Nova - Kasparov Versus Deep Thought

Nova episode detailing one of the first times man was pitted against computer in a game of chess.

Curated by Whitney Weiss

Total Runtime: 0:55:07

Docs1980sartificial intelligencechesscomputersibmnova

From Wikipedia:

Deep Thought was a computer designed to play chess. Deep Thought was initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at IBM.^[1] It was second in the line of chess computers developed byFeng-hsiung Hsu, starting with ChipTest and culminating in Deep Blue. Deep Thought was easily defeated in both games of a two-game match with Garry Kasparov in 1989 as well as in a correspondencematch with Michael Valvo.

It was named after Deep Thought, a fictional computer in Douglas Adams' series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The naming of chess computers has continued in this vein with Deep Blue, Deep Fritz, Deep Junior, etc.

Deep Thought won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1988 and the World Computer Chess Championship in the year 1989, and its rating, according to the USCF was 2551.^[2] In 1994, Deep Thought 2 won the North American Computer Chess Championship for the fifth time, with its rating estimated at around 2600. It was sponsored by IBM. Some engineers who designed Deep Thought also worked in the design of Deep Thought 2. Its algorithms were quite simple evaluation functions, but it could examine half a billion chess positions per move in tournament games, which is sufficient to reach depth of 10 or 11 moves ahead in complex positions. Despite that, using the technique of singular extensions it could also follow lines of forced moves that reach even further, which is how it once found a checkmate in 37 moves.^{[citation needed]}

Doc - The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet

Mostly-documentary that tries to unravel the complicated web that is Ted Kaczynski--by placing his actions in technological context. Squirrelly but worthwhile.

Curated by Whitney Weiss

Total Runtime: 1:54:50

Docs1990slsdneo-ludditethe internetunabomber

From Wikipedia:

Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski ( /k ə ˈ z ɪ n s k i/ ka-zin-skee, or ka-chin-skee; Polish: Kaczyński, pronounced [kaˈt͡ʂɨȷ̃skʲi]; born May 22, 1942), also known as the "Unabomber", is an American mathematician, social critic, and Neo-Luddite^[2] who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.

Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted intoHarvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25, but resigned two years later.

In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient.^[3] He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development.^[3] From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto,Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.

The Unabomber was the target of one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's costliest investigations. Before Kaczynski's identity was known, the FBI used the title "UNABOM" (UNiversity & Airline BOMber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber. The FBI pushed for the publication of Kaczynski's "Manifesto" which led to his brother and his wife recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipping off the FBI.^[4] Kaczynski dismissed his court appointed lawyers because they wanted to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, as Kaczynski did not believe he was insane.^[5]^{[not in citation given]} When it became clear that his pending trial would entail national television exposure for Kaczynski, the court entered a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Theodore Kaczynski has been designated a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI.^[6] Some anarcho-primitivist authors, such as John Zerzan and John Moore, have come to his defense, while holding some reservations about his actions and ideas.^[7]^[8]^[9]

Animation - John Henry

The Disney's American Legends version of the story of John Henry.

Curated by Whitney Weiss

Total Runtime: 0:11:13

animationdisneyjohn henry

"John Henry is an American folk hero and tall tale. Henry worked as a "steel-driver"—a man tasked with hammering and chiseling rock in the construction of tunnels for railroad tracks. In the legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand. The story of John Henry has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels.^[1]^[2]

The legend of John Henry has been compared to that of other American "Big Men", such as Paul Bunyan^[3] and Pecos Bill.^[4] John Henry's heroism is associated with several elements: his strength and grit as a working-class common man, his status as a hero to African American laborers, and his allegorical depiction of "the tragedy of man versus machine" and other aspects of modernization.^[3]^[4][edit]Legend

There are many versions of John Henry's story. In almost all versions of the story, John Henry is a black man of exceptional physical gifts, a former slave,^[1] possibly born in Tennessee.^[3] Henry becomes the greatest "steel-driver" in the mid-nineteenth-century push to expand railroads from the East Coast of the United States, across and through the mountains, to the frontier West. However, the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black steel-driving crew. To save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the owner to a contest: Henry will race the steam-powered hammer.

The historicity of many aspects of the John Henry legend is subject to wide debate.^[1]^[2] It is commonly stated that Henry's rail work, including his race against the steam hammer, occurred while working along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.^[3] In particular, Henry is claimed to have raced the steam hammer during the construction of Big Bend tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia between 1869 and 1871.^[1]^[5]^[6] Talcott holds a yearly festival named for Henry and a statue and memorial plaque have been placed along a highway south of Talcott as it crosses over the Big Bend tunnel.^[5]

In Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend, Scott Reynolds Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary, argues that John William Henry (prisoner #497 in the Virginia penitentiary, released by the warden to work on the C&O Railway in the 1870s) is the basis for the legendary John Henry.^[7]^:39 Nelson asserts that a steam drill race at the Big Bend Tunnel would have been impossible because railroad records do not indicate a steam drill being used there.^[4] Instead, he believes the contest took place at the Lewis Tunnel, between Talcott andMillboro, Virginia, where prisoners worked beside steam drills.^[8] Nelson also believes that an early version of the ballad that refers to John Henry's grave as being at "the white house", "in sand", and somewhere that locomotives roar, indicates that Henry was buried at the Virginia penitentiary, where unmarked graves have been found.^[9]

According to Nelson:

...workers managed their labor by setting a "stint," or pace, for it. Men who violated the stint were shunned...Here was a song that told you what happened to men who worked too fast: they died ugly deaths; their entrails fell on the ground. You sang the song slowly, you worked slowly, you guarded your life, or you died.^[7]^:32

Coosa Tunnel and tracks between Coosa Tunnel and neighboring Oak Mountain Tunnel, possible Alabama sites of John Henry legend.

Other research has placed Henry's famous race near Leeds, Alabama. Retired chemistry professor and folklorist John Garst, of the University of Georgia, has argued that the contest instead happened at the Coosa Mountain Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus & Western Railway (now part of Norfolk Southern Railway) near Leeds on September 20, 1887. Based on documentation that corresponds with the account of C. C. Spencer, who claimed in the 1920s to have witnessed the contest, Garst speculates that John Henry may have been a man named Henry who was born a slave to P.A.L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in 1850.^[10] Since 2007, the city of Leeds has honored John Henry's legend during an annual September festival, held third weekend in September, called the Leeds Downtown Folk Festival & John Henry Celebration.^[11]

Garst and Nelson have debated the merits of their divergent research conclusions.^[12] Other claims have been made over the years that places Henry and his contest in Kentucky or Jamaica.^{[13]"

-From Wikipedia}

Collection - The IBM Watson Jeopardy Challenge

Watch Jeopardy greats take on IBM's lastest foray into artificial intelligence, a trivia-playing computer system called Watson. Who is almost as creepy as Alex Trebeck.

Curated by Whitney Weiss

Total Runtime: 0:51:47

Collection2010salex trebeckartificial intelligencegame showibmken jenningssupercomputerwatson

From Wikipedia:

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,^[2] developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson.^[3]^[4]

In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show's only human-versus-machine match-up to date.^[3] In a two-game, combined-point match, broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes February 14–16, Watson beat Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, andKen Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak (74 wins).^[5]^[6] Watson received the first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM divided Watson's winnings between two charities.^[7]

Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage,^[8] including the full text ofWikipedia,^[9] but was not connected to the Internet during the game.^[10]^[11] For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble responding to a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.

When playing Jeopardy! all players must wait until host Alex Trebek reads each clue in its entirety, after which a light is lit as a "ready" signal; the first to activate their buzzerbutton wins the chance to respond.^[11]^[23] Watson received the clues as electronic texts at the same moment they were made visible to the human players.^[11] It would then parse the clues into different keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases.^[11] Watson's main innovation was not in the creation of a new algorithm for this operation but rather its ability to quickly execute thousands of proven language analysis algorithms simultaneously to find the correct answer.^[11]^[24] The more algorithms that find the same answer independently the more likely Watson is to be correct.^[11] Once Watson has a small number of potential solutions it is able to check against its database to ascertain whether the solution makes sense.^[11] In a sequence of 20 mock games human participants were able to use the average six to seven seconds that Watson needed to hear the clue and decide whether to signal for responding.^[11] During that time Watson also has to evaluate the response and determine whether it is sufficiently confident in the result to signal.^[11] Part of the system used to win the Jeopardy! contest was the electronic circuitry that receives the "ready" signal and then examined whether Watson's confidence level was great enough to activate the buzzer. Given the speed of this circuitry compared to the speed of human reaction times, Watson's reaction time was faster than the human contestants except when the human anticipated (instead of reacted to) the ready signal.^[25] After signaling, Watson speaks with an electronic voice and gives the responses in Jeopardy!'s question format.^[11] Watson's voice was synthesized from recordings that actor Jeff Woodman made for an IBM text-to-speech program in 2004.^[26]

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