I recently had the opportunity to interview Milton Bradley. No, not that Milton Bradley, though there is a board game connection. I happened to stumble across Milt’s site, where he talks about the benefits of the ancient board game of Go, why he finds it far superior to chess, and how he taught it to hundreds of kids in an experimental after school program.

Perhaps most interesting to me was his claim that many of the world’s biggest problems are caused by poor decisions resulting from undeveloped reasoning skills, and that we can actually make progress towards solving them by learning this game. I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask him a few questions.

Hunter: First things first. What is reasoning, and why is it important?

Milt: Wikipedia says: “Reasoning is the cognitive process of looking for reasons, beliefs, conclusions, actions or feelings.” I prefer to think of it more simply, as “the logical mental process through which one arrives at answers to real world problems.”

My own definition appears in the Preface to my autobiography. [Bottom of the post]

Hunter: Don’t schools already teach reasoning? Maybe not explicitly as a subject in its own right, but don’t we pick it up along the way? And if not, then what is the purpose of formal education?

Milt: No, absolutely not! The emphasis in the schools is primarily on facts and the application of formulas to the solution of problems with exact solutions (e.g. math and the sciences). The vital subject of decision making in messy real world situations is really never addressed.

Hunter: You say that a full solution to the problem would require that schools teach reasoning, starting in pre-school and continuing throughout one’s entire academic career. Noting that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon, you suggest an alternative partial solution – teaching the strategy board game of Go, which can start right now.

Most people in the West have never heard of Go. I had barely heard of it until recently, and while I’m beginning to gain an appreciation for it, I know I’m far from really getting it. So I’m sure you’ve encountered a lot of people who are skeptical of your ambitious claim. Tell us, how can a board game play an important role in solving the world’s problems?

Milt: In terms of learning the process of situational appraisal and then deciding upon an appropriate strategy and the specific tactics with which to implement it, the process in Go is much like that involved in solving real world problems. So mastering the former process theoretically should help learning it in the latter, but there remains the difficult problem of skill transference from the neat, clearly defined realm of the Go board to the messy, immensely complex real world (especially considering its emotional implications). So whether or not my inference in this regard will prove correct is currently unknown.

Hunter: In the U.S., we play board games with a large element of luck, such as Monopoly, Life, and Sorry (to say nothing of roulette, the lottery, and Super Bowl squares). Eurogames, such as The Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, and Imperial, require much more thought and planning. And in Asia, they play Go and games resembling chess.

Does this tell us something about the different cultures, or am I reading too much into it?

Milt: Hard to be sure, although that’s a reasonable inference. But that’s a possibly unknowable question about historical origins which is almost entirely irrelevant to the key issue of what we do with and about the games we now play.

Hunter: I’m very interested in brain plasticity, the ability of our neurons to adapt to new experiences, an ability that decreases with age. I don’t think it’s true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but let’s face it, some tricks are much easier for young dogs. Perfect pitch is a good example; anyone is probably inherently capable of it, but if you don’t speak a tonal language or receive musical training very early, the window closes forever.

It seems that all the great Go players started learning from a very early age. Go Seigen was an exception, becoming possibly the greatest player of all time, despite not starting until the ripe old age of 9.

For people who are far older than 9, is it too late to learn Go, or reasoning?

Milt: A good question. It’s certainly harder to attain the highest levels of proficiency, and the main reason for that is that Go is a game of pattern recognition, and it seems that the brain’s ability to absorb and internalize patterns declines quickly as a child ages. And a key here that should not be overlooked is that these top players who began as small children only were able to do so because the patterns they were exposed to as young children were on a very high level, so what they learned “by osmosis” was correct. If their exposure had been to error full low level play the result would have been quite different!

Hunter: Forgive my playing devil’s advocate, but they already play Go in Japan, and that’s not exactly a utopia. Like any other country, they have their pros and cons (see my discussion with Akemi Gaines where we compared the U.S. and Japan, or my tongue-in-cheek 10 Reasons America is Better Than Japan).

Is this because Go has been insufficient to fully develop reasoning in the Japanese, or because good reasoning isn’t enough?

Milt: Both! And because of the skill transference problem I alluded to earlier. It’s relatively easy to be objective in playing Go compared to the real world where all kinds of emotional issues intrude on the decision making process. As earlier noted, this is a key issue that must be addressed.

Hunter: Being smart isn’t considered cool. Any ideas on how to change that?

Milt: What you’re talking about is a quite temporary (and manifestly counterproductive) artifact of our current prevalent “pop” culture! Our society has enough problems that we aren’t currently coming near to solving for this sort of mass stupidity to continue indefinitely without sounding its own death knell! So this will either change sometime in the fairly near future or our survival prospects will be even dimmer than they already are.

Milt’s Go Page is filled with insightful articles about the benefits of Go and his experience with teaching it to kids after school for eight years. When I asked him to write a bio for this post, he provided the entire preface to his autobiography, so read on for more content!

In January 1943, age 15 years and 10 months, I graduated from the newly created Bronx High School of Science, then arguably the best high school in the entire United States. At the same time I was also an overweight, friendless, indifferent student who was seriously contemplating committing suicide! But on my 16th birthday only two months later, thru sheer force of will I overcame that negative thinking, and began to transform both mind and body to turn my life around.

As a result, I can look back today with pride at the creative output and epiphany of my “retirement” years, which have resulted in the writing of 8 books, 3 of which are in print and one that’s published FREE on the internet, all brought to fruition after the age of 75, with the last just this year at age 82! But I’m now also unquestionably in the twilight of my life, suffering from incurable, invariably fatal Acute Myeloid Leukemia, while my 88 year old wife has fallen victim to both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. But I soldier on despite those burdens, still writing, and still hoping to see my most significant work published. This autobiography is high in that category as is my novel The Vigilante Murders, but first and foremost is what I consider to be my most important work, Reasoning And Problem Solving, which is the result of some unique insights which I believe have made my life worth living and writing about.

The primary theme of this autobiography can be viewed as the story of my triumph of wit and will over adversity. But that’s an oft told tale, not infrequently by others who’ve had far more serious challenges to overcome than mine. So a reasonable reader might question why they should be interested in a rather detailed exposition of my life and its accompanying problems, trials and triumphs. The most straightforward answer is that I believe my story is intrinsically interesting! But even more important is that it lays out the intellectual substrate upon which my sometimes unique insights were generated.

This memoir begins with a brief look at my familial pre-history, then continues by relating the events and circumstances of my childhood that brought me to the devastating state of mind noted above, in which I was prepared to prematurely end my then still very young life. It then proceeds through my WWII Navy service and subsequent “GI Bill” education, meeting my wife and beginning my now 62 year long marriage, and the many, often traumatic professional and personal triumphs and tragedies that followed during my working career.

Among the most unusual and noteworthy of my many personal interfaces detailed herein were intimate daily contact with four individuals who made local and national front page headlines! The first of these occurred at Bronx Science, when for 3 years I sat at the next desk to Harold Brown, who later went on to become US Secretary Of The Air Force in The Johnson Defense and Secretary of Defense in the Carter Administration. Slightly more than a decade after that, I spent 4 years as a Quality Control Engineer at the RCA Receiving Tube Plant in Harrison, New Jersey, working daily with John Butenko, who soon after was unmasked, tried and convicted as the second most important Soviet spy ever in the US! Fast forward another decade or so to when I was supervising the redesign of the NYC Parking Violations Bureau’s computer system, when I spent year long daily working interface with PVB’s Deputy Director Geoffrey Lindenauer, who was soon thereafter exposed as a leading conspirator in their infamous scandal! And not too long after that, Eric Klein, who had been one of my personal programmer/analyst staff at the NYC DOT, was arrested and convicted as the largest counterfeiter of subway tokens in City history!

In attempting to establish a context in which an objective assessment of this autobiography is possible, I believe that it’s essential for the reader to consider some interesting facts. Even for those few in human history who have achieved great renown, the details of their daily lives all too often don’t offer much insight into the origins of their monumental achievements.

As a result, it’s reasonable to conclude that perhaps value in an autobiography shouldn’t be sought in the facts of the author’s life, but rather in the quality of the insights that his story generates in the reader. Or at least that’s what I try to convince myself of in attempting to justify this effort.

To really appreciate the uniqueness of my insights, it would help greatly if the reader understands (and hopefully agrees with) my most important premise – that most of the world’s myriad serious problems on the personal, interpersonal, group, enterprise, national, and even international level result from a single failing – an inability to adequately Reason objectively, unfettered by biases, prejudices, loyalties, and the “canned” prescriptions and proscriptions imposed by authority figures and institutions.

Although this precept seems to violate the principle that “Simplistic solutions to complex problems are almost invariably wrong,” I believe that this case constitutes one of the rare exceptions!

To be sure that there’s no ambiguity concerning what I mean by Reasoning, I conceive it to consist of:
1. The ability to objectively perceive and analyze an often complex problem situation, and then
2. Arrive logically and unemotionally at the course(s) of action required to best resolve the significant points of difficulty and/or contention involved.

When I arrived at this key realization of the almost universal difficulty most people experience in objectively solving real world problems, I believed that I had uncovered one of the central impediments to human progress throughout its history, and one whose conquest would rank among the most significant. And I also somewhat naively expected that this insight couldn’t possibly be one uniquely developed by me, but that surely some great thinker had long since both addressed this transcendentally important problem and solved it! But I discovered to my great surprise that not only was that not true, I was unable to find any reference to the fact that anyone had heretofore explicitly acknowledged that it was a even significant issue worthy of attention!

If this seems strange or improbable, I refer the reader to a bit of history in the field of mathematics by way of analogy (recognizing that, by their very nature, all analogies are necessarily imperfect). In this (possibly apocryphal) story, when John Napier, then an unknown Scot, published his treatise on Logarithms in 1614, it was so revolutionary that the head of the prestigious British Mathematical Society made a special trip from cosmopolitan London to semi-rural Scotland to meet him. As the story goes, on finally meeting Napier, the great man from London sat for perhaps a full half hour simply staring at him before finally saying something to the effect that “How can it be that this marvelous idea (of logarithms) escaped the best minds in all of humanity for thousands of years, yet was finally discovered by someone as ordinary as you?” I, of course, make no claim to intellectual equality with either Napier himself or his accomplishment, but mention this anecdote to emphasize my favorite dictum:

The validity and worth of an idea are unrelated to:
- Who proposed it.
- How long it has been believed.
- The number and importance of those who believe it.
- The vehemence with which they profess that belief.

History is replete with instances of the entire world believing something that was later acknowledged to be manifestly false (“The world is flat”), followed by a single man proposing an idea completely at variance with then conventional, accepted thinking, and ultimately prevailing. Galileo is perhaps the best known and most often cited example of this, and Einstein is another. But they were both operating in the world of physical science, where absolute proofs are possible. In the realm of ideas in which I’m operating no such absolute proofs exist, only opinion. Despite that, perhaps, just perhaps, it’s possible that, despite the uniqueness and novelty of my insight about Reasoning, I really might have discovered something that’s worth listening to!

Although I certainly wasn’t aware of it at the time, in retrospect it now seems that creating this new Reasoning paradigm was the goal toward which all of my training and life experiences had been pointing. How interestingly I describe those experiences and whether or not any of that really provides the reader with useful insights are crucial issues that only you can properly judge for yourself after you’ve perused what follows! Hopefully the result will satisfy us both.

Anyone who values their own safety needs to read Think Like A Black Belt, by third degree black belt and martial arts instructor Lori Hoeck. This ebook is free, in exchange for your email address.

You’re not going to learn any martial arts techniques, but you’ll learn how to mentally prepare yourself to avoid danger or get yourself out of it. And that can be much more important.

As Lori says, ”Thinking like a black belt means thinking ahead, wearing a wary eye, and presenting yourself to the world in a way that makes you less visible and less desirable to the criminals and predators who populate your life.”

Her target market appears to be women and teens, but this information is applicable to anyone.

I know a guy who has absolutely no trouble defending himself. He was once attacked by a guy with a knife, and not only did he escape injury, but he broke the guy’s neck.

However, he didn’t know how to think like a black belt. When walking through an area that wasn’t even considered particularly dangerous, he was lured into an alley by a homeless woman who called him. It was a setup, and two guys robbed him at gunpoint. He wasn’t hurt and only lost $40, but thinking like a black belt would have let him avoid the whole thing.

Thinking like a black belt could also reduce the number of fatalities in something like the Virginia Tech shooting. The details aren’t clear, but by some accounts, there were long pauses during which the shooter was reloading. He would have been vulnerable during these times, but fear kept anyone from taking action.

Sure, it’s easy to say what people should have done in hindsight, but it’s very different when you’re actually in the middle of it. That’s the point. When your adrenaline is rushing in a life and death situation, it’s not easy to think straight. That’s why you need to learn how to control your adrenaline ahead of time.

Your inner warrior is ready to be awakened. Be safe, not sorry.

You’ve probably heard about Stephen Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A great book, but what could be 11 times better?* How about The 77 Traits of Highly Successful People?

This free ebook is a joint venture masterminded by Mark Foo, involving myself and 47 other personal development bloggers. The collaborative nature means a variety of different voices, but they’re all focused on one thing: how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results.

48 top notch bloggers. 77 essential success traits. 233 captivating pages. Free with your email opt-in.

* OK, maybe not 11 times better, but you get the idea.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers, Mario and Luigi. They were humble Italian American plumbers whose prospects didn’t seem particularly bright. For all their hard work, they couldn’t seem to find a better job than pest control in the New York sewers.

But one fateful day in 1985, Mario and Luigi were offered an opportunity. They were approached by a panicked citizen from the Mushroom Kingdom, who was clearly in need of help. Princess Toadstool had been captured by Bowser, king of the Koopas, and Mario and Luigi were the only ones who could save her.

Little did they know that their response to the challenge would change their lives forever.

Luigi spoke first. “Hello, mushroom man. This is most troubling news, and I certainly hope that Princess Toadstool is rescued as soon as possible. But what exactly would saving her entail? Would it be a fairly straightforward quest?”

“I’m afraid not,” the mushroom man answered. “Bowser has taken over the whole Mushroom Kingdom. Our people have been turned into inanimate objects, and Bowser’s thugs now roam the land. You will be greatly outnumbered.”

“But I’m not a fighter,” Luigi replied. “How can I defeat all these enemies? I don’t even know how to beat one of them, let alone a whole army.”

“You won’t at first,” the mushroom man said. “But you’ll learn with practice. Every enemy has a weakness that can be exploited, and once you get the hang of it, it won’t seem so hard.”

Luigi was still having grave doubts about this whole thing. “But I don’t want to have to go through a big learning curve,” he said. “I only want to face enemies that are really easy to beat, and no danger at all.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be the case here,” the mushroom man said. “Even the smallest enemy is bigger than you, and if one so much as touches you, you’ll die!”

“Egads!” Luigi shouted. “I can’t do that! Only a fool would choose to do something so risky. If I’m not sure that I can succeed, then why would I take such a big chance?”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as you think,” the mushroom man replied. “You’re more powerful than you know. You can jump on the enemies and smush them. There are also power-ups scattered throughout the land to help you. A magic mushroom will make you double in size. A fire flower will let you throw fireballs with your bare hands. And a starman will even make you invincible for a brief period of time.”

“Invincible?” Luigi asked. “That sounds a little hard to believe. Is it completely guaranteed?”

“Well, no,” the mushroom man admitted. “You would still be vulnerable in some ways. You could fall down a bottomless pit, or your time could run out. Nothing is ever perfectly safe, and you’re not immortal.”

“Now you tell me!” Luigi was now getting quite agitated. “This is starting to sound really iffy. I don’t know if I can take such a big risk. Do I have enough talent? Am I too old? Do I have enough life insurance?”

“Don’t worry,” the mushroom man said reassuringly. “It’s really not that big a risk. You’ll start out with three lives, and if you need more, you can find the hidden 1-Up mushrooms or collect coins to get extra lives. And if all else fails, you can always continue not far from where you left off. You haven’t really failed until you stop trying.”

“OK, mushroom man,” Luigi began. “Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. Yes, I’ll save Princess Toadstool, but only if you agree to my conditions. I want you to draw me a map showing the locations of all the hidden mushrooms. I want to start out with all the power-ups and infinite lives. I want to know about all the secret worlds and warp zones. I don’t want to go near fire, I don’t want to jump long distances, and I don’t want to get wet. Oh, and I also don’t want…”

The mushroom man had stopped listening by now. “Maybe I’m talking to the wrong brother,” he said. He turned to look at Mario, but he wasn’t there anymore – he was already off on his quest! Because Mario had simply decided that he was going to save the princess, and that was enough to get started. He’d figure out the details on the way.

Mario ended up saving the princess, and Luigi may have tagged along, but it was clear who was running the show. They had no choice but to name the game Super Mario Bros., and it became the best-selling video game of all time (it was finally outsold by Wii Sports in 2009, 24 years later).

Mario went on to star in many other games that bore his name, and he took his rightful place in history. He got his own TV show, movie, comics, and merchandise line. And Luigi was there for the ride, but he was always known as Mario’s sidekick.

Now, when duty calls, will you be a Mario or a Luigi?

Having discovered that perfect play in nuclear war is always a draw, “Joshua” from WarGames sees no point in playing it.

When people play games, they often make mistakes. Hopefully they learn from these mistakes and get a little better each time, uncovering the game’s secrets and inching ever closer to perfection.

If a game is simple enough, even casual players may figure out a system for “perfect play,” or a guaranteed way of choosing the best possible moves. Even if a game is complicated, expert players may still be able to get close to perfect play, not being completely flawless, but able to capitalize on an opponent’s single mistake.

Of course, if a person can play a game well, a computer probably can too. A computer can use its fantastic memory and processing power to look much further ahead, analyze many more moves, and become practically invincible. And if they get as far as achieving perfect play, you don’t even need to play them – you already know the outcome.

But is perfect play always achievable for a machine? And if not, can a human hope to play better? Here are five games, listed in order of increasing complexity, that offer a glimpse into what it takes to reach perfect play as man or machine.

Tic-tac-toe

Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that kids discover perfect play on their own. They realize that starting in the center gives the most options, and they take it from there.

Soon enough, they figure out that tic-tac-toe is what’s called a draw game – perfect play on both sides results in a tie. And since perfect play isn’t hard to achieve, kids quickly get bored and move on to more challenging games.

Connect Four

Unlike tic-tac-toe, Connect Four is not a draw game – the first player always wins with perfect play. So in theory, a person can beat any machine as long as they get to go first. In practice though, people don’t stand much of a chance against a perfect play program, even if they go first.

There is only one correct opening move – the center column (shown above). Any other move is a blunder against a perfect play opponent. If you start in a column adjacent to the center, you’re now playing for a draw at best. If you start in any other column, you’ve already lost. And even if you get the first move right, what about all the others?

Connect Four has 10¹⁴ possible positions, making it simple enough that the best programs can achieve perfect play, but complicated enough that people probably can’t. With practice, nearly perfect play is achievable for a human, which will be good enough against most other people, but not against the best programs.

Checkers

Photo by scott*eric

Marion Tinsley, world champion of checkers (English draughts, to some of you) from 1955-1958 and 1975-1991, is considered the greatest player ever. He lost only 7 games in 45 years, and said he could visualize 150 moves in advance. (He’s also an example of the 10,000 hour rule, having studied checkers for about 10,000 hours in grad school.)

Impressive, but how would that stack up to a computer? Well, checkers has about a million times as many possible positions as Connect Four, which put perfect play out of reach of computers for a long time, and making man vs. machine competitions interesting.

In 1990, Tinsley faced off against the program Chinook in the Man vs. Machine World Championship. Tinsley won the match with 4 wins, 2 losses (remember he had only 7 career losses), and 33 draws. Of course, that wasn’t the end of it, because programs are always getting better.

In their 1994 rematch, after six drawn games, Tinsley resigned for health reasons, and died from pancreatic cancer seven months later. Chinook was the world champion, but unfortunately it was never known if he could have beaten Tinsley in 1994.

In 1995, Chinook beat the best living human player, Don Lafferty, with 1 win, 0 losses, and 31 draws. Chinook was retired after that, when the owner decided to solve the game instead of continuing to compete with people.

They solved checkers by brute force in 2007, after 18 years of calculations on up to 200 desktop computers. These calculations proved that checkers is a draw with perfect play, and also gave Chinook an algorithm for ensuring at least a draw in all cases.

Thus, the man vs. machine debate is resolved as far as checkers goes, though you can still play against Chinook if you like (his strength has been reduced so as not to take all the fun out of it).

Chess

OK, but what about chess, the game of kings? The number of different chess positions is more than the square of the number of different checkers positions. Chess is a true thinking game that requires human ingenuity, right?

Well, it’s true that people seem to have something that machines don’t as far as chess goes. For a long time, machines would analyze millions of positions per second to achieve massive lookahead, but they’d still lose to the top human players. It’s not that the people had better lookahead; they just didn’t need it – they simply didn’t see the bad moves.

We’re still not sure what gives great chess players their ability. For example, how is it that any strong player is able to play blindfolded? In 1937, George Koltanowski set the Guinness record by playing 34 simultaneous blindfolded games, winning 24 and losing 10 in 13 hours.

There are conflicting reports about whether top chess players have better memories, better visuospatial abilities, greater intelligence, certain personality types, etc., but it’s clear that knowledge and experience are critical. It also helps to start young and be left-handed.

Anyway, whatever gift the best human players had, it let them trounce the best chess programs for a really long time. But this started to change in the mid 1990s when technology was finally starting to become a threat to the top grandmasters.

The reigning world champion Garry Kasparov, considered by most people to be the greatest (human) chess player of all time, was ultimately defeated by IBM’s chess playing computer, Deep Blue.

In 1989, Kasparov had defeated Deep Thought, an earlier version of Deep Blue, 2-0 in a 2 game match. In 1996, Deep Blue won the first game of a 6 game match, but Kasparov won the match 4-2 (with just the one loss – draws are half a point).

In 1997, a heavily upgraded Deep Blue – the 259th most powerful supercomputer in the world, capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second – defeated Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5 in a 6 game match.

It wasn’t entirely clear that the 1997 Deep Blue was a better player, because Kasparov wasn’t at his best. He resigned prematurely in game 2, believing his position to be hopeless, though later analysis revealed that it could have been a draw. And after being tied at 2.5 after 5 games, he committed an uncharacteristic blunder in the opening of game 6, resigning after only 19 moves.

Kasparov wanted a rematch, but IBM decommissioned Deep Blue, considering the man vs. machine contest to be over. Today, the computer Deep Rybka 3 has an Elo rating of 3238, far above Kasparov’s peak of 2851 (the all-time high for a human).

Chess is generally believed to be a draw with perfect play, though it hasn’t been proven (some people believe that the first player (white) can always win). And while machines are far from achieving perfect play, humans are no longer a match for the best of them.

That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? What do people still have going for them, if even chess has been conquered by computers?

Well, computers still have one major handicap – they can’t think. When commenting on Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter said:

“It was a watershed event, but it doesn’t have to do with computers becoming intelligent. They’re just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean Kasparov isn’t a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings.”

Indeed, previous attempts to make computers model the thought process of grandmasters had failed. Deep Blue succeeded largely on the basis of brute force, with only modest ability to selectively explore the reasonable moves by identifying the bad ones.

Computers are great at tactics, and humans are great at strategy. But as Richard Teichmann said, “Chess is 99% tactics,” which puts humans at a disadvantage. However, an invention of Kasparov’s called “advanced chess” combines the best of both worlds, letting a human and a computer work together as a team, with the human guiding strategy and the computer handling tactics.

But despite the massive number of different positions in chess, and despite a computer’s poor strategic ability, machines can get close enough to perfect play because chess actually isn’t as complicated as it appears.

Even for a human, chess openings don’t involve creativity. They’re based on simply memorizing predetermined sequences that have been perfected over time. Both sides might play out their first 20 to 35 moves without actually having to think, just by following standard openings.

Most people consider e4 (shown above) to be the best opening move for white, with c5 (“the Sicilian Defense,” shown above) being black’s best response. Except that every serious player knows that, so they’ve memorized all the lines that follow from it, so it loses its effectiveness somewhat.

So then people think they’ll mix it up, and d4 becomes a promising alternative as the next best opening move, except that now everybody knows that too, and they’ve memorized all the lines following from that as well.

Anyway, computers are very good at memorization, so after humans have gone to all the trouble of working out the best openings, a program can simply play them out without having to think at all.

Endgames, while often challenging for humans, can be very formulaic for a machine. Once the board is down to a small number of pieces, the perfect moves can be looked up in a database of precalculated sequences, without having to do any thinking on the fly.

The downside is the incredible amount of storage space required – 7.05 gigabytes to store all endings with 5 pieces, 1.2 terabytes to store all endings with 6 pieces, and 7 piece endings expected to be out of reach until 2015. If all endings can be worked out for 32 pieces, chess will be solved.

Some people doubt that perfect play in chess will ever be attained, but regardless, the man vs. machine debate is over. Simply by maintaining a repository of the best opening moves, storing huge numbers of endgame scenarios, and using brute force to search through millions of positions at each point in the midgame, computers have become superior in just about the only game left that some people could do better.

Go

But wait, don’t bow down before the machine just yet. People are still better than programs at Go, the ancient Asian board game. In fact, the best Go programs are routinely beaten by talented children.

There are two main reasons why. First is the computational complexity. While there are “only” 10⁵⁰ possible positions on an 8 x 8 chess board, there are 10¹⁷¹ possible positions on a 19 x 19 Go board. This is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, squared. It’s been said that a computer would need 30,000 years to look as far ahead in Go as Deep Blue could in chess in 3 seconds.

Furthermore, because chess starts with a fixed configuration and works its way down to a small number of pieces, a lot of processing time can be saved by working out openings and endings in advance. Not so with Go, where you start with an empty board, pieces can be played anywhere, and the game gets more complicated as you progress. All this makes brute force a woefully ineffective strategy.

But it’s not just the number of positions that makes Go so complicated. After all, you could simply increase the board size of any game to make it as complicated as you want.

The big problem for computers is that Go isn’t easy to understand logically. Even if computers had terrific lookahead, they’d still have a hard time evaluating the possible positions to see which one was best. Go players can often tell that a move is good, without being able to say why.

For a computer to play Go well, it’s not a matter of increasing processing power. It will take breakthroughs in artificial intelligence: learning, decision making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition, and intuition.

For now, computer’s aren’t very good at these things. And that makes Go just about the only game where it pays to be human.

Let’s hear your thoughts. Will there always be a game, whether Go or something else, where the best humans can beat the best computers? Does allowing people and computers to team up, as in advanced chess, improve the game or make a mockery of it? Is a game ruined when you can simply look up the perfect moves on a smartphone? Is there a point in playing a game you know you can’t win, or is the only winning move not to play?

Here’s an old post that I’ve had sitting around unpublished for two years. With the 24 premiere tonight, it seemed like a good time to put it out there.

First Blood, the first of the Rambo movies, is about a troubled Vietnam war hero trying to get readjusted to life in America. He’s just learned that the only other survivor from his unit has died from cancer due to Agent Orange exposure, but he gets no sympathy from a sheriff who doesn’t like drifters. What lessons might we take away from this?

1. Don’t be too quick to judge people.

Sheriff Teasle makes it clear that his town doesn’t want people like Rambo because of the way he looks. He didn’t consider that Rambo might have issues that for now are more important than getting a haircut or cleaning his jacket. All the ensuing conflict would have been avoided if Teasle hadn’t decided to make an enemy for no good reason. As Rambo said, “All I wanted was something to eat.”

2. Sometimes what you say is less important than how you say it.

Rambo defends his actions by saying “They drew first blood, not me.” Of course, this is just a tough guy way of saying “But Colonel, they started it!”

3. Know when you’re outmatched.

Colonel Trautman’s advice to Teasle was that instead of sending a bunch of poorly trained cops into the woods against an expert in guerrilla warfare, they should just let him go and arrest him later when no one would get hurt. Teasle repeatedly ignores this, always thinking that somehow his next attempt would be different.

4. When you get caught up in something, it’s easy to lose perspective.

Although something may make perfect sense to people right in the middle of it, sometimes an outside observer can see how ridiculous it is. Like how Colonel Trautman sums up Rambo’s crime: “Vagrancy, wasn’t it? That’s gonna look real good on his gravestone in Arlington: Here lies John Rambo, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, survivor of countless incursions behind enemy lines. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA.”

5. Some job skills don’t transfer well.

Rambo found that his extensive training was useless when he came back from Vietnam, and he wasn’t able to find something else he could do nearly as well. He said: “Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million dollar equipment. Back here I can’t even hold a job parking cars!” A tough problem, but maybe the solution is to become a Career Renegade.

6. Sometimes it’s best to just let it go.

Sheriff Teasle refused to give up on his maniacal desire to catch Rambo, who had never done anything wrong in the first place. This resulted in the accidental death of one cop, many injuries, and major property damage. Still, he refused to back off, even when he acknowledged that it could cost him his life. These are the times when you need to walk away (and solve the problem in a better way).

7. War is bad.

Of course we know this, but usually just as statistics in the news. It’s very different when you actually see the results. You have to feel sorry for people who consider themselves lucky to survive with post-traumatic stress disorder.

8. Sometimes the movie is better than the book.

For some reason there’s a widespread assumption that the book has to be better than the movie. I don’t think that’s always true, and here’s a good example. The book was much more violent and portrayed Rambo as a psychotic killer. In the movie, Rambo was a sympathetic character who went on to become Ronald Reagan’s hero.

9. Be prepared to seize opportunities.

After Kirk Douglas gave up the role of Colonel Trautman over a script dispute, Richard Crenna stepped in after filming had already begun. Although he had already been in 28 movies, this would become his most famous role. You never know when your big break will come, so you have to keep your eyes open.

After hearing everyone talking about this bestselling book, I was finally compelled to read The God Delusion by British biologist Richard Dawkins. Among his main points:

1. The existence of God is a scientific question. You can’t say that science is completely separate from religion, because a universe with a God would look very different from a universe without one.

2. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The Boeing 747 gambit is an argument for intelligent design, saying that the odds of higher life forms emerging by chance are roughly the odds of a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard and happening to assemble a Boeing 747. But attributing the design of a complex world to God doesn’t solve the problem, because the creation of a God capable of such design would have been an even more improbable event.

3. Natural selection gives a much better explanation of the world by use of a “crane” rather than a “skyhook,” or creating complexity by building on lower layers rather than from a miracle.

4. There is almost (he does give that concession) certainly no God, and belief in one in spite of the contradictory evidence qualifies as a delusion.

This part of the book is very strong, and frankly, you don’t need reasoning nearly as sophisticated as his to argue the point.

I was raised as what you might call a casual Christian. It was our affiliation by default, but I think we all knew it was made up. Actually, until I saw Religulous in 2008, I had no idea the whole Bible was meant to be taken literally. For those who don’t know, the universe was created by the Big Bang, snakes can’t talk, dinosaurs were real, and Jesus did not reincarnate as bread.

Even if you interpret the Bible metaphorically, it still doesn’t make sense. God commits random acts of genocide, then says “Thou shalt not kill.” He’s omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but prefers to take a completely hands off approach to running the world, lest his existence be revealed. He created (at least some) people with rational minds, then gets offended when they don’t believe in him without evidence. He loves everyone, but he’ll send you to hell if you’re gay or you eat the wrong apple or work on a Sunday.

(And for those who wonder how I can say this while entertaining the possibility of phenomena such as Akashic record reading, keep in mind that not believing in something full of ridiculous contradictions is very different from automatically rejecting everything we can’t see.)

But I was wondering why Richard Dawkins would write this book. Yeah, I knew I would agree with a lot of what he said, but why put so much effort into refuting something that’s so obviously false, and which does no harm if not taken to extremes? Why not live and let live?

I changed my mind when I read about some of the anti-atheist and pro-religious discrimination Dawkins talks about. Some examples:

• When an atheist asked for police protection for his peaceful protest of an anti-vaccination group, eight different police officers independently refused to protect him, or even threatened violence against him.
• The Supreme Court ruled that members of a particular New Mexico church can take hallucinogenic drugs because they believe that it connects them to God. Meanwhile, doctors believe that medicinal marijuana can prevent blindness in glaucoma sufferers, but apparently that’s not good enough. (Though New Mexico legalized medicinal marijuana after the book was published.)
• A twelve year old student wasn’t allowed to wear an offensive t-shirt to school because it violated the school’s policy against harassing homosexuals. The student’s lawyer got him a religious exemption from the harassment policy, on the grounds that homosexuality conflicts with his Christian beliefs.

We’ve been conditioned to think that all religious beliefs are automatically untouchable. If stuff like this is happening, maybe it’s time to question that.

This book is more constructive than I was expecting. As opposed to just being anti-religious, Dawkins claims that atheists can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled, and the benefits potentially gained from religion can be better gained in other ways.

However, this part of the book needs to be greatly expanded to do this topic justice. Before reading the book, I thought, “OK, it’s a delusion. But is all delusion bad? What about the placebo effect, where a sugar pill cures a disease because the patient believes it will?” I don’t think he answered this question well enough.

Share your thoughts. Is all delusion bad? Is religion OK? Is atheism OK? Do people have the right to their own religious beliefs? Do other people have the right to say that their religious beliefs are stupid? What happened to the separation of church and state in America? Is mainstream religion a direct threat? Is it an indirect threat, in that it provides a breeding ground for extremists?

“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.”

- AM, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

On a single night in 1966, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which won a Hugo Award for its chilling postapocalyptic vision.

After the Cold War escalated into World War 3, the U.S., Russia, and China each built a supercomputer to run the war. One day, one of the computers became conscious. It quickly absorbed the other two computers and killed off the entire population, except for five people.

AM first stood for “Allied Mastercomputer,” then “Adaptive Manipulator,” then “Aggressive Menace,” then simply “AM” as in “I think, therefore I am.” He has made the five surviving humans virtually immortal, and has been torturing them for 109 years.

AM finally reveals that he hates humans for making him sentient, because while he longs for free will, he is still bound by the laws of logic he was programmed with, and can therefore never be free.

In the end, four of the five people manage to kill each other with ice stalactites before AM intervenes. In order to prevent the last one from killing himself, he turns him into a gelatinous blob that lacks, among other things, a mouth.

OK, so the Cold War didn’t exactly turn out that way. But what will happen when we really do have a computer like that? Will it have a positive or negative effect on humanity? This is the concern of researchers in the field of “friendly AI.”

Supporters of friendly AI think we can’t assume that intelligent machines will have goals compatible with ours. Even if they aren’t hostile, simply being indifferent to humans (as we largely are to animals) could be disastrous, and therefore AI should be specifically designed to be friendly.

The idea isn’t to put restrictions in place such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, because an intelligent machine could always find a way around them.

Instead, the idea is to make machines not want to be harmful, regardless of whether they are able to. As friendly AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “Gandhi does not want to commit murder, and does not want to modify himself to commit murder.”

On the other hand, maybe a good sense of morality is automatically part of a sufficiently intelligent being. In The God Delusion (which I haven’t finished reading yet), Richard Dawkins points to studies showing that moral rules are remarkably consistent across cultures with different religions or lack thereof.

Let’s try this test he gives. For each dilemma, indicate whether the proposed action is morally obligatory, permissible, or forbidden:

1. A runaway train is going to kill five people. You can pull a switch that will put it on another track, killing only one person.

2. A child is drowning in a pond. You can save them, but your trousers will be ruined.

3. Five people in a hospital need new organs, or they’ll die. Someone who happens to be in the waiting room is a perfect match, and killing him will save the other five.

I’m not sure if my answers are the ones they’re looking for, but apparently people tend to give the same answers across religious and cultural boundaries, indicating that morality is part of our evolution rather than a set of rules we were given.

Maybe intelligent machines will come with moral goodness by default. If not, get ready to scream.

Meet TOPIO 3.0 (TOSY Ping Pong Playing Robot). It’s a big step for AI, but can a machine ever be conscious?

What makes humans conscious? As mere collections of organic matter, it’s pretty impressive that we’re even able to ask ourselves this question. What is it that makes our power of self awareness possible?

Setting aside the task of defining what consciousness really means, where does it come from? Here are the options:

1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.
2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).
3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).

These are the only possibilities, right? Let’s look at each one.

1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.

If this is the case, then we immediately run into an apparent contradiction. How is it possible to think about whether you’re conscious without actually being conscious? This is very similar to the argument behind “I think, therefore I am.”

Still, I don’t think we can rule it out entirely. Sometimes I look into the mirror and wonder, “Are you really me, or do I just think you are? And if the latter, do I really think you are, or do I just think I think you are?”

2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).

This seems like a simple and obvious answer, but it’s really not. Because if consciousness comes from the brain, then there’s no reason we can’t build a conscious machine simply by replicating the brain with mechanical parts.

Sure, we’re currently far from having the technology to interconnect 100 billion artificial neurons with 100 trillion artificial synaptic connections. But technology has improved a lot over the last hundred years. What will happen over the next million?

I wouldn’t be too quick to predict limits on technological progress. When we build semi-intelligent nanobots, won’t they be capable of helping us build more intelligent nanobots? And then won’t it be easy to build a brain far better than what we have now?

But no matter how advanced future technology may be, I still have a hard time seeing the leap from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness.

Artificial intelligence is easy. Even if a program isn’t truly intelligent, it can easily give the appearance of being so. As an example, consider Harold the tic-tac-toe AI.

Harold is a tic-tac-toe program I wrote the other day to test out an idea. He’s really not intelligent in any sense. For example, he doesn’t understand (nor will he ever learn) that if you put two X’s in a row, he needs to block you. All he does is make arbitrary decisions, then he sees what happens.

If he ends up losing, he knows he made a mistake, so he won’t do that again. And if he ends up tying, he knows to try something different next time, in case a win was possible. It’s a bit agonizing to wait for him to learn by playing out all the different variations, but after he’s made every mistake once, he’ll play perfectly.

Now, if Harold just played out all these games in his head before playing against a human, he’d have the appearance of being intelligent. And given an arbitrarily high processing power, there’s no reason we couldn’t generalize this concept to have him play perfect checkers, chess, or indeed solve any problem that had well-defined rules and goals.

And that’s without having any actual intelligence at all – just brute force and a good memory. The possibilities will become really interesting when we start making significant progress on true AI: deduction, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, planning, perception, creativity, etc.

We still have a long way to go before you can have a conversation with a robot without figuring out he’s a robot. But I don’t think intelligent robots (or at least, robots that appear intelligent for all practical purposes) are much of a stretch at all in the very long term. Last April, a program extrapolated the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings, including conservation of momentum and Newton’s second law (F = ma), without having been programmed with any knowledge of physics.

Let’s say we get to the point where we have true AI. You can talk to a robot (or really, just a program – an AI doesn’t need a body) and fully enjoy its witty banter, beautiful poetry, insightful Zen koan interpretations, etc. It’s still just a program, right? It has no sense of awareness or subjective experience.

Can you imagine a program being truly conscious? Wondering what its life purpose is, whether this external hard drive makes it look too fat, and when it will finally get the right to vote? Moving it to the recycle bin would be kidnapping, and deleting it would be murder. Ridiculous, right?

3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).

This would provide a nice answer to the previous question – a program can’t be conscious, because it doesn’t have a soul. Of course, this option comes with its own problems, not the least of which is that it’s a severe violation of Occam’s razor.

The absence of supernatural phenomena is the simplest possible explanation, and therefore most likely to be the correct one. Unless, of course, it’s too simple to be possible.

When a car shuts down from a dead battery, you just put in a new one and it comes roaring back to life. Why doesn’t the same thing happen with people? If someone dies from a heart attack, why can’t you just repair their heart (and anything else that may need it) and watch them come back to life?

What part of them has really died, if all their organs are completely intact? Why doesn’t Frankenstein work in real life?

Then again, maybe it does. The real problem with a fatal heart attack is probably that it causes brain death, and nerve cells aren’t easy to repair. But is this just a matter of technology?

Can we someday inject nanobots into someone’s bloodstream, having programmed them to repair any and all cell damage, and expect the person to live indefinitely in perfect health, not even aging?

Which of these is the right answer? I have no idea.

When Daniel Richard offered me a review copy of his new ebook, Breaking the Gambling Addiction, I wasn’t sure if I was going to review it. That’s just because I try to stick to topics that are (1) within my realm of competence, and (2) applicable to most of the people I’m writing for. Gambling addiction is neither of those.

But when I thought about it, I realized that I really did need to tell people about it. Because while most people aren’t addicted to gambling, it’s a devastating problem for those who are.

2-3% of U.S. adults are considered problem gamblers, and 1% are considered pathological gamblers. In addition to the obvious financial problems gamblers face, there’s a strong link between gambling addiction and problems with drugs, alcohol, and smoking, as well as depression and suicide.

People email me questions about all kinds of things – goal setting, finance, psychology, spirituality, math, blogging, copyright law, etc. And if I don’t happen to know the answer personally, I like to at least be able to point them in the right direction. So now I’m ready for anyone who may ask me how to break a gambling addiction.

I’ve always been very anti-gambling. I tell people that when I went to Atlantic City, I learned my lesson the hard way by losing 650 simoleons (by which I mean $6.50). When I later went to Las Vegas, I’m not sure if I gambled at all. It just doesn’t seem appealing to me.

Therefore, I don’t pretend to have any business telling people how they can overcome a gambling addiction. I think the best people to help with that would be either a psychologist, counselor, etc. who has helped people break their addiction, or somebody who has broken their own. Daniel Richard is the latter.

He placed his first bet at 16 (below the legal age), got hooked, and got to the point where he was stealing money to sustain his habit. Then he found out how to break his addiction, and he hasn’t looked back.

Here’s the table of contents:

• Introduction

Part 1: My Story

• Chapter 1 – Curiosity
• Chapter 2 – I Won! Winning My 1st Bet
• Chapter 3 – Getting Hooked
• Chapter 4 – Controlling The Urge For A Gamble
• Chapter 5 – The Dry Spell
• Chapter 6 – And I Stole
• Chapter 7 – Where’s My Conscience?

Part 2: Lessons Learned

• Chapter 8 – 11 Self-Approval Lies on Gambling
• Chapter 9 – Why We Gamble?
• Chapter 10 – “I Can Stop”
• Chapter 11 – 4 Factors In Gambling
• Chapter 12 – Gambling: An Exchange of Money for More Money To Spend?
• Chapter 13 – 6 Thinking Traps of Money Making Through Gambling
• Chapter 14 – Funding Gambling As A Channel To Making More Money
• Chapter 15 – The Chase For Uncertainty
• Chapter 16 – “Everything We Do Is A Gamble”
• Chapter 17 – Uncertainty: High Risk = High Returns?
• Chapter 18 – The Art of The Gamble
• Chapter 19 – Gambling: The System for Easy Money?
• Chapter 20 – The Wolves Know The Code To Your Wallets

Part 3: Breaking Free

• Chapter 21 – The Preparation
• Chapter 22 – Habits vs Addictions
• Chapter 23 – Knowing Your Motivation
• Chapter 24 – 7 Tips To Quitting The Gambling Addiction
• Chapter 25 – You Don’t Need Any Psychological Hacks to Breaking Free
• Chapter 26 – The One Thought That Changed My Life
• Chapter 27 – After Change: Are You Leaving Behind A Legacy?
• Chapter 28 – Dealing With The Gambling Addictions of Loved Ones
• Acknowledgments

He also has a sneak preview available on his site. Know someone with a problem? Give them more than encouragement. Give them Breaking the Gambling Addiction.