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Chess computers don't have psychological faults, but they do have very distinct strengths and weaknesses, far more distinct than any equivalently strong human player would have. Today, they are so strong that most of their vulnerabilities have been steamrolled into irrelevancy by the sheer speed and depth of brute…
The possibilities of modem technology were first in practice realised in England by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accordingly, the industrial revolution started there. But the Germans explicitly realised the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science could be reached. In their technological…
...there’s no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers, when there’s everything is professional photographers. Certainly there is varying levels of skills, but we didn’t want to have a Flickr Pro anymore, we wanted…
Great players like Kasparov do not delude themselves into thinking they can calculate all these possibilities. This is what separates elite players from amateurs. In his famous study of chess players, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot found that amateur players, when presented with a chess problem, often…
Taxonomy was the biology of the scientific revolution. The opening up of the New World and the Far East provided European scientists with thousands of new species to examine and classify. Establishing botanical gardens, menageries and 'cabinets' of minerals, preserved animal specimens and dried plants were favourite…