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...

 Reading Wars of the 1990s

WHOLE-language theory holds that learning to read and write English is analogous to learning to speak it -- a natural, unconscious process best fostered by unstructured immersion. In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from ...

 Redundancy of English language is a Goldilocks zone for C...

In Shannon’s terms, the feature of messages that makes codecracking possible is redundancy. A historian of cryptography, David Kahn, explained it like this: “Roughly, redundancy means that more symbols are transmitted in a message than are actually needed to bear the information.” Information resolves our uncertainty; redundancy is every part of a message that tells us nothing new. Whenever we can guess what comes next, we’re in the presence of redundancy. Letters can be redundant: be...

 Roman Arithmetic

...basic Roman arithmetic is largely rather simple, even for those of us spoiled by Arabic notation. Addition is no sweat, because complex Roman numbers already use what math pros call additive notation, with numerals set beside one another to create a larger number. VI is just V plus I, after all. To add large numbers, simply pile all the letters together, arrange them in descending order, and there’s your sum. CLXVI plus CLXVI? CCLLXXVVII, or CCCXXXII. And one of the advantages of the Rom...

 Children Are Naturally Skeptical of Santa Claus

First, researchers asked children between the ages of 3 and 9 about the possibility of various extraordinary events, some possible and some impossible. None of the events were related to Santa or to Christmas. (Shtulman used his own 4-year-old son as a “data point” in the study.) Next, the researchers asked children to help write a letter to Santa. Although children were free to include whatever they wanted, they were specifically encouraged to ask Santa some questions. “What we found...

 Phonetic Orthography in Spain and Italy

Fonetic spelling, in one form or another, has been, and is now, used by progressiv teachers in England and America as an introduction and an aid to the study of the current orthografy. Their experience is that children can spel correctly that is, fonetically the words they ar able to pronounce, as soon as they hav learnd the alfabet employd, and the principle of combining letters into sillables. In languages such as Italian and Spanish, that hav approximately fonetic alfabets, appro...

 Spelling is an Invention, and May be Modified

Spelling was invented by man and, like other human inventions, is capable of development and improve- ment by man in the direction of simplicity, economy, and efficiency. Its true function is to represent as accurately as possible by means of simbols (letters) the sounds of the spoken (i. e. the living) language, and thus incidentally to record its history. Its prov- ince is not, as is often mistakenly supposed, to indicate the derivations of words from sources that ar in- accessible...

 The Many Ways of Representing Sounds in English Spelling

English spelling, owing to the conditions that gov- ernd the growth of the English language, now presents many anomalies. The same letter, or combination of letters, often represents many different sounds; while the same sound is often represented by many different letters, or combinations of letters. The combination ough, for example, represents at least 9 different sounds in the words cough, rough, though, through, plough, hough, thorough, thought, hiccough; and the sound of e in ...

 English Spelling Risks Becoming Like Chinese Ideograms

Indeed, the present tendency in the scools is to dis- regard the fonetic basis of English spelling, and to treat the written and printed words as ideografs like Chinese the pupils being taught to recognize a word by its appearance as a whole, rather than by a f util attempt to analize the supposed sounds of the letters composing it. Vast amounts of mony and incalculable years hav been spent in efforts, never wholly success- ful, to teach children to memorize the intricate and unreaso...

 What Students Should Develop During Pre-K and Kindergarten

Language skills At entry to first grade, students will need to have had a broad array of language experiences. Oral language, vocabulary, and other language concepts are crucial foundations for success in reading, especially reading comprehension. In particular, children need to be able to use language to describe their experiences, to predict what will happen in the future, and to talk about events that happened in the past. Early childhood programs can develop children's language by givin...