The Chess Master and the Computer, a book review by Garry Kasparov

I recently got my first smartphone and I’ve so far used it for chess more than any other application. I’ll start a game while morning coffee is brewing, play it throughout the day whenever I have time, and finish just before bedtime. Though I’ve set the chess program at the lowest level (it only thinks for one second as opposed to one minute, or five) , I have never managed to be handed anything less than demoralizing defeat from my cell phone’s microprocessor. It doesn’t just hurt when I lose, it megahertz.

But I feel better today after reading Kasparov’s review of Chess Metaphors, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman. He puts my recent failure in perspective.

The number of legal chess positions is 10⁴⁰, the number of different possible games, 10¹²⁰. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game.

At the article’s conclusion, Kasparov offers some insightful comments regarding poker as the “game for our times.”

Algorithmic game theory

Noam Nisan, a computer science professor at Hebrew University, recently started a blog on algorithmic game theory. If you’re like me, you immediately wondered what this even means—a topic handled in the first real post:

When Eva Tardos, Vijay Vazirani, Tim Roughgarden and myself were editing our book on Algorithmic game theory we knew that we wanted to cover this general area (from a somewhat focused perspective due to our theoretical-CS background), but we were not really sure what to call it — neither the book nor the area. Christos had a strong opinion what the field should be called Algorithmic Game Theory, so we decided to stick with that for our book as well. While the name itself is somewhat imprecise (I personally am missing “Internet”, “Markets”, and “Computation” in the name, but you can’t have it all in a snappy name), it seems that Christos’s naming for the field is sticking, so I’m going with it.

So far, the posts are all quite readable and interesting; I expected something a little more dense and intimidating.

Jody Williams, on collaboration via fax

Chief spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jody Williams used the fax machine to help build organizational capacity:

Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many, many issues – to feel that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning, thinking, programs, actions was important. So, instead of sending letters, I’d send everyone faxes. People got in the habit of faxing back. This served two purposes – people would really have to think about what they were committing to doing before writing it down, and we have a permanent, written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one.

The quotation comes from the FAQ section of the ICBL website.

How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.

During the final heist in Bottle Rocket, Dignan, played by Owen Wilson, discovers the guy who’s supposed to be cracking the safe might not be who he says he is.

Kumar: Man, I blew it. I blew it, man.
Anthony: Kumar, what were you doing in the freezer?
Kumar: I don’t know, man, I lose my touch, man.
Dignan: Did you ever have a touch to lose, man?

I wonder if we ever had a touch to lose.

What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?

So what if this has been bookmarked by 1,160 delicious-users and added as a favorite by 1,035 MeFites? It’s new to me.

My addition to this list would be Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. It can get a little academic at times but I think it would satisfy a layperson interested in the history of the American urban form.

What would you add?

Blurts and collective creativity

There are four example formats for blurts that I want to consider here, although there are many others floating about that I could have discussed. They are: 1) facebook status updates, 2) twitter’s tweets, 3) moves in signtific’s forecasting games, and 4) comments in Tim Gowers’ mathematical blog. Each has a different character but each shows how the properties of length, rapidity, and openness can play into a successful conversation.

The author equates blurts to a form of brainstorming in which the participants—and not a moderator—shape the structure of the conversation.

Wikipedia in academic studies

A list of peer-reviewed papers and other academic literature with Wikipedia as the subject.

Related: Wikipedia in culture.

Pseudoscientific submission slips into science journal, Swedish stealth ships not suspected

Creationism Slips Into a Peer-Reviewed Journal
[via nielsen]
The submission was a review paper of some of the recent literature on mitochondrial interactions but the paragraph that gave it away was just a hodgepodge of lyrics from DC Talk’s Jesus Freak album.

Swedish Visby-Class Corvette Is First Operational Stealth Ship in the World

[via hawktrainer]
The ship looks really, really cool. Except for that protrusion at the top. It’s probably called a radar cone but I can’t help but think of a dunce cap, which might be a good thing. Dunce caps are named for John Duns Scotus, a 13th-century Scottish philosopher, who accepted

the wearing of conical hats to increase learning. He noted that wizards supposedly wore such things; an apex was considered a symbol of knowledge and the hats were thought to “funnel” knowledge to the wearer.

The ships are also said to be equipped with a particularly sharp version of Occam’s razor.

Charles Avery’s altermodern island
[via rodcorp]

8. When The Guardian wrote about Avery they put one of their little Bluffer’s Guide quizzes at the end, which said: “Move over YBA: He is part of a new generation of artists practicing under the banner of Altermodern. Alter what?: A term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.” (The Altermodern was covered on Click Opera here.)

I carried over the links in the original post; both are worth a visit.

Preoccupations
[via jbushnell]

A blog, just added to my NetNewsWire. See also: delicious.com/Preoccupations.

Nielsen's posts tagged Science2.0

For a while now, Daily Clique member nielsen [his blog is here] has been bookmarking articles and blogs devoted to the Science 2.0 movement—basically, massively multicollaborator online problem solving. Here are some of his recent bookmarks tagged Science2.0:

Questions of procedure from Gowers’s Weblog: Timothy Gowers updates the rules to his massively collaborative mathematics experiment. He posted the first project for this experiment a few days ago and has already received 145 comments.

Williams Math/Stat blog: The blog of the Williams College mathematics and statistics department.

For communicating ideas in the mathematics and statistics communities, the common media have been conference talks and journal articles. Neither of these options provides the freedom given by a blog.

Snark Attack: UCLA Research Dissing Technology Bombs: Clay Burell smartly dismisses a study from the latest issue of Science, which claims “multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet, and video games” have led to declines in our critical thinking and analytic abilities.

Creating an opposition between “critical thinking” and “reading and discussing,” on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog
from Terry Tao’s blog: Tao announces a blog book based on all his mathematical posts from the past year.

E. Kowalski’s blog: I’ve never been good at math but I know a dedicated blogger when I see one.

Crowdsourced math and enforced props

Above: Glowing cities under a night time sky [via migurski]. Beautiful.

Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?

[via nielsen]
One day after Michael Nielsen’s post looking at how blogging creates a new forum for solving scientific problems, Fields Medal-winner Timothy Gowers decides “to suggest a problem and see what happens.”

He’s laid down a set of twelve ground rules I think might be helpful for anyone wanting to start a similar project, even in a field outside mathematics; Gowers has obviously spent plenty of time crafting each rule. Number 6, for instance:

6. The ideal outcome would be a solution of the problem with no single individual having to think all that hard. The hard thought would be done by a sort of super-mathematician whose brain is distributed amongst bits of the brains of lots of interlinked people. So try to resist the temptation to go away and think about something and come back with carefully polished thoughts: just give quick reactions to what you read and hope that the conversation will develop in good directions.

The Mission doesn’t want chains

[via TomC]
In 2006 San Francisco voters approved Prop G, requiring Planning Commission reviews for the approval of all chain stores opening new locations. According to a map of what appear to be Census Blocks, most in The Mission voted between 70-90% in favor of Prop G. While the passage of Prop G doesn’t mean chain stores are prohibited, it does mean they now require approval from a Planning Commission whose members are often unsympathetic to their interests. Sometimes this means vacant buildings are left vacant:

ICI Paints operated a store on Market Street for 65 years but needed to relocate after its lease expired last year. The company wanted to move into the shuttered Hollywood Video, whose parent company had gone bankrupt and left longtime landlord Ken Allen without a tenant.

Allen worried that the vacant property would attract graffiti, garbage and other blight. He said he surveyed most neighbors within 300 feet of the site and found that most favored the paint store, in part because the nearest existing one is more than half a mile away.

But as part of their review, planning commissioners concluded that the property could be used for something more beneficial to the community - possibly new housing and some non-chain stores, although no developer had proposed such an alternative.

The shell of a Hollywood Video remains, at least in street view.

View Larger Map

And ICI Paints seems to have found a location a little up the street.