The Usual Suspects is the name of our mailing list of local geeks. We get together regularly for a gathering referred to as Poker Night. We then eat, drink, BS, and fail to play poker.

This one Poker Night, we were playing Apples to Apples. This is a word association game. The Judge for the turn picks an adjective, and then everyone picks a noun from their hand of 7 nouns which they think the judge will think matches the adjective the best. There is a lot of playing for the judge... The player with the most chosen nouns wins.

There is also another nominal event during the game. As everyone picks a new card to replace their played card, they go "arg, this one would have been perfect!". So, this one evening there was an experiment. Everyone would play their card, and then we picked the next card from the deck and put it in too.

You'd think that a randomly chosen card would be less appropriate than a card chosen by an intelligent player. In fact, the random card pseudo-player won. Not once, but twice in two separate sessions.

It is rather humbling to be told by empirical experiment that one is no more coherent than a randomly picked card... So we did what any other full blooded human would do in the face of mechanical intelligence. We stopped playing with it. :-)