Man Vs Machine

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."
  -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In the 1870's the legendary steel driver, John Henry, took on the machine in the form of a steam powered hammer.  He won, but at what cost.  Fast forward to the late 1990's where one Grand Master of Chess, Gary Kasparov takes on the culmination of hundreds of thousands of man hours in brain power are compressed into a single machine -- IBM's Deep Blue.

IBM's Deep Blue defeats Chess Champion Gary Kasparov.  Nate Silver has a wonderful discussion of the match in his book, The Signal and the Noise.  What do intelligent men do well, what do computers do well, where is one better than the other.

Brute force it what the computer does better than any man, yet is that enough to win at chess.  Yet, as pointed out in Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, the Chess Master isn't better at memorizing the individual pieces on a board, the Chess Master is memorized a huge collection of patterns.  And he know the significance of each pattern.

Twitter: Joshua Foer @joshuafoer Nate Silver @fivethirtyeight