Entry 361: Winter Break -- Woo!

Likely no entries for a few weeks.  We are headed out for the rest of 2016, going south for a much needed vacation.  I got a book loaded on my Kindle -- The Man Who Knew Infinity -- and I'm looking forward to finishing it.  It's about the mathematician S. Ramanujan.  There is a movie by the same name coming out in April, and I would feel like a fraud if I saw the movie without reading the book first.  Although the book is not as good as I was hoping thus far.  It's not bad, by any means; I'm enjoying it, but it's slow, and there isn't nearly enough math in it.  The "problem" with it is that it is written for a general audience, and I want something more technical and math nerdy.  Less culture, more conjectures!  Oh well.

It's a shame the movie isn't out already, as S and I might actually get a chance to go to the theater by ourselves.  We usually do about once a year.  Last year we saw Force Awakens, so this year maybe we will see Rogue One.  Although, honestly, I'm not that into the new Star Wars movies.  I could take them or leave them.  They would be great to watch with my kids, but they are still too young (and I've heard Rogue One is 133 minutes of war and violence).  But, hey, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon than watching a new Star Wars film -- like, say, being forced to watch Office Christmas Party.

Okay, gotta go -- a long drive awaits.  Until next time...

Entry 360: A Little Taste of Single Parenthood

It's still just me and Lil' S1 for another week.  Well, not quite a week; S gets back Friday evening, so this is the last weekend day we are alone together.  That's key.  The weekdays are relative easy/boring.  It's an hour or so in the morning mostly getting him ready for the day, and a few hours in the evening mostly getting him ready for bed.  I'm in a time pinch when I have to go into the office because of my commute, but other than that it's not bad.

But the weekends are a whole 'nother ball or wax.  Yesterday was long.  I took him to get a haircut in the morning.  Then we went to the Starbucks next door just to kill some time.  Then we got back home, the clock showed 11:00 a.m., and I thought to myself, "Great, so what do we do for the next nine hours?"  Usually we would go to the park, but it's too cold here right now.  There are indoor play areas around and things of that nature, but I'm never sure whether he's going to take to them.  If he's with a group of kids -- no problem.  But if it's just him, sometimes he just doesn't want to play, and then you're in the weird position of trying to coerce your kid into an activity that's supposed to be fun for them, because you drove all the way there and paid the $15 to get in.  You're like, "Enjoy yourself, goddammit!  Jump into that big foam pit or I'll throw you in myself!"  Actually, Lil' S1 would love it if I threw him in.  That's the other thing that happens sometimes: If there are no other kids around his age, he wants me to play with him.  This is problematic because I often physically cannot do the things he does (last time I tried to jump on a trampoline I damn near threw my back out), and because a big reason for us going is because I wanted a break.  We can play together in our basement anytime.

These interstices of single parenthood really make me appreciate full-time single parents.  It must be rough.  I mean, if I was a single parent, I would structure my life differently to help relieve some of the burden.  For example, I would move closer to my family, and I would become more involved with parent groups and play groups and things of that nature.  A big part of the reason it's hard on us when S's goes away is because we are so accustomed to having her here.  But still, I imagine there are many things that are just more difficult as a single parent, no matter how inured you get to them.

Today is nice because Lil' S1 went to some friends' house.  When our friend A found out it was just he and I for a few weeks, she offered to take for him for a day, and I said "yes" without thinking twice.  She has three young kids, and they play together nicely, so it all works out.  I'm not exactly sure what "the day" means -- she said she will just text me when she wants me to come get him -- but I'm hoping it's closer to dinner time than lunch time.  We shall see.

Anyway, I should probably go now -- I want to take advantage of this opportunity and get some stuff done around the house -- but before I do, I wanted to link to a post by Paul Krugman about an article by Matt Yglesias.  They're about Trump's brand of populism, and how a big part of it is contrasting oneself with those snooty, lefty elitists.  It doesn't matter that Trump is, at his core, a spoiled rich kid, who was born into the aristocracy, who has never had to do any "real" work in his life, and who opposes things like unions and minimum wage increases and government regulations that would actually benefit the proletariat.  All that matters is that he says he likes fast food and guns and fossil fuels and speaking English ("this is America!") and factory jobs and even Christianity (the Bible is his favorite book, after all) -- unlike those effete coastal liberals who think they are too good for all this stuff.

It really is brilliant marketing, and while I think much of the "liberals should have seen this coming!" analysis about the election is 20-20 hindsight to the nth degree (Remember: millions more people voted for Hillary!  We weren't that wrong.), I will say that people like myself probably underestimated the appeal of Trump to some extent, because we thought: Not that many people are stupid enough to fall for this, right?

And therein lies the rub.  In many ways, the white working class is right about people like me: We do think we're better -- not that our lives are any more valuable or that our experiences are any more meaningful.  We don't think we are more deserving of existence.  But we do think that we're smarter, or at least that we have more knowledge, and we can leverage this knowledge into a better country for everybody, if we could somehow get through to people.  We have good reasons for being the way we are.  We don't like fast food, because it cause health problems; we like gun control, because the data show unfettered access to guns makes it easier to commit mass murders (especially in big, dense cities, where most of us live); we don't like fossil fuel, because we believe in the science of anthropogenic global warming; we like multiculturalism because we live in places where it works (for the most part) and because we believe the economists who tell us immigration is not the job killer it's made out to be; we like factory jobs, but we recognize that technology is moving the economy in a new direction, and we need to adapt; we're fine with Christianity, until it is used to justify discrimination or teaching pseudoscience like creationism in public schools.  We feel this way not because we're on "Team Liberal," or because we have an innate disdain for working class whites, but because we, not you, have put in the time and the energy to study these issues from an objective, scientifically-minded vantage, and these are our conclusions.

Could we be wrong about things?  Of course.  Are there things we still don't understand?  Yes, many.  But that doesn't negate everything we have to say, just like a doctor's advice about how to cure a disease isn't useless, just because we haven't completely eradicated sickness.   We are constantly walking a tightrope between being confident enough to put our ideas forward, and being humble enough to question our assumptions and conclusions.  (And this humbleness often works to our disadvantage.)

Whenever I hear about elitism, I'm reminded of my favorite Isaac Asimov quote:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

If being an elitist means thinking highly of the acquisition of knowledge so that you can make the best decisions possible, then I am a proud elitist.  And I only want elitists running the country.  My question is, why doesn't everybody?  It always comes back to this: Why can't everybody think like me?

Until next time...

Entry 359: On Chess

Distractions...

It is a pretty good time for fans of Seattle sportsball.  The Seahawks are comfortably in first place; the Sounders improbably made it to the MLS finals; and the University of Washington even more improbably qualified for the college football playoffs.  But don't worry, I'm not going to talk about these things in depth.  Of the five people whom I know read this blog regularly not a one of them is interested in Seattle sports.  I am however going to talk about a different sport -- kinda: chess.

Magnus Carlsen, a 26-year-old Norwegian chess wunderkind, retained his title of "Greatest Chess Player Alive" (probably "ever," honestly), by defeating Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin in the World Chess Championship on Wednesday.  The match was incredibly close, which was not expected, but Carlsen, the heavy favorite, ultimately pulled it out in "overtime."  This event likely would have come and gone without my notice had I not heard it discussed on a podcast.  I don't follow chess regularly, but it's a great subject to do a deep dive on, so every now and then I will go down the chess rabbit hole, and this match gave me a great opportunity to do so.

[The baby-faced kid who runs the dining hall in your dorm?  No!  The greatest chess player ever.]

I've tried on several occasions to take up playing chess, but it has never really stuck.  I never felt like I was making much progress as a player.  I would read annotated games and have little idea why one move was better than another, even after it was explained.  When I would play (usually against a computer) my entire strategy was to set up a very focused, multi-move siege on one of my opponent's major pieces.  And then as I was carrying it out, my opponent would either (a) move the piece to safety; (b) take one of my major pieces that I had left unprotected because I was too focused on my attack.  Then I would lose.

Also, chess is a game with an extremely steep "entry fee," meaning in order to be good you have to do a lot of tedious memorization.  With the aid of computers, people have mapped out thousands upon thousands of different opening sequences, and if you don't learn them, you simply can't compete with somebody who has.  It's like Scabble in that if you don't have the dictionary more or less completely memorized, you will never be a top player no matter how good you are at actually playing Scrabble.

But chess is very different from Scrabble in that there is no randomness to it.  It never comes down to the luck of the draw.  This is both good and bad.  It's good in that it's pretty much as "fair" a game as you can possibly have -- our wits against your opponent's.  It's bad in that this can make games boring to follow.  When both players of a chess match are really good, ties are overwhelmingly likely (in the 12 regulation games, Carlsen and Karjakin drew 10 of them), and games often turn on a single misstep.  You rarely see amazing comebacks and swings in win-expectancy like you do in Scrabble or poker or a game in which luck is an integral part.  Now, there are variations of chess that are more exciting, and you can induce action by making players move more quickly (this is how they break ties in official matches -- they continually decrease the amount of time on the players' clocks until somebody wins outright), but I think a lot of "true" chess aficionados view this as a bastardization of the game -- like how many soccer fans don't like penalty kicks as a tie-breaker.

Another reason I'm interested in chess is the a.i. aspect.  It's the perfect human-vs.-machine game -- or at least it was.  It's not much of a competition anymore.  The decision is in: Machines won.  There is a good documentary Game Over about the (in)famous 1997 match in which IBM's Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in disputed (by Kasparov, at least) fashion.  (Apparently you can watch the entire movie on YouTube.)  But the whole thing seems quite quaint now, given that I could probably download a free chess app on my phone that could defeat Magnus Carlsen with ease.

But don't despair, fellow human, Skynet isn't taking over just yet.  Although the best chess algorithm can defeat the best human, a decent chess player with the aid of a computer can defeat the best computer by itself.  There is a whole new variant of chess called centaur chess (or advanced chess) in which humans compete against each other, but the use of computers is completely legal.  The best players are those who can effectively manipulate computers to look for good moves, but not rely completely on the output from a single program.

In general, this is the way humans "stay ahead" of computers.  We use them to make ourselves smarter (and if you believe futurist Ray Kurzweil, we are not that far away from cyborg brains).  Computers can do amazing things like, say, solve difficult math problems or fill in crossword puzzle grids (y'know, for people who are into math and crossword puzzles), but the best work is still done by a human using a computer as a tool.  People aren't obsolete yet.  Also, when it comes to Terminator 2 style takeovers, there is another thing we have to consider: We can still turn computers off.  They aren't sentient beings.  That's a pretty big thing.  Imbuing a previously inanimate object with a sense of self is not exactly a trivial accomplishment.

When it comes to chess a.i. specifically, I have some personal connections.  When I was about ten I set out to "solve" chess.  That is, I was going to write down every possible combination of moves, so that when I played, I could just follow along in my master book of moves and never lose!  This, of course, is beyond naive.  The total number of possible combinations of chess moves is something literally unimaginable -- like if a billion people were able to write a billion moves per second for a billion days, you still wouldn't be anywhere near it.  (Note: I don't know if this is technically true or not; I'm just saying it to make a point.)  But, hey, at least I recognized that chess could, in theory, be solved by brute force enumeration.  That's not bad for a preteen.  I was just too ambitious.  If I had gone with tic-tac-toe, I probably could have pulled it off.

I remember I told my dad about my plan to solve chess, and he was like, "yeah... you're not going to do that."  And I insisted that I was, and he was like, "no you aren't."  And I again insisted that I was, and he again told me that I wasn't.  And the conversation finally ended with him telling me to go ahead and try.  (It's funny how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  I can't tell you how many conversations I have with Lil' S1 in which he insists something is true when it is clearly false.  The other day he drew a '3', and said it was an 'A'.  When I told him he was wrong, he ran into his room crying and got under his covers.  Oh well, he needed a nap anyway.)  I didn't even get past white's first move.  After I did a few pawns, I realized that perhaps my dad knew what he was talking about, and started playing Nintendo or something.

[Fisher vs. Spassky in 1972.  One of the most interesting chess matches in modern history.]

So I never did solve chess, but as a junior in high school I did program my own chess engine in computer science class: Ski-Bot the chess playing machine.  I consider it my greatest academic achievement.  I'm not being facetious.  I actually think it was a bigger accomplishment than my Ph.D. dissertation.  As a seventeen-year-old with about three months worth of programming classes, I wrote a computer algorithm that could actually play chess against the user.  Ski-Bot was by no means a great chess player, but it could whoop up on beginners, and it would always catch a mistake, so it impressed a lot of people.  I still have it on floppy disk somewhere, but I don't have an old Mac to run it on, and there is a decent chance that the magnetic tape of the disk has eroded anyway.  It's more than 20 years old after all.  So Ski-Bot might be gone forever.  But that's okay.  I'll just tell people I retired it after it beat Nat Nguyen, the best chess player in my class, much like IBM retired Deep Blue after it beat Kasparov.

Alright, I think you are probably tired chess by now (if you've even stuck it out this far), so I will call it a post.

Until next time...