Showing posts with label New York Review of Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Review of Books. Show all posts

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Jeopardy, Fischer, anthropology, phone-a-friend

Random links....

Stanley Fish discusses Hubert Dreyfus's critique of AI.  And Kasparov opines...

White to play
Can you evaluate this position more accurately than Rybka?
If so, why?

Sevan Muradian told me that Robert R. Desjarlais's Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard looks like interesting reading.




Garry Kasparov reviews Frank Brady's Endgame.  Mig discusses that review, too.


And guess who was on the Georgian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Playing chess with Kubrick

From the New York Review of Books.

2001 is not the only Kubrick movie featuring chess: there's a great New York chess club scene in The Killing.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Kasparov waxes philosophical

...in the forthcoming New York Review of Books:

There is little doubt that different people are blessed with different amounts of cognitive gifts such as long-term memory and the visuospatial skills chess players are said to employ. One of the reasons chess is an "unparalleled laboratory" and a "unique nexus" is that it demands high performance from so many of the brain's functions. Where so many of these investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent. Programming yourself by analyzing your decision-making outcomes and processes can improve results much the way that a smarter chess algorithm will play better than another running on the same computer. We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software.