872 book. (JB)

Quick Links:

• While struggling to stream Trust, one of my most fondly remembered films from the 1990s, I discovered that the indie director Hal Hartley has solved his distribution woes by hosting all his films on his own site.  (JB)

• The Endless Thread podcast solved an old literary mystery, finally discovering the artist behind the cover art for the 1976 Dell/Laurel Leaf paperback edition of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

• If you need a quick book to read, Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi was perfect for me this week. A masterpiece of human confabulation. (JB)

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Jason (JB)

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