February 17th, 2011
First the candy. Maureen Tkacik’s NY Observer profile of Lawrence O’Donnell:
That Mr. O’Donnell somehow emerged from an Irish Catholic upbringing in working-class Boston calling himself “Lawrence” in the age of Larry Bird dovetails with his other known affectations: His earliest recorded flirtation with punditry is a 1985 New York Times op-ed on the superiority of designer Italian suits to the Brooks Brothers numbers he wore before an episode of Miami Vice inspired him to tour Barneys. (More recently WWD touched off a predictable memelet by noting the provenance of his socks as something called Seize sur Vingt.) His life took a fateful turn around the time of his sprucing up, when he took a sublet in the apartment of Maura Moynihan, whose cartoonish dilettantishness–she was a performance artist in the midst of a conversion to Tibetan Buddhism–no doubt cast her roommate in a favorable light when she introduced him to her late and lionized father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then senior senator from New York. By all accounts, he was smitten by his pompous pupil, and a reluctant politico-cum-pundit career was launched.
That’s what you get for opposing HillaryCare, bucko.
The good stuff is per Galley Friend A.K.’s recommendation of Kasparov’s own NYRB account of his loss to Deep Blue. It’s very, very good. Sample awesome:
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
And:
Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.
Kasparov remains a hauntingly interesting mind.
One last thing: Ken Jennings has a piece in Slate. It’s clever and a fun read, but the most interesting part is this bit about Daily Doubles:
In the final round, I made up ground against Watson by finding the first “Daily Double” clue, and all three of us began furiously hunting for the second one, which we knew was my only hope for catching Watson. (Daily Doubles aren’t distributed randomly across the board; as Watson well knows, they’re more likely to be in some places than others.) By process of elimination, I became convinced it was hiding in the “Legal E’s” category, and, given a 50-50 chance between two clues, chose the $1200 one. No dice. Watson took control of the board and chose “Legal E’s” for $1600. There was the Daily Double. Game over for humanity.
Argyle February 17, 2011 at 5:30 pm
For an amazingly prescient look at computers in chess tournaments, read Fritz Leiber’s excellent “64 Square Madhouse” from 1962.
One of the grandmasters intentionally beats the computer by finding a typo in the chess book it was programmed from. Similar to Kasparov’s previous defeat of Deep Blue, when the computer program had a bug that prevented it from castling.
Kasparov’s reaction to Deep Blue’s play from the second game on, after which he seemed almost intimidated by the computer, is also reflected in the story. One grandmaster first insists on screens to block the computer from his sight, as the blinking lights distract him. Once they’re in place he insists they be removed, as the thought of what the machine might be doing unseen is even more unnerving.
The change in the computer’s playstyle may also have been predicted. The computer beats one grandmaster because its programmers bet everything on the grandmaster’s known proclivity for the French Defense, unnerving the human.
Or take Kasparov’s adamant stance that his resigned game was (in hindsight) could have been a win. One grandmaster in the book makes almost the exact same claim to a draw.
It even predicts that the future of chess belonged to human-computer pairs, with each taking the lead as appropriate.
Finally, it’s a cracking good story.