Computer chess games are fun to play over, even if it’s just because you know that these are the best chess playing entities in the world and some of their wisdom is contained in the games they’re playing out. Commentary of course adds to the fun, but that leads to…

Since John Horton Conway passed a few days ago now might be a good time to write up my thoughts on gardens of eden in his life automata. I’ve spent some time manually trying to find simple gardens of eden patterns and failed miserably, to the point where it seems…

This paper gives some technical attacks on neural networks. To understand what’s going on here, consider this plot to a Hollywood caper (which somebody should totally produce): An employee of a company wishes to steal a McGuffin from their vault. To do this she follows instructions from a super-spy phone…

I’m going to propose a completely insane way of playing better Poker, but hear me out. Instead of playing as one person, play as a team of two. This doesn’t require you know any more information than you would by yourself, in fact one of the people knows less. That…

Alphazero defeated Stockfish in a series of remarkable games marking, according to the common interpretation, a turning point where computer Chess will inevitably switch to deep learning based board evaluation. The deep learning centered interpretation has some truth to it, but I think it’s less than half the story. In…

Clean Up Your State There’s one overriding principle of doing imperative programming safely, which experienced programmers should all have long since learned from the school of hard knocks: Clean up your internal state before making outgoing calls Even within your own code, calling internal methods of the same class maintained…

I’ve configured my browser to replace all instances of the word ‘leadership’ with ‘douchery’. While this makes business commentary much more tolerable and leads to the web being a generally snarkier place, it leads to the question: Why does this work so perfectly? Why doesn’t it change anything into gibberish? …

Let’s say that you’re running a company and want to create some internal competition between teams to see which ones can perform better. You can do this with R&D, and sales, but I would humbly suggest that you don’t do it with receivables. …

I characterized Mike Hearn’s farewell essay as a ‘whiny ragequit’. I did this because it is, well, a whiny ragequit. …