three documentaries
Jan. 8th, 2006 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOnce you've seen March of the Penguins, what else is there?
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, that's what. For me the funny thing is that, though I know the neighborhoods in the film well, I've never seen the parrots, nor indeed had heard of them until the news stories a few years ago attendant on an event central to the film, the departure of the local resident who'd been feeding them. But I gather the parrot flock hasn't really been around for much more than a decade or so, and most of my wanderings around the east side of Telegraph, the central location, predate that.
However, I need not feel that I've missed much, for the close-ups of cute parrot antics featured in this splendidly-shot documentary will satisfy the soul of anyone who likes birds. Cuter even than baby penguins, I swear.
The other two documentaries I've seen lately concern eccentric geniuses:
Game Over: Kasparov Vs. The Machine concerns an event I didn't pay much attention to at the time. I was therefore surprised to learn that Kasparov suspects that Deep Blue cheated, by having a grandmaster operator in the back room (which IBM wouldn't let anyone see) capable of over-riding the machine when it made bad moves. He also claims his eventual loss was due more to gamesmanship by IBM than to better chess-playing. This threw him off-balance, for he'd signed up for a scientific experiment, not a cut-throat grand-master tournament against an opponent he couldn't get a psychological handle on. The film is mostly from Kasparov's perspective; interviews with the IBM team show them as smug and arrogant. It's a weird film, too, full of whispered narration. It compares Deep Blue to The Turk, the original marvelous brass chess-playing automaton, coyly implying but never stating outright that The Turk was secretly human-operated.
My Architect is an "in search of my father" by the illegitimate son of the late Louis Kahn. Kahn has always been high up on my list of detestable modern architects, but I thought a sympathetic look at his work would be edifying. It was: I can see a certain rugged grandeur and proportion to some of his buildings, like the Salk Center, if one stands far enough back from them. The personal side was gently handled: the awkward scene where the son and his previously-unmet half-sisters meet and gingerly discuss whether they're a family; the son's determination not to disabuse his mother of her faith that Louis was about to leave his wife for her at the time of his death.
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, that's what. For me the funny thing is that, though I know the neighborhoods in the film well, I've never seen the parrots, nor indeed had heard of them until the news stories a few years ago attendant on an event central to the film, the departure of the local resident who'd been feeding them. But I gather the parrot flock hasn't really been around for much more than a decade or so, and most of my wanderings around the east side of Telegraph, the central location, predate that.
However, I need not feel that I've missed much, for the close-ups of cute parrot antics featured in this splendidly-shot documentary will satisfy the soul of anyone who likes birds. Cuter even than baby penguins, I swear.
The other two documentaries I've seen lately concern eccentric geniuses:
Game Over: Kasparov Vs. The Machine concerns an event I didn't pay much attention to at the time. I was therefore surprised to learn that Kasparov suspects that Deep Blue cheated, by having a grandmaster operator in the back room (which IBM wouldn't let anyone see) capable of over-riding the machine when it made bad moves. He also claims his eventual loss was due more to gamesmanship by IBM than to better chess-playing. This threw him off-balance, for he'd signed up for a scientific experiment, not a cut-throat grand-master tournament against an opponent he couldn't get a psychological handle on. The film is mostly from Kasparov's perspective; interviews with the IBM team show them as smug and arrogant. It's a weird film, too, full of whispered narration. It compares Deep Blue to The Turk, the original marvelous brass chess-playing automaton, coyly implying but never stating outright that The Turk was secretly human-operated.
My Architect is an "in search of my father" by the illegitimate son of the late Louis Kahn. Kahn has always been high up on my list of detestable modern architects, but I thought a sympathetic look at his work would be edifying. It was: I can see a certain rugged grandeur and proportion to some of his buildings, like the Salk Center, if one stands far enough back from them. The personal side was gently handled: the awkward scene where the son and his previously-unmet half-sisters meet and gingerly discuss whether they're a family; the son's determination not to disabuse his mother of her faith that Louis was about to leave his wife for her at the time of his death.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 08:16 pm (UTC)The parrots on our particular street are spillover from the extensive parrot colony in the Gothic entrance arch to Green-Wood Cemetery up the street, a structure I tend to refer to as the Willow Rosenberg Memorial Satanic Temple. Parrots evidently love architectural curlicues.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 05:26 pm (UTC)Nevertheless I don't find this theory as inherently ludicrous or unsupportable as the popular Shakespeare authorship theories, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, or Moon landing hoax theories. It doesn't require a massive conspiracy more improbable than the supposed improbabilities it seeks to explain.
If it is unsupportable, there should be simple answers to a couple points Kasparov raises to which the responses given in the film are inadequate (they may easily, of course, have been clipped to make them inadequate):
1. Why wouldn't the IBM team discuss Deep Blue's playing with Kasparov? Joel Benjamin, their grandmaster, is shown saying that Kasparov wouldn't expect Karpov to write a post-game essay about his strategy. True enough, but this wasn't a world-championship match. Two friends trying out a rule variation probably would discuss the effects it had on playing strategy before going on to the next game, and Kasparov reasonably expected this would be more like that. Besides, if it was a cut-throat tournament, then Kasparov was playing an opponent who'd had a complete brain transplant since their previous match a year before, putting him at an unfair disadvantage in terms of the ways tournament grandmasters normally prepare for specific opponents.
2. Kasparov says Deep Blue played "like a machine" in their first game, but suddenly made a "human-like" move at a critical point in the second game. Benjamin shrugs and says this year's Deep Blue was just better than last year's Deep Blue. But why was it so much better than the previous day's Deep Blue?
3. If IBM had made such a wonderful chess-playing automaton, why did they immediately abandon the field after the match? The film doesn't discuss this, but the chief designer, frustrated by this, tried to buy the machine but was unable to raise the money to keep it operational. Kasparov's agent theorizes that the whole project's sole purpose was to restore IBM's intellectual credibility in the computer world. Having beaten Kasparov, they'd done it. This would be a very strong incentive to cheat, and the hasty retreat does nothing to allay any suspicions.
Lastly, a question for Kasparov:
4. If your complete breakdown in the last game was due to your having lost all faith and trust in your opponent, why didn't you render this unambiguous by deliberately and unambiguously playing badly to demonstrate your scorn? You could have played the World's Shortest Chess Game, the one that leads to mate against you in about five moves, and seen how Deep Blue responded to that. As it is, your excuse sounds like saving face after being fairly trounced.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 06:17 pm (UTC)You did.
I'm not impressed with any of Kasparov's rationalizations.
1. It was not a world championship match, but everyone understood that it was about determining the best chess player in the world -- it's a match play between the champion and a challenger -- which might as well be the same thing. That's one reason it got more publicity than a world championship match, another of course being that there's a great hook in man vs machine in areas where we continue to assert that there is something inherently human about some of our behaviors that we cannot create in a machine. This will be a running theme underlying most of Kasparov's objections. The previous match is evidence, to me, that Kasparov understood this perfectly well: he was being challenged, as the best player in the world, to show that a machine could not be the best. He didn't object to not discussing strategy until he became aware that he could lose. This is also when he began looking for any excuse to assert that his loss wasn't fair.
As for preparing for a specific opponent, Kasparov had never needed to prepare for Big Blue before: the computer didn't play like a human, everyone said.
Which brings us to point 2: Why was it so much better (my italics) than the previous day's? But we only have Kasparov's assertion that it made a "human move" having never done so before. Kasparov means that the machine surprised him badly with a move, and had not done so before. Since he (and many, many others, both chess people and philosophers and other intellectuals) believed there was something inherently human about chess brilliance, the computer by definition could not make such a move. Therefore something else must be going on. But what do we have here apart from the assertions of humans with a very strong interest in the debate that the play of Big Blue was in some fundamental way different than what it had done before?
3: Why did IBM abandon the field? Well, what more did they have to gain? It's not like it's a practical application: it's publicity. They hit the peak of the publicity -- we're the champion! -- and like a corporation motivated not by human pride or (if you like) honor, they declined to continue past the point of clear usefulness. Which is probably shortsighted, but still hardly seems inexplicable to me. But the silliest assertion of Kasparov's (or his agent), to my mind, is the notion that IBM needed to restore their intellectual credibility in the computer world. Whatever is supposed to have been wrong with IBM's intellectual credibility?
We don't have a problem with machines being stronger and faster than we are. We don't have too much of a problem with machines being able to calculate more quickly and precisely than we can; though we use our brains to do that, it doesn't strike at the heart of what we consider to be uniquely human (or at least it doesn't now). But chess is dangerously close to those areas -- creativity, intuition, etc. The best chess players are hard-working and systematic thinkers, but they are also, all of them, people born with a way of comprehending chess that most of us are not. It is not a rational comprehension. It's inexplicable, incommunicable, a gift. I think if you have a mystical bent at all, it's hard not to feel that there is something about a soul/i> of intelligence tied up in that. A personality. Traits machines (we say) can't have. So Kasparov, faced with a blow to the heart of who he is, can't take it, must find another explanation.
IMGDO.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to think about this!
no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 01:39 am (UTC)1. So long as the machine played like a machine, little preparation was necessary. (Actually, I suppose Kasparov had researched what machines play like before he ever began.) When it seems to him to suddenly switch playing styles in the midst of a match, his curiosity is understandable.
2. So far as I know, Kasparov is the only person qualified to judge chess-playing styles to have weighed in on the question of whether Deep Blue started playing like a human. (Joel Benjamin did not address this in the clips given.) Absent other experts saying he's wrong, I won't discount his judgment just because it's in his interest to say that.
3. If I were engaged in a major multi-year project to prove that a machine was the best chess player, I wouldn't stop after winning on points one ambiguous match. (Deep Blue actually won only 2 of the 6 games, the second over a demoralized opponent who could not at the moment fairly be called the best human player.) I might think that IBM was afraid they wouldn't be able to pull it off again. But that's me.
I seem to recall IBM, after the flashy debut of the Chiclet PC in 1981 or so, spending the next decade and a half getting rather shellacked in the computer field. I can imagine they thought they had a reputation to restore.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 12:56 am (UTC)In Sunnyvale look at the trees in the
parking lots for Trader Joe's and Orchard Supply Hardware.