I have this intuition, that we (people), even the really bright ones, are really bad at predicting emerging properties of systems.
This phenomenon might be seen almost everywhere, but I find it that using cellural automata (Game of Life anybody?) and abstract board games with limited rules is the easiest way to show people that they are actually really not that far from children if it comes to imagining consequences of few rules interacting with each other on scale greater than 10-20 moves ahead.
Go board game is my favourite example - few almost self explaining rules and if you show this to someone that did not play it before and he will be lost for days or weeks at a time (if it comes to predicting consequences of two players laying stones according to those few simple rules).
And then, after they learn anything about this game, change one rule (allow for two moves in a turn for example) and see how they are lost again...
It's almost like in the quote from Feynman (this is more a paraphrase because I do not remember correct phrasing, only the general idea) - "People do not understand what it really takes to know anything".
This phenomenon might be seen almost everywhere, but I find it that using cellural automata (Game of Life anybody?) and abstract board games with limited rules is the easiest way to show people that they are actually really not that far from children if it comes to imagining consequences of few rules interacting with each other on scale greater than 10-20 moves ahead.
Go board game is my favourite example - few almost self explaining rules and if you show this to someone that did not play it before and he will be lost for days or weeks at a time (if it comes to predicting consequences of two players laying stones according to those few simple rules).
And then, after they learn anything about this game, change one rule (allow for two moves in a turn for example) and see how they are lost again...
It's almost like in the quote from Feynman (this is more a paraphrase because I do not remember correct phrasing, only the general idea) - "People do not understand what it really takes to know anything".