You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
It's been a long while since I wrote anything here, going to see if I can get back on the horse.
Nate Silver on the parts of a chess match computers and humans excel at:
Both computer and human players need to break a chess game down into intermediate goals: for instance, capturing an opponent’s pawn or putting their king into check. In the middle of the match, once the pieces are locked in combat and threaten one another, there are many such strategic objectives available. It is a matter of devising tactics to accomplish them, and forecasting which might have the most beneficial effects on the remainder of the game. The goals of the opening moves, however, are more abstract. Computers struggle with abstract and open-ended problems, whereas humans understand heuristics like “control the center of the board” and “keep your pawns organized” and can devise any number of creative ways to achieve them.