Kasparov was the John Henry of Chess

HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from laughably weak to nearly unbeatable during my twenty years as the world's top chess player. As we will see, this is a pattern that has repeated over and over for centuries. Pe...

 A Computer Algorithm for Randomization

Back in the early days of computers, one of the more popular methods of generating a sequence of random numbers was to employ the following scheme: 1. Choose a starting number between 0 and 1. 2. Multiply the starting number by 4 ("stretch" it). Subtract 4 times the square of the starting number from the quantity obtained in step 2 ("fold" the interval back on itself in order to keep the final result in the same range). 3.Given a starting number between 0 and 1, we can use the proce-dureâ€...

 Game Play Informs Real World Play

For Molly, computer play in a simulated world connected strongly with off-line play. It reinforced her desire to create fictional worlds of her own. And it helped sharpen her understanding of that creative endeavor. In evaluating the imaginative and creafive worth of childhood activities, of course, this is the gold standard: that reading or watching television, that trips to the theater, to art and science ce museuns, an and id yyes, that play with computer games should stimulate personal en...

 Understanding the Education Customer

VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality ...

 Steps to Colonizing Space

The third technological revolution which I see coming is the expansion of life's habitat from Earth into the solar system and beyond. This revolution may take a little longer than the other two. Perhaps it may take as long as a hundred years from now. In charting a possible course for this revolution, I take as my guide Ben Finney, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii who has made a detailed study of the Polynesian navigators and their voyages of colonization from island to island ac...

 Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review (SQR3)

Survey The first step, survey or skim, advises that one should resist the temptation to read the book and instead glance through a chapter in order to identify headings, sub-headings and other outstanding features in the text. This is in order to identify ideas and formulate questions about the content of the chapter. Question Formulate questions about the content of the reading. For example, convert headings and sub-headings into questions, and then look for answers in the content of the ...

 All Must be Accomplished with Existing Human Material

To the social philosopher and the enlightened social reformer, and best of all to the plain citizen taking thought of these matters, the first step in the right direction, the first basic principle that must underlie an understanding of the present Social Disorder and be imbedded in the foundation of the Social Order to come, should be the real and effective recognition that all that may be accomplished must be accomplished with the existing human material. Not Angels.

 Strategy of Predator Satiation

An effective strategy of predator satiation involves two adaptations. First, the synchrony of emergence or reproductions must be very precise, thus assuring that hte market is truly flooded, and only for a short time. Secondly, this flooding cannot occur very often, lest predators simply adjust their own life cycle to predictable times of superfluity. If bamboos flowered every year, seed eaters would track the cycle and present their own abundant young with the annual bounty. But if the perio...

 There is No End to Mechanical Progress

[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.

 The Evolutionary Unit of Measurement

The starting point of Darwin's theory of evolution is precisely the existence of those differences between individual members of a race or species which morphologists for the most part rightly neglect. The first condition necessary, in order that any process of Natural Selection may begin among a race, or species, is the existence of differences among its members; and the first step in an enquiry into the possible effect of a selective process upon any character of a race must be an estimate ...