The Pig sends along the link. It’s great sport.

The Pig adds:

I hope someone comes up with The Catcher in the Rye video game next. Go from prep school to the big city to the loony bin, taking out phonies along the way, with a bonus round of Holden catching as many children falling over the cliff as he can in 30 seconds.

Back in 1997, Charles Krauthammer wrote what might be the best piece done on Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov. It’s absolutely worth revisiting today. Sample:

On May 4 in New York City, a computer demonstrated subtlety and nuance in chess. A more general intelligence will require a level of complexity that might take decades more of advances in computer speed and power. (Not bad, actually, considering that it took nature using its raw materials three billion years to produce intelligence in us.) And it will take perhaps a few centuries more for computers to reach the final, terrifying point of self- awareness, contingency, and autonomous will.

It is, of course, a very long way to go from a chess game on the 35th floor of the Equitable Center to sharing the planet with logic monsters descended distantly from Deep Blue. But we’ve had our glimpse. For me, the scariest moment of the match occurred when Murray Campbell, one of the creators of Deep Blue, was asked about a particular move the computer made. He replied, ” The system searches through many billions of possibilities before it makes its move decision, and to actually figure out exactly why it made its move is impossible. It takes forever. You can look at various lines and get some ideas, but you can never know for sure exactly why it did what it did.”

You can never know for sure why it did what it did. The machine has already reached such a level of complexity that its own creators cannot trace its individual decisions in a mechanistic A to B to C way. It is simply too complicated. Deep Blue’s actions have already eclipsed the power of its own makers to fully fathom. Why did Blue reposition its king’s rook on move 23 of Game Two? Murray Campbell isn’t sure. Why did Adam eat from the apple? Does his maker know?

We certainly know the rules, the equations, the algorithms, the database by which Deep Blue decides. But its makers have put in so many and so much at such levels of complexity — so many equations to be reconciled and to ” collide” at once — that we get a result that already has the look of contingency. Indeed, one of the most intriguing and unnerving aspects of Deep Blue is that it does not always make the same move in a given position.

That’s the great Jim Treacher’s headline, and it seems pretty spot-on. I hardly know what to say, except:

1) Evidently the repeal of DADT wasn’t enough to keep Sullivan bought; the ante to stay in the hand was “gay marriage”;

2) I wonder if Sullivan is headed for Huffington circa 2000 “pox on both their houses” moment. Or if the looming specter of the most dangerous, extremist, right-wing ideologue in the history of America as the Republican nominee will scare him reluctantly back into the fold.*

My guess is that this break-up won’t take and that Sullivan will be back for more. But it’s nice to know we can add him to the list of writers having second thoughts after blithely assuring America that Obama was a super-serious guy and that anyone who thought otherwise was a racist bigot.

* Of course it doesn’t matter who the nominee is. If 2008 taught us anything, it’s that much of the left will render any Republican nominee not simply as a less desirable president than their preferred choice, but as an actual monster.

From multiple Galley Friends: An examination of what went wrong when Macho met Hulk.

Epic.

Steve Sailer highlights a little nugget from the New Yorker’s big Scientology take-out. Quick summary: The New Yorker piece is hung largely on the back of former Scientologist Paul Haggis. Haggis broke with the group after 35 years because he found that a single member of a Scientology office in San Diego signed a petition in favor of Prop. 8 and the group’s galactic national leadership declined to publicly renounce the member to Haggis’s personal satisfaction.

Makes you wonder how Haggis gets around in the world at all. I’m sure plenty of Ralph’s employees signed petitions–or maybe even voted for!–Prop. 8. Same’s probably true for In-and-Out Burger and 76 stations and banks and . . .

Joss Whedon has just wrapped up the final issue of his comic book Buffy series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8. It’s been an uneven run, with some brilliant stuff in the beginning, some bad choices and confusing plotting toward the end, and vigorous writing throughout. On the whole, not as tip-top as his Astonishing X-Men run (which might be the best thing he’s ever written), but still entertaining and engaging. Facing the final page of the issue is a little note from Whedon, in which he says the following:

The biggest challenge in Season 8 was that many years ago I wrote a Slayer comic and set it in the far future so that it could never affect Buffy’s life. I was so young. But the challenge of reconciling the optimistic, empowering message of the final episode with the dystopian, Slayerless vision of Fray’s future gave Season 8 a genuine weight. There is never progress without hateful, reactionary blowback. That’s never been more apparent than in today’s political scene in America.

There’s “hateful and reactionary blowback” in America today to President Obama’s “progress”? Are you kidding? If anything, the level of personal, as opposed to ideological, animus toward Obama is much less hateful than it’s been in at least 20 years. Consider the meanest, angriest Tea Partiers we’ve seen over the last two years and think about how they stack up to the “Bush = Hitler” crowd; or the folks who thought Clinton was running drugs out of the Mena airstrip and having aides murdered. If anything, the opposite is true: Obama’s personal approval ratings run far ahead of his job approval ratings. People tend to dislike what he’s doing to America, but they like him just the same.

But the most ridiculous part of this little jab at anyone who dares object to Barack Obama’s administration is the claim that hateful reactionary blowback has never been more apparent than in today’s politics. Never ever? Not after the Emancipation Proclamation? Not with the Civil War? Not during Reconstruction?

It’s always been clear that Whedon has the same politics as people like Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, and that’s just fine. But now it’s clear that he has the same political sophistication. And that’s kind of embarrassing.

Wait, you mean it’s not that Christopher Lee?

I have a low-rent P.J. act over at the Daily Beast.

A period-piece superhero movie. Sign. Me. Up.