Chess versus poker

I stopped playing chess on a regular basis a long, long time ago.

When I DO play abstract strategy games, I usually play go.

Once upon a time, though, I was a serious player: a member of the United States Chess Federation (USCF), a player in tournaments, even a (losing) contender for the run-off to challenge for the championship of the US Virgin Islands.

Of the many world chess championships, many have been spectacular failures. There have been lunatics, apparatchiks, and monomaniacs (of course, being a monomaniac might be a prerequisite for being the world's best at almost ANYTHING). One that I've admired, though, has been Kasparov, who wrote this article about chess and computers:

erhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.

These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites.

Perhaps the current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker is not a wholly negative one. It may not be too late for humans to relearn how to take risks in order to innovate and thereby maintain the advanced lifestyles we enjoy. And if it takes a poker-playing supercomputer to remind us that we can't enjoy the rewards without taking the risks, so be it.

HT, again, MR!

Most useless dating advice of the month

I rather enjoyed this article, but there was a glaring omission.

The article describes how men's dance moves were judged by women, and "women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone." So if you're a guy, and you want to glitter underneath that disco ball, just make sure you are exposed to plenty of testosterone while you are still in the womb.

In case you're wondering, yes, I had a high level of prenatal testosterone (PT). The way they determine this is to compare the length of your index finger to that of your ring finger. If your ring finger is longer, high level of PT. The bigger the disparity, the higher the PT.

Interestingly, and I have no idea what this means - if anything, the difference is greater on my right hand than my left: 1/2 a fingernail compared to 1/4 a fingernail.

Fun article, but couldn't they have given the poor male readers at least ONE dance move guaranteed to look good?

HT MR

Quote of the Day

And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to become devout myself but it has not come.
- Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms"

Quote of the day

"The way to interpret his intentions is not by his words but by his entrails."
- myself, in reference to a rather duplicitous player

Quote of the day

"As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door."

-- Fareed Zakaria, via MR

Haiti

A bit late on this - but if you're wondering where to donate, Professor Cowen has advice.

Quote of the day

"A Shanghai hospital cultivated and reintroduced human brain tissue in 2002 after taking a sample from the end of a chopstick implanted in a patient's frontal lobe following a disagreement at a restaurant."

HT Marginal Revolution

Quote of the Day

You have a splendid rank. I don't want you to have any more rank. It might go to your head. Oh, darling, I'm awfully glad you're not conceited. I'd have married you even if you were conceited but it's very restful to have a husband who's not conceited.

A Farewell To Arms (Hemingway)

Quote of the day

"I want to tell you I used a calm voice, but I worry I used a psycho, calm-before-the-storm voice."
- Penelope Trunk

Really hitting where it hurts.....

Pretty much the same week we had the underwear bomber, the coffee machine at work failed. This turned out to be failure from ordinary wear and tear rather than sabotage by extremists, but it DID make me think...

The security around coffee machines is so much less intense than we see around airports, and America is so dependent on its caffeine of its productivity - wouldn't it make more sense for terrorists to strike at the coffee machines instead, leaving American workers bleary?

Also, it has the (inexplicable) advantage of not being seen as a capital crime!

Quote of the Day

There's no such thing as a "pretty good" alligator wrestler.

- Book title

A Christmas Carol on the Defense

Finally somebody thinks to defend poor Scrooge.

HT Volokh Conspiracy

Process counts....

Megan McArdle points out how much damage the effort of forcing a vote on health care did to the actual process of legislation. Her two biggest beefs are writing the bill to fit budget guidelines - this is done as thought trying to solve a puzzle game, with no consideration of what the bill will do to the actual budgets of the future. The other is an attempt to legislate what can be legislated - actually putting a clause into the bill that attempts to make it impossible (or at least difficult) to ever alter the bill in the future.

Looks like I'm NOT the only one!

Running that way.

Quote of the day

Paying lots of money to stop having sex with hot women seems an odd thing to do. From my experience he could take up playing Dungeons and Dragons and have the same result for a lot less money.

- Coyote

Alternative Medical Center

HT Coyote

Diversity in conservatism

This DOES sound like the make-up of one of those super-hero teams.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as does fighting super-villains.

Definition of the day - schadenhorny

OK, it hasn't made it into the dictionaries yet, but it is the lustfulness engendered by pondering other people's relationship problems.

Park rangers and bear hugs

I love this series, I've read from #1 to #1426 of the archived series, and am reading the dailies as they come.

Sadly, soon I'll have reached the middle, where all the archived ones have been read.
Fortunately, the dailies are still coming in.

Click on the comic and it will take you to the site and it will give you a chance to read them ALL:

Invictus

Normally, you'd find it hard to get me to go to a sports movie with a cattle prod. But with Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela (reportedly, Mandela had been quoted as saying that if somebody were to play him, and he could choose the actor, he'd pick Freeman) and Clint Eastwood directing, I didn't put up much of a fight.

Touching, great performances, not a boring moment. Worth seeing, even if you didn't think the original poem "..I am the captain of my soul..." was all that.