Chessboard Project

The chess board.
The chess board.

For our annual fundraiser’s silent auction, I made a chess board. The structure was made of wood–I learned how to use dowels to attach the sides–but the black squares were cut out of the material they use for matting the borders of pictures. My student drew “cheat sheet” diagrams of each of the black squares in bright gel pen colors. The squares were laid on a white grid and the entire top epoxied with a clear glass-like coat. We also made two sets of chess pieces with the 3d printer (rounds versus squares).

It turned out quite well.

Chess board with 3d printed pieces.
Chess board with 3d printed pieces.

Human-Cyborg Relations

I’ve long thought that with all the things we can do with personal, handheld technology that we’re acceleratingly becoming cyborgs. And I don’t think it a bad thing. Consider how much cell phones and the internet helped in the Egyptian protests. Consider being able to look up maps and definitions when you need them, and being able to share them live in the classroom.

Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who was the first to be defeated by a computer in 1998, adds another useful datapoint in an article on the human-machine partnerships in chess competitions:

The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
–Kasparov (2010): The Chess Master and the Computer

but also fascinating is this, after a tournament:

The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants.

The take home message is worth pondering:

Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
–Kasparov (2010): The Chess Master and the Computer