AI Can't Tell You Why It Did Something

The problem comes when the database and the engine go from )ach to oracle. It happens quite often that I will ask one of the students about a move from one of their games, and why he made it. If the move comes early on, the answer is almost always, "Because that's the nain line." That is, that's the theoretical move in the database, likely 5layed by many Grandmasters before. Sometimes the move isn't thery, but the student prepared it with the help of an engine, so the anwer is similar: "It's ...

 How An Idea Makes Something Valuable

White people discovered the Galapagos Islands in 1535 when a Spanish ship came upon them after being blown off course by a storm. Nobody was living there, nor were remains of any human settlement ever found there. This unlucky ship wished nothing more than to carry the Bishop of Panama to Peru, never losing sight of the South American coast. There was this storm which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea. But when...

 A Chess Metaphor for Understanding Physics Through Science

One way, that's kind of a fun analogy in trying to get some idea of what we're doing in trying to understand nature, is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, let's say, and you don't know the rules of the game, but you're allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, in a little corner, perhaps, and from these observations you try to figure out what the rules of the game are, what the rules of the pieces moving are. You might discover after a bit, for ex...