The Chess Master and the Computer – The New York Review of Books

Humanist pointed me to a review in The New York Review of Books by Garry Kasparov titled “The Chess Master and the Computer” (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what?

One followup experiment that Kasparov mentions was a “freestyle” competition sponsored by the chess site Playchess.com where teams of humans and computers could compete against each other.

The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

I find it interesting that it is a hybrid of human machine that played best not pure AI. This is Engelbart’s augmentation outperforming experts or AIs.

GHOSTSIGNS: hand painted wall advertising

GHOSTSIGNS.CO.UK is a site dedicated to the hand painted advertising murals that we often see like ghosts of text on the sides of buildings. The site presents itself as,

a collaborative national effort to photograph, research and archive the remaining examples of hand painted wall advertising in the UK and Ireland.

The images of these ghostsigns are up on a Flickr group pool. See also HAT (History of Advertising Trust) web site which has a gallery.

Tagging Full Text Searchable Articles: An Overview of Social Tagging Activity in Historic Australian Newspapers August 2008 – August 2009

D-Lib has an article by Rose Holley of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP), on Tagging Full Text Searchable Articles: An Overview of Social Tagging Activity in Historic Australian Newspapers August 2008 – August 2009 (January/February 2010, Volume 16, Number 1/2.)

The Australian Newspapers project is a leader in crowdsourcing. They encourage users correct the full text of articles and tag them. This D-Lib article focuses on the tagging and mentions other projects that have researched the effectiveness (and found it wanting compared to professional subject tagging.) The conclusion endorses user tagging,

The observations show that there were both similarities and differences in tagging activity and behaviours across a full text collection as compared to the research done on tagging in image collections. Similarities included that registered users tag more than anonymous users, that distinct tags form 21-37% of the tag pool, that 40% or more of the tag pool is created by ‘super-taggers’ (top 10 tag creators), that abuse of tags occurs rarely if at all, and that spelling mistakes occur fairly frequently if spell-check or other mechanisms are not implemented at the tag creation point. Notable differences were the higher percentage of distinct tags used only once (74% at NLA) and the predominant use of personal names in these tags. This is perhaps related to the type of resource (historic newspaper) rather than its format (full-text). It is likely that this difference may be duplicated if tagging were enabled across archive and manuscript collections. There was an expectation from users that since this was a library service offering tagging, there would be some ‘strict library rules’ for creating tags, and users were surprised there were none. The users quickly developed their own unwritten guidelines. Clay Shirky suggests “Tagging gets better with scale” and libraries have lots of scale – both in content and users. We shouldn’t get too hung up on guidelines and quality. I agree with Shirky that “If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organise things is an error”.

The experience of the National Library of Australia shows that tagging is a good thing, users want it, and it adds more information to data. It costs little to nothing and is relatively easy to implement; therefore, more libraries and archives should just implement it across their entire collections. This is what the National Library of Australia will have done by the end of 2009.

MagCloud | The Best New Magazines, Printed on Demand by HP

Looking at my Flickr account (where I’m steadily uploading pictures taken in Kyoto) I came across MagCloud, a print-on-demand service for publishing magazines, catalogues and other visual printed works. The idea is that you upload a PDF and then people can come an buy a copy off MagCloud who then print and mail it. I wonder what the quality is like.

Onè Respe is an example of a publication using MagCloud. It is a collection of photographs of Haiti donated by many photographers. The proceeds from sales will go to benefit the victims of the disaster.

HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing

The web site for our graduate conference is up: HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. This follows on the successful one that students ran last year. We hope to have Jon Bath and Yin Liu from the University of Saskatchewan as speakers. The conference is free thanks to support from our Office of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.

Darnton: The Library in the New Age

Robert Darnton has a new book out The Case for Books and it touches on the issue of “google and the future of the book” (and the library.) There is an essay by Darnton in The New York Review of Books (v. 55, n. 10, June 12, 2008) that covers some of the ground. The essay is titled, “The Library in the New Age” and it argues,

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital repositories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

Wired Campus: Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program

The Mellon Research in Information Technology program is being closed according to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Marc Parry titled, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program.” (Jan. 5, 2010.)

Mellon described the change as part of an effort to “consolidate resources” and concentrate on core program areas like the liberal arts, scholarly communications, and museums. RIT will merge into the Scholarly Communications program, which will manage its existing grants.

This program funded a number of really cool projects like Zotero, SAKAI, and Fedora. I wonder what will happen to ongoing projects like Bamboo that are not yet off the ground?

Update: Bamboo has been “smoothly migrated into the Scholarly Communications program.”