The Importance of Being Idle

Last Time 'Till August

Yeah, its the last Bank Holiday till the end of August and as is fairly typical it's grey and overcast and looks like its about to rain (this always happens too, I mean you could have a Bank Holiday in the middle of a heatwave (so exactly like now then) and it will somehow conspire to be a crappy day. Of course, right now Bank Holidays (every day is a holiday *ironic grin*) don't mean a damn thing to me, all of my time is time off, so it's not significantly different...
Okay so last night I watched a documentary about the Garry Kasparov vs Deep Blue match. That was very interesting stuff. First I need to 'fess up and admit that I suck at chess. I know the rules, I can understand the strategy and all that, I just don't have the patience for it. I guess I am a child of the television generation, cos I need constant stimulation and chess just to keep my attention. So yeah, I really really suck at chess. What I do find interesting is the game theory though. I've been thinking for a while now if I could write a simple programme to play a game like say, tic-tac-toe, and even a game as simple and frankly pointless as that is pretty hard to do, so I was interested in how exactly the guys at IBM managed to put together a machine that could and did beat the greatest chess player the world has ever seen. Turns out that for all the programming and technical genius that these guys had to offer, the easiest thing to do wasn't to beat Kasparov, it was to have him lose. Now Kasparov is paranoid as all hell, apparently thats something that is fairly common in all chess players. His recollection of the events sure bears that out, he talks about how unfair things were, how the machine did something that a machine simply could not do. In his opinion all chess playing computers are essentially stupid and... okay, the way chess programmes work is that they are always seeking a material advantage, ie they want to have more pieces than you, so they don't understand the concept of a sacrifice. In the second game Kasparov set a trap for it which any other machine would've taken for the short term material advantage, but Deep Blue didn't fall for it and he was convinced that a human player had intervened at that point. Now He fails to take into account here that the guys who programmed this machine are pretty fucking smart and will know just as well as he does what the failings of a regular chess programme are, and will have actively programmed against that. Anyway, the point here is that from this point onwards Kasparov's mind was NEVER on what he was doing, it was always worrying away at the point he felt he was cheated. His support team were exactly no help and fuelled his paranoid fantasies. He thought he was being spied on, he thought that there was no Deep Blue and that he was in fact playing a room full of Grand Masters... basically every crazy thing he could think of. Now the thing to note here is that IBM didn't do a damn thing to calm him. He was never allowed to even SEE the Deep Blue machine, hell he couldn't even walk past the room that it was in. In fact nobody ever got to see it, as soon as the match was over Deep Blue was disassembled and that was it. I'm not saying the technical guys were in on this, cos I honestly don't think they were, but the corporate guys... well look at it this way; the day after Deep Blue beat Kasparov IBMs share price increased by 50%, and IBM went from being a dull old-school hardware manufacturer to the people who produced the 'smartest' computer in the world. I don't know if any of this adds up to a damn thing, but it seems to be that IBM corporate saw a huge opportunity for publicity and to promote their brand and they were prepared to do whatever was necessary to get it. They'd spend a lot of money on this, and I think they wanted some return on their investment...
Like I say, I don't really know if any of it adds up to a damn thing, but thats how it looks to me.
Right well thats enough of that for one morning eh? Time to... what is it that I do exactly?

posted by BadMonkey @ 9:08 AM