Peter Thiel, a businessman I know who is a damn good chess player, told me the same story about chess.
Now he is a financial trader, and feels he can outperform software in this domain. But when software can outperform him at trading, he'll get sick of that too. What will be left for unaugmented, non-uploaded humans after computers can outdo them in all intellectual and athletic tasks? Art and sex, I would suppose ;-) After all it's still fun to learn to play Bach even though Wanda Landowska did it better... -- Ben G On 5/20/07, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I used to like to solve Sudoku puzzles, and thought about the mental process I used to solve them. Then I decided it would be a bigger challenge to put that process into code, and wrote http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/sudoku/sudoku.html I thought it was cool that I could write a program that was smarter than me, at least in some narrow domain. But the unexpected result was that I lost interest in solving the puzzles. Why should I do it the hard way? And what fun is it to do it the easy way? When a computer beat the world champion at chess, the game lost the significance it once had. You know who Kasparov is. Who is the champion today? When calculators became available, teaching students to do arithmetic by hand seemed less important. Likewise for handwriting and keyboards. We now use computers to remember details of our lives like phone numbers and email addresses, to get driving directions, to decide which email we want to read, to do ever more of our work. When machines can do all of our thinking for us, what will happen to us? -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;
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