The theme for today’s eliminations is the simplest one yet – chess.
The Seven Deadly Chess Sins by Jonathan Rowson (January 2018)
I finished this dense, insightful work from grandmaster Rowson after a year of stop and go reading. Its structure enabled this because the book was cleanly divided into seven sections. Each of the seven sections focused on one common cause for defeat in chess that Rowson had identified after a lifetime in the game. As Garry Kasparov echoes in the book I highlight below, great chess players often recognize that the biggest threat to their own success lies within. The way I saw it, this truth applies not only to chess, but also to many other aspects of life.
Parting thought: A self-organizing system uses arrival sequence to determine the storage method. This is likely to result in sub-optimal storage because it fails to account for retrieval method.
This was a great insight to pull from the book because although I’ve occasionally applied the principle by accident, I’ve never had the idea stick in my mind to serve as a guide for my storage projects. It leads me to a basic observation about organization – an organized person knows how to quickly retrieve everything.
Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov (July 2018)
Former chess world champion Kasparov is carving out an interesting post-competitive career. This book about artificial intelligence is a reflection of one aspect of his work. Kasparov’s experience of being the world’s best at the moment chess computers began to challenge top grandmasters gives him a unique perspective on the rise of machines. His observations, insights, and conclusions about our society and its increasing reliance on computer programs make for a thoughtful read.
Parting thought: Chess computers started beating humans when they took advantage of their relative strength.
One great challenge in neuroscience is developing an understanding about how people think. Until this knowledge exists, it remains impossible to ‘program’ the equivalent into a software program. This doesn’t necessarily stop programmers from trying yet it seems like the early versions of chess computers failed to reach grandmaster levels for that reason. In short, the computer fell short anytime it stopped to ‘think’ about a position in the way its programmers envisioned human thinking.
As computing power increased steadily through the 1990s, programs shifted to rely more on brute force and focus on their greater processing ability. In chess programs, this meant a focus on computing as many legal moves as possible and calculating which of these sequences put the computer in the strongest position. Computers are simply much better at counting than we are and leveraging this relative strength against top human players was the catalyst for their breakthrough against Kasparov and his contemporaries. In the final analysis, a computer’s systematic counting ability proved superior to the messier human method of analyzing positions, recognizing patterns, and adhering to overarching principles whenever faced with a novel situation.
