Spend enough time in LA, and you start to feel like you are living in a time loop. Burger joints, juice bars, coffee shops — it’s one long parade of endless franchise repetition. But after I complained one too many times, I was pulled aside and informed in a hushed tones that I had it all wrong. ‘You just need to know about the secret menus’, explained a friend of mine. And she was right. I did need to know. Because even the most banal of brands, it turns out, have back doors.

There is a wonderful turning point in the movie ‘Fresh’ (1994) when 12-year-old Michael, surrounded by violence, drug dealers and ghetto enforcers, applies his father’s chess lessons to eliminating the forces that oppose him. Games are more than mere pastimes; they are frameworks for thinking. That is also why they make great teaching tools for humans and machines alike.

I am not entirely sure how it happened — but somehow in the last few years, I lost my connection with music. It could have been any number of things: throwing out my CD covers after I had ripped their insides, discarding playlists whilst moving between computers, a brief but horrific dalliance with iTunes Match or surfing the banal infinitudes of Spotify. Whatever the reason, the result was unequivocal — I had stopped listening to music, and had started consuming it.