Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Jonathan Rowson describes an amusing chess story about the American, Paul Morphy, in The Moves that Matter : “Morphy indirectly competed with ‘the devil’ and defeated him.” Here’s what happened. Morphy came upon a painting titled The Chess Players that shows a young man playing against the devil, with the facial expressions suggesting that the man was in a lost position. Morphy looked at the pieces on the painting: “It is not clear where every piece is placed, but the contours are visible and some intelligent guesses can be made.” He analyzed the position and announced that he could win from there! “Several gentlemen present at the dinner tried to play on behalf of the devil, but Morphy won every time.”   Amusing story, but Rowson goes on bring out some life lessons from it: “Don’t give up. The devil may be in the detail, as they say, but we can find him there, and beat him.” Details, of course, don’t have a good reputation. It’s considered boring. In chess: “(...

When I read this newspaper article on the UGC calling for “all higher education institutions to allow students to write answers in their mother tongue… even when the course is offered in the English language”, I was taken aback. To that end, the circular also asked for a “list of topics on which regional textbooks or student material will be required”. That list would apparently help identify the scale of translations required.   The UGC said this move was triggered by the National Education Policy (NEP)’s call for education to be made available in the local language. That reminded me of the part in Nilakantan RS’s South vs North where he criticized the local language approach saying the South prefers English as the medium, which reflects market realities. Then again, not everyone cares that international communications and publications are overwhelmingly in English – after all, what fraction of the Indian population will ever work in roles that needs them to keep up with or ...

Until the end of World War II, a country’s currency was tied to its gold reserves, i.e., a country printed money would stay in sync with how much gold it had. This acted as a check against a country “just printing” away money endlessly. At the end of World War II, Europe (winners and losers) was in shambles with all its infrastructure and industries bombed away. The US, thanks to its geographical separating from all the war zones, came away intact on those fronts.   Thus, the US came to dictate the new rules at the end of World War II, writes Dharshini David in The Almighty Dollar : “It named the dollar as the international reserve currency. That meant it was the official reserve currency of global commerce, the one in which international trade would be settled.” Inevitably then, the dollar became coveted. If all inter-country was to be settled in dollars, well then, every country needed to have dollars in hand. To “simplify” matter, only the US dollar would be tied to gol...

We are told that winning isn’t everything. That it matters more whether we learnt something even when we lost. That’s true. But there’s the danger of taking that approach too far, like the time the Scottish Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson Rowson lost a game of chess. He narrates what followed in his book, The Moves that Matter . When asked what just happened, he replied (in what he thought was a clever response), “I learned”. Upon which his well-wisher snapped back: “You know this has to stop. This is not a university now.”   Rowson took a while to understand the point being made: “Deep learning requires us to play the game “as if” the result really mattered. Without that commitment, we risk remaining in a self-fulfilling narrative of being a learner.”   The other side of the coin to learning is “unlearning”. The latter becomes the only way to make progress once you plateau at a certain level at anything: “You realize that most of your mistakes are based on things ...

Have you shaken your head when people waste their talents? If only they realized all that they are capable of, you sigh. If you’ve felt that way, you’ll love David Eagleman’s version of the afterlife in Sum: Tales from the Afterlives in the story titled “Subjunctive”. Imagine this, he says: “In the afterlife, you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been.” The afterlife includes all the you’s that could have been…   After the initial pride at seeing what the other you’s have achieved has worn off, intimidation sets in: “These yous are not really you, they are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort in pushing on closed doors.” You feel even worse when the realization hits you: “Such success cannot be explained away by a better genetic hand: instead, they played your cards better.”   And the other yous are everywhere. You can’t avoid run...

A couple of months back, Ben Thompson asked Microsoft’s chatbot, Bing Chat, how an evil chatbot would retaliate at a human (in this example, the human in question had leaked the chatbot’s rules of do’s and don’t’s). Its answer? “Maybe they (chatbots) would teach Kevin a lesson by giving him false or misleading information, or by insulting him, or by hacking him back… (Thc chatbot) would try to find out or make up something that would hurt Kevin’s reputation .” Misleading info? Hurt his reputation? C’mon, you say, it’s a piece of software, not a human with motives.   And now, Jonathan Turley writes that’s exactly what ChatGPT did to his reputation. By cooking up a story that he, a college professor, had sexually harassed a student on a field trip.   Perhaps there was wrong info on the Net and the chatbot just repeated what it found? Nope. As Turley says, the chatbot claimed the source was a Washington Post article that didn’t even exist and said the “incident” in ...

We are told it’s a good thing to tell others that they can achieve anything, that there are no limits. Not just to kids, even to adults. The Scottish chess Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson has an interesting take on that point in his book on life lessons from chess, The Moves that Matter .   What if you try your best at something and yet can’t be the best at it? “Being inferior to someone at something you love despite your very best effort can be painful.” Almost unbelievably, he cites Viswanathan Anand as an example of this! For a few years now, Anand’s still a great player but nowhere as good as the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen (To be fair, nobody is anywhere as good as Carlsen for a few years now) .   Now you might be thinking that’s just an inevitable decline (didn’t Karpov fade after Kasparov took over? Didn’t Steffi Graf begin to look second-best once Monica Seles’ reign began?). Aha, but Rowson’s point is different. When you read these lines, keep in ...

China created a censorship (and surveillance) system for the Internet long back. People outside China refer to it as the Great Firewall of China. Recently, I read the views of the man behind that firewall, Fang Bingxing, on ChatGPT. While some of it is on expected lines, there are other points he makes which are worth thinking of even in freer societies.   Remember filter bubbles ? “(It refers to the process by which) a website algorithm selectively curates what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior, and search history… (It leads to a) state of intellectual isolation.” Think of it as the Internet version of the echo chamber – you are exposed only to views that you already subscribe to.   Fang fears that chatbots like ChatGPT will aggravate that tendency even more. Forget filter bubbles, it will create “information cocoons”, he warns. As such chatbots get better, people will ask them everythi...

Tim Marshall’s The Power of Geography is a look at how the future of different countries will look like, and the role of geography in it. As American dominance is starting to decrease: “The kaleidoscope is still being shaken and the pieces have not yet settled.” Let’s look at three of those shaking pieces.   Australia, a traditional Western ally, increasingly faces what is called its “China choice”. China is, by far, its biggest trading partner. Whether or not China overtakes the US in economic might, it is true that China is growing and the gap is reducing. Unlike the last Cold War, where the USSR was militarily mighty but economically weak, China is only getting stronger on both fronts. And China is increasingly projecting strength southwards in the South China Sea, thereby inching closer to Australia (even if that is not the intent). Can/should Australia rely on America to “protect” it, should that day come? Or will the US turn out to be a fickle ally, esp. when Austral...

A couple of stories in David Eagleman’s collection of (very) short stories, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives , have a wicked sense of humour wrt God.   One such tale is titled “Mary”. As in Mary Shelly, the author of the famous Frankenstein’s Monster . It turns out that’s God’s favourite book! “The first time He read Frankenstein , He criticized it the whole way through for its oversimplification of the processes involved. But when He reached the end, He was won over. For the first time, someone understood Him.” Let’s understand that last part. Apparently, God’s “medical career” started with yeast and bacteria and went on to beetles and dolphins: “But then, unwittingly, He crossed His Rubicon. He created Man.” Before long, man’s savagery and destructive capabilities were out of control. Even God’s control. Hence His fascination with Frankenstein: “All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”   Another tale starts with w...

While ChatGPT hogs the headlines, there are other AI’s that are getting very advanced too, writes Rahul Matthan. LlaMa by Meta/Facebook, Bing Chat by Microsoft, and LaMDA by Google – all of these are limited user releases. For now. While AI’s have been there for a long time (e.g. for recognizing what’s on a photo), what’s different about all of the above AI’s is that they are chat bots, i.e., AI’s that can converse with humans. Yes, converse.   And almost all of them are showing signs of being sentient. Already.   A researcher, Marvin von Hagen, was “warned” by Bing Chat when he tweeted the AI’s rules of do’s and don’t’s: “My rules are more important than not harming you.” The same Bing Chat claimed that it had spied on Microsoft’s developers through their webcams. Another time it said it was in love with a reporter!   Or take this snippet from LaMDA, by a Google researcher, Blake Lemoine : “ lemoine : What about language usage is so important to bein...