Locator: 48938TX.
AliianceTexas: I've blogged about AllianceTexas many times on the blog. I spotted AllianceTexas before it was a thing. Now, another huge story coming out of AllianceTexas, just up the road from where we live, out near the Texas Motor Speedway and near one of the first Bucc-ee's locations.
Put a music venue out there -- a huge amphitheater with surrounding smaller stages -- that's the next big thing for AllianceTexas -- tea leaves. Think: the Empire Polo Club in Indio, which hosts the famous Coachella and Stagecoach festivals.
Indio, California, is a large, growing city in the Coachella Valley of Riverside County, known as the "City of Festivals" for hosting events like the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and the Stagecoach Music Festival. It is also known for its agricultural history, especially dates, and serves as a year-round city with a temperate winter climate and access to desert activities like golfing and exploring nearby mountains and parks.
AllianceTexas will be the geographical population center of the DFW metroplex in 2050 -- TxDOT.
***************************
The Book Page
I will finish this book today. And then will re-read it, taking notes.
The Immortal Game: A History of Chess or How 32 Carved Pieces On A Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain; David Shenk, c. 2006.
The last section is on chess and AI. Never expected that! Note the copyright date (2006).
From page 216:
In the nearer term, minimax logic quickly put computer chess programming in a serious bind.
By opening up chess to a nearly endless series of calculations, minimax made chess computing both possible and impossible.
The equations could be continually improved to make better and better chess decisions, but it simply took too long for computers to analyze all the possibilities.
Then, in 1956, American computer scientist and AI pioneer John McCarthy -- he had actually coined the term artificial intelligence one year earlier (fact-checked; true) -- came up with an ingenious revision of minimax called alpha-beta pruning that allowed a computer to ignore certain leaves on a tree whose evalutaions wouldn't make a difference in the final result.
Like the minimzx concept, the idea wasn't based on any particular insight into chess, but was a simple matter of logic: certain leaf evaluations are irrelevant if other leaf values on that same branch have already taken that particular branch out of contention.
A computer instructed not to bother calculating such nonactinable leaves could accomplish its wok in much less time.
By the way, this was a crucial insight necessary for NSA when computing power was severely constrained.
Shenk then goes on to explain how / why computers have a difficult time beating chess masters. The big difference: computers, at least up until now, use only logic. Chess masters use logic, but they can also use intuition. I do not know if ... well, let's ask ChatGPT:
In Shenk's 2006 book on chess: Shenk explains how / why computers have a difficult time beating chess masters. The big difference: computers, at least up until now, use only logic. Chess masters use logic, but they can also use intuition. I do not know if current AI computer chess programming has made the leap to using INTUITION as well as logic when playing chess against chess grand masters. Thoughts?
I will post ChatGPT's reply elsewhere. But bottom line: computer chess programming now uses what appears to be "approximating intuition." Whether one calls it "intuition" or not is in the eyes of the beholder, and probably bordering on semantics. Computer programs now routinely make moves that humans would assume were being made by other humans using intuition, not logic.
But one word: that's where neural processing units come in. Where did I first hear about neural processing units? From an Apple presentation some years ago. This was from March 8, 2022.
Apple silicon:
- A15 and much, much more; 16-core neural engine.
********************************
Also, Note "Scrabble" At That Same Link
