Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Mind Master , Viswanathan Anand talks about the evolution of chess playing machines. “In the beginning the (chess) engines were ridiculously weak… The way they approached a problem was to consider every possible move to counter it, but because they were not looking far enough they would sometimes offer the most ludicrous solutions.”   Since computers did brute force calculations of every possible move, they could calculate only X number of moves. Yes, that number X would keep increasing, but that just moved the limit. Such a limit would sometimes led to weird situations: “For a long time… the machines would go wrong at a point where a long-term decision came into play.” While computer couldn’t calculate that far out, humans could intuitively feel it.   But even with that constraint, over time, humans began to find it increasingly difficult to beat computers. Why? “Even when we’d outplayed engines for long stretches in a game, we’d end up making a ...

In his book, Finite and Infinite Games , James Carse has this to say on the topic of the damage we do to the environment, the machines and technologies we build to make our lives comfortable, and the waste we product: “Our domination of nature is meant to achieve not certain natural outcomes, but certain societal outcomes.” Once you keep that aim (comfort, a certain way of life) in mind, it becomes obvious why it is so hard for mankind to change its approach, regardless of the damage we do to the environment. “Abandoning the strategy of power in our attitude towards nature” will have “cultural consequences”.   Nothing new in any of that, of course. Then he adds: “Nature has no outside, it has no inside”. We are part of it too. And nature is not against us. Rather: “It is the display of a perfect indifference on nature’s part to all matters cultural.” We think of earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides as random. But: “Nature is neither chaotic nor ordered. Chaos a...

Former chess champ, Garry Kasparov, wrote this very interesting book titled Deep Thinking . Once a upon a time, chess was the holy grail for machine intelligence. Claude Shannon, founder of information theory, explained why. Chess is a sharply defined game, its objective is clear, and the last reason is best explained in Kasparov’s words: “Since chess requires thinking, either a chess playing machine thinks or thinking doesn’t mean what we believe it to mean.” There was also the hope that training a computer’s guns at chess may lead to other learnings, things far deeper than chess. Unfortunately though: “Chess just wasn’t deep enough to force the chess-machine community to find a solution beyond speed… Patterns, knowledge, and other humanlike methods were discarded as the super-fast brute force machines took home all the trophies.” Which is why Google’s AI, AlphaGo, that beat the human world champion at the Chinese game Go, a game “too big of a matrix to crack by brute f...