Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Set Pieces

Vishy Anand has appeared in many NIIT commercials. The connection is obvious - intelligence, speed, strategy, & whatever other parallels this game represents. And such a notion is not a parochial one, but fairly universal.

In May 1997,
Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, compelling us to rethink what we mean by intelligence, to look again at the possibilities of capturing our elusive moments of grand inspiration within the realm of a mundane & predictable algorithm.

That mundane & predictable algorithm follows a computational model called
recursion. Ray Kurzweil has written a very informative & insightful article on the use of recursion to play a perfect game of chess.

So while my mind boggles at the sight of a chess board, & my grasp of the
"Towers of Hanoi" remains feeble, it simply boils down to the inability of my cranial hardware to implement a call-stack.

And that, categorically, is not my fault.

2 comments:

Usha said...

hey, when did you learn greek. or was it latin!
I am sure you said something profound as usual. Great post!
hehehehe

S! said...

Yes, it was slightly skewed towards computer science. :)

I found a terrific example of Recursion in Wikipedia. Here it is:

Recursion:
If you still do not get it; See "Recursion"

That totally shook me, :)

S!