Posts Tagged ‘chess’
“Advantage! What is advantage?”*…
Pradeep Mutalik unpacks the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first…
Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play. This results in a built-in asymmetry, and the question arises: Should you go first or second?
Most people instinctively want to go first, and this intuition is usually borne out. In common two-player games, such as chess or tennis, it is a real, if modest, advantage to “win the toss” and go first. But sometimes it’s to your advantage to let your opponent make the first play.
In our February Insights puzzle, we presented four disparate situations in which, counterintuitively, the obligation to move is a serious and often decisive disadvantage. In chess, this is known as zugzwang — a German word meaning “move compulsion.”…
Four fascinating examples: “The Secrets of Zugzwang in Chess, Math and Pizzas,” from @PradeepMutalik.
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
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As we play to win, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that scientists involved in the OPERA experiment (a collaboration between CERN and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso) mistakenly observed neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light. OPERA scientists announced the results with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast; accounting for these two sources of error eliminated the faster-than-light results. But even before the sources of the error were discovered, the result was considered anomalous because speeds higher than that of light in a vacuum are generally thought to violate special relativity, a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics for over a century.
“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up”*…
A supposed “crisis in masculinity” is much in the public discourse these days. But as Jules Evans points out, we’ve been here before…
Last month Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson released a TV series called The End of Men, warning that American men were becoming effete, flabby and sterile. Civilization is descending into chaos, the series suggests, but that’s OK, because ‘hard times produce strong men’. It also featured a man tanning his testicles to the tune of Thus Spake Zarathustra (you can watch the trailer here).
With that Nietzschean image in mind, now seems like a good time to tell the story of President Theodore Roosevelt and his cult of manliness. Teddy Roosevelt preached a life-philosophy of vigour, and embodied this in his own romantic life. His words and deeds made him an icon to the online ‘manosphere’. Indeed, the popular website ‘Art of Manliness’ sells inspirational posters of him, and calls him ‘the patron saint of manliness’.
And yet there is a darker side to his life-philosophy. It included Social Darwinian attitudes that might makes right, only the strong deserve to survive, there are fitter and less fit races, and the white race has a right to conquer other races, while itself needing to be strengthened through eugenics. It’s a story that helps us explore some of the ways that wellness, men’s fitness, the human potential movement and ecological conservation can lead to ‘spiritual eugenics’…
The history– and the dark downside– of the “cult of masculinity,” “Teddy Roosevelt and the End of Men,” from @JulesEvans11.
C.f. also: Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin.
* Ronald Wright
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As we parse power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that software running on Deep Blue (an IBM supercomputer) became the first computer program to defeat a world champion in a match under tournament regulations.
The year before, Garry Kasparov had defeated Deep Blue (4-2). In the rematch, Kasparov won the first game but lost the second. The the next three games were draws. And the sixth game lasted only a little over an hour after just 19 moves.
“One doesn’t have to play well, it’s enough to play better than your opponent”*…
When less is, if not more, at least very amusing…
1D Chess is a fun, innovative chess variant played on a single row of 16 squares. Each player begins with one of each piece and must take their opponent’s king to win. The rules are intuitive for new and expert players alike, but offer a refreshing twist on the classic game of chess…
1D Chess— everything you need to get started. From Doctor Popular (@DocPop)
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As we simplify, simplify, simplify, we might spare a thought for Johannes Zukertort; he died on this date in 1888. A soldier, musician, linguist, journalist and political activist, he is best remembered as a chess master. Zukertort was was one of the leading world players for most of the 1870s and 1880s, but lost to Wilhelm Steinitz in the World Chess Championship 1886, which is generally regarded as the first World Chess Championship match.
“If Ancestry or its businesses are acquired… we will share your Personal Information with the acquiring or receiving entity”*…
If you’ve never before considered how valuable an asset your DNA might be, you are far behind. Some of the biggest direct-to-consumer DNA sequencing companies are busy monetizing their large-scale genomics databases, with hopes to shape the burgeoning DNA economy and reap its rewards. And if you spit in a cup for one of these companies, your DNA might already be under the corporate control of some of the richest firms on Wall Street.
With their purchase of Ancestry.com late last year, the private equity firm Blackstone now owns the DNA data of 18 million people. And Blackstone is currently ramping up efforts to monetize the data amassed among the companies it owns. But experts say Wall Street firms’ interest in genomics poses new and unforeseen threats, and risks sowing distrust among DNA donors. Without trust, could we miss out on the genome’s real value?
Since the global financial crisis of 2008, private equity firms—which buy up and reshape diverse private companies—have quietly overtaken traditional investment banks like Goldman Sachs as the “dominant players in the financial world,” according to the Financial Times. It’s been a rough tenure so far. While private equity mega-deal hits have made billions for investors, often the companies acquired pay the price, as with high-profile flops including mismanaged music group EMI and bankrupt retailer Toys R Us. The industry has become “the poster child for financial firms that suck value out of the economy,” said U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, while introducing an act to Congress aimed at reining in private equity “vampires.”
In December the biggest, most dominant private equity company of them all, the Blackstone Group, Inc., which boasts half a trillion dollars in assets under management, made a dramatic entry into the genomics space when it bought a controlling stake in Ancestry.com as part of the deal that valued the genealogy and gene testing company at $4.7 billion. And with that one stroke of the pen, the firm acquired the largest trove of DNA data assembled by any consumer gene tester. If your own DNA sequence is included in this collection, it exists on servers somewhere along with the genomes of 18 million people from at least 30 countries.
Announcing the deal, David Kestnbaum, a senior managing director at Blackstone said he foresees Ancestry growing by “investing behind further data, functionality, and product development.” At the same time, many privacy-concerned watchers had the same question: How does Blackstone aim to monetize Ancestry’s massive database, which includes users’ most sensitive genomic data and family histories?
Those lingering worries were ignited in the final days of 2020 by revelations buried in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and unearthed by Bloomberg, that showed Blackstone will begin to “package and sell data” from the companies it acquires as a fresh revenue stream.
For any entrepreneur or investor in the genomics space who knows the industry needs investment to realize its dramatic potential, the question is vexed. Are deals that bring sensitive data under the control of private equity mega-funds a much-needed path to realizing the industry’s goals? Or do they threaten to derail the rapid progress that consumer gene science is making?…
A Wall Street giant’s big bet on Ancestry.com drives home the financial realities– and the privacy challenges– facing the consumer genomic revolution: “Is Your DNA Data Safe in Blackstone’s Hands?“
* from Ancestry.com’s EULA, September 23, 2020 (between Blackstone announcing its plan to buy and the deal completing)
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As we appraise the personal, we might send carefully-deduced birthday greetings to Samuel “Sam” Loyd; he was born on this date in 1841. A chess player, chess composer, puzzle author, and recreational mathematician, he was a member of the Chess Hall of Fame (for both his play and for his exercises, or “problems”). He gained broader posthumous fame when his son published a collection of his mathematical and logic puzzles, Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles after his father’s death. As readers can see here and here, his puzzles still delight.
Loyd’s most famous puzzle was the 14-15 Puzzle, which he produced in 1878. His original authorship is debated; but in any case, his version created a craze that swept America to such an extent that employers put up notices prohibiting playing the puzzle during office hours.
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.”*…
In the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, a burly custodian in an orphanage basement, hunched over a chess board, intrigues a nine-year-old girl named Beth Harmon, who sees him playing, under a dim light, against himself. This Mr. Shaibel can tell Beth’s a bit desperate to understand what he’s doing, and begrudgingly agrees to teach her to play. At night, high on the tranquilizers the staff administers to orphans—this is the early 1960s—she practices tactics in bed, staring up at a chess board that she hallucinates on the ceiling. Beth advances rapidly in skill, until Mr. Shaibel, who plays in a club, can no longer reserve how impressed he is at her abilities. He invites a fellow chess player, who heads the local high school chess group, to meet Beth, and recruit her. She ends up playing the boys in the club simultaneously, including last year’s champion. A crowd of students forms as she bests each one.
As I watched Beth dreamily focus on her imaginary chess board, simulating alternative possibilities, I thought about how that must be shaping her brain, particularly the part dedicated to planning and decision-making, the frontal cortex. Compared to other regions, it’s uniquely malleable, or plastic. Stanford behavioral endocrinologist Robert Sapolsky calls it “the brain’s hotspot for plasticity.” Our brains are changing, forming new neural connections and severing others all the time, of course. But at a young age the brain’s plasticity is much more pronounced. This is something that Tom Vanderbilt discussed in his Nautilus feature, “Learning Chess at 40,” in which he reports what it was like taking up the game with his four-year-old daughter. Neil Charness, a psychologist who has studied cognition through chess for years, told Vanderbilt, “If you’re talking about two novices, your daughter would probably pick things up about twice as fast as you could.” In that way it’s like learning a language—children can assimilate the game’s complex rules and action much more intuitively and quickly than an adult.
This means that chess offers a unique opportunity. It could perhaps be the ultimate window through which we might see how our mental powers shift during our lives. This is because the moves of professional chess players in games, going back over a century, are recorded, and so researchers can objectively analyze the quality of players’ moves over their career, inferring cognitive rise and decline. And that’s exactly what a recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, did…
How a game that dates from the 6th century can teach us about ourselves and how we change as we age: “Scientists Analyzed 24,000 Chess Matches to Understand Cognition.”
The study- is here: “Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run.”
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we consider our next move, we might recall that it was on this date in 1877 that the first meeting of the Manhattan Chess Club was held; the entrance fee was $1 per person and dues were $4 per year. MCC was, until it closed in 2002, the second-oldest chess club in the U.S. (The oldest, The Mechanics Library Chess Club in San Francisco, first met in 1854– and is still in operation.)
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