Further or Alternatively
Miscellaneous thoughts on politics, culture, law and philosophy
Saturday, 26 April 2025
The Castle of Otranto, Shakespeare, Voltaire and the ancestry of suburban magic
Thursday, 17 April 2025
What chess teaches us about AI - and what AI teaches us about chess
It sometimes strikes me as odd that humans still play chess despite the fact that computers can do it much better than us.
I know that people still delight in foot races or contests of strength despite there being machines that are much faster and stronger than any of us, but I don't find that odd. Humanity has grown up in the knowledge that it is a physically weak creature: there have pretty much always been domesticated animals that are faster or stronger than us, let alone wild ones.
But, although we weren't the stongest or fastest animal out there, we knew we were the cleverest, with minds that far surpass anything else we encountered, minds that allowed us eventually to outwit and subdue all the alpha predators and alpha prey (if that's a thing - think mammoths) that we came across.
Chess was a kind of symbol of this intellectual mastery. The 100m Olympic final might tell you who the fastest man in the world is, but the world chess championship plausibly used to tell you who was the best entity in the entire universe at a particularly demanding mental endeavour. It doesn't surprise me that when Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, it was a pretty big deal.
Yet on we go, playing games that once would have been regarded as the among highest intellectual achievements in the known universe, but are now the equivalent of washing up by hand when you could use the dishwasher.
What's going on? Why has our self-regard - our self-conception as the intellectual monarchs of creation - not been badly dented?
Part of the reason is that we have changed our view of what chess is. No-one really thinks it's like discovering the Grand Unified Theory of Everything or writing a symphony any more. It's not even brain surgery or rocket science. It's just a diversion, like noughts and crosses but a bit more tricky.
One question that immediately arises is: when (and surely it is when) AI does produce cutting edge science, or a mathematical proof no human could hope to achieve, or write a symphony beyond Beethoven's wildest dreams ... what then? Will we then regard those achievements as nothing more than mere arithmetic, better handled by machines than humans? Presumably brain surgery and rocket science are even closer to losing their lustre: what then will we say about easy tasks?
But I want to leave that high-falutin' stuff to one side for the moment. I've got a more prosaic point: AI will be really good at teaching us how to do the things we want to do. (By "AI", I don't mean to refer to the latest LLMs, simply to any computer process.) And it turns out that what we want to do involves other people.
I have recently come across this website called lichess.org. It's amazing and I recommend it to anyone who plays chess. You can play against a seemingly limitless pool of humans or against a computer at various different levels of difficulty. But it does a number of other cool things besides. And it's all free.
I'm going to show you some of the cool things that it does. You won't need to understand anything about chess to understand the points I am going to make, but if you are completely allergic to chess-chat then just skim until I shout NO MORE CHESS below.
As an illustration, I will use a very low quality game of chess that I played recently (against another human). If you play chess then you will see that I am not using this example as a boast: it is not a game on which either I (white) or my opponent (black) can look back with any great pride.
After you finish a game on lichess, you can get the computer to give you an analysis of it. That is what I show here.
This is the game as at move 20, when black has just blundered with Nd4. Black's idea is to put pressure on the bishop on e6 and simultaneously be threatening against the white king, which is looking a little exposed and has a few pieces pointing ominously towards him. But it's a blunder nonetheless, as we shall see. This is what you see on lichess (click on it to see it properly):
Sunday, 23 February 2025
In which the writer praises Stephen Bush and tentatively suggests some ideas that differ from his
That's my (glowing) review of him. But what does he say about me? I'm sorry to say that the picture here is a little more mixed. I make "smug asides" and my "analysis, such as it is, is a greatest hits of partisan wishful thinking". I say "increasingly ridiculous things". At one point, he gave the (sensible, but I think inapposite) advice to "Live in the real world, stand up for decency regardless of the rosette colour, don't excuse-make for opening up the tent to include people who don't think I [Bush] am English." (In fact, the advice to live "in the real world" was given to me twice.) I was also said to have caricatured Bush's point and he suggested that my "need" to do so "tells its own story".
Gosh.
Thursday, 6 February 2025
An email from a WEIRDO ...
I want to explain (and apologise for) the break in posting.
Over the Christmas holidays, I received an interesting email from one of my old tutors, now a big name in behavioural economics. For reasons that will appear from the email itself, I was keen to publish it. The negotiations for that took a bit of time (hence the delay in posting), but the author has now very kindly agreed to my request, after I made certain changes to preserve his anonymity.
I am not entirely sure what to make of it all, but I don’t want to influence you in advance of reading it and so, without further comment, here is the email.