On Games (Unsourced)

 "As in every discipline, so in astronomy, too, the conclusions that we teach the reader are seriously intended, and our discussion is no mere game." (Johannes Kepler)

"Chess is a game by its form, an art by its content and a science by the difficulty of gaining mastery in it. Chess can convey as much happiness as a good book or work of music can. However, it is necessary to learn to play well and only afterwards will one experience real delight." (Tigran Petrosian)

"How then shall mathematical concepts be judged? They shall not be judged. Mathematics is the supreme arbiter. From its decisions there is no appeal. We cannot change the rules of the game, we cannot ascertain whether the game is fair. We can only study the player at his game; not, however, with the detached attitude of a bystander, for we are watching our own minds at play." (Tobias Dantzig)

"I love mathematics [...] principally because it is beautiful; because man has breathed his spirit of play into it, and because it has given him his greatest game the encompassing of the infinite." (Rózsa Péter)

"If chess permits a virtually infinite variety of games, the rules of nature surely do. Science may be immortal after all." (John Horgan)

"It's a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from - cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time." (Warren Buffett)

"Mathematics should be learned through recreational games, the way the Egyptians do, through amusement and pleasure." (John A Comenius)

"Science is a game - but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives." (Erwin Schrödinger)

"The chief weakness of the machine is that it will not learn by its mistakes. The only way to improve its play is by improving the program. Some thought has been given to designing a program that would develop its own improvements in strategy with increasing experience in play. Although it appears to be theoretically possible, the methods thought of so far do not seem to be very practical. One possibility is to devise a program that would change the terms and coefficients involved in the evaluation function on the basis of the results of games the machine had already played. Small variations might be introduced in these terms, and the values would be selected to give the greatest percentage of wins." (Claude E Shannon)

"We must regard classical mathematics as a combinatorial game played with symbols." (John von Neumann)