Zwischenzug: winter holidays

Today I used the word "toque" in a sentence and no one knew what it meant. Oops.

Still no snow here but it's below freezing in the evenings, e.g., right now.

The Bilbao tournament finished today (just a short exhibition) not in the total disaster augured by the first day; man only lost 4-8 (+1=6-5). Huzzah. Meanwhile, Sunday the World Cup starts in Siberia. Convenient for the 23 Russians (not "former Soviets") attending (out of 128, to be fair, but next highest I think is China or Ukraine at 9 or 10 each).

The town is shutting down for Thanksgiving, beginning tomorrow -- even Fine Library is closed, and Fine Library is open to one o'clock in the morning on weekdays (only eleven o'clock on Sundays, and seven o'clock on Saturdays). Blessings to the bureaucrat who decided they should still serve meals here during this time, including something labelled "holiday dinner." (They even did something like this last week, although I didn't recognise the turkey stuffing as such until I tentatively bit into it.) One imagines the only thing in a couple kilometers that won't be closed is the local 24-hour convenience store. -- and I thought living in North Vancouver was parochial.

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Postscript, that night. I went to a concert the other night. I've been meaning to go to something, anything, since I got here, since generally they're free or very cheap for students, and probably they have some adequate talent. Various things intrude. This one took place at the local chapel, which is an enormous and impressive structure.

(In fact I was putting off writing about this because I took a few pictures and I was trying to figure out what to do with them. In the end I decided "nothing at all," because the pictures aren't any good. This is because (a) it was nighttime and quite dark; (b) I didn't feel good about wandering around to gawk and get the shots I might have wanted; (c) I didn't even try to make the best of the ones I did get. Shameful. Here's the best of the lot, and it's blurred and has distracting things in the foreground which I can't get rid of without (a) killing the perspective and (b) chopping off the column. Ugh.

And of course since there's no light outside the magnificent stained glass windows looks slightly less impressive. Close parenthesis.)

They have an 8,000 pipe organ, which is what I went to hear, really. It was an organ concert, more or less, and it made quite a noise in there, to the extent that the building seemed to vibrate slightly during the most intense parts. I wished I was sitting about seven pews further ahead, which looked acoustically superior, but that section was marked "Reserved." It was supposed to be music of Bach, and anyway it was in a chapel, so they had a few cantatas, sung by a nice mezzo-soprano whose voice was given an ethereal reverberation. Also of note: chaconne for unaccompanied violin, which a colleague tells me is just about the most remarkable unaccompanied violin music ever written. ("Basically nothing notable happened after Bach until Bartok," he remarked. "Sounds less impressive if you don't know Bartok's dates," I quipped, thinking of the usual "from A to Z" rhetoric.) It's BWV 1004, if you're wondering, 'Chaconne from Partida No. 2in D minor'. I heard a fugue I hadn't before, BWV 532 in D major, which was unremarkable, to put it gently.

Schachmaschinen: "a horse, a horse, my kingdom--"

An item on the list of Things Everyone Knows: that, without qualification, computers are better than humans at chess. Ever since Kasparov lost the first game of the original 1996 match against Deep Blue it's been downhill for chesspeoples looking to protect their mystique. It seems the Royal Game is fit just for calculators. Whereas in the 19th century it was held that a master's gift was for inspiration and fantasy, and optimism so reigned it was felt that a player could in the most seeming-rotten position discover some extraordinary resource to save the day --

-- or so the chess mystifiers and hagiographers tell us. I would doubt it, except that not too long before Everyone Knew that all functions are continuous and with one or two silly exceptions differentiable and so forth, which is a right bit of fantasy itself -- albeit abetted by ambiguity in the meaning of the operative terms.

Anyway, Kasparov lost the game, then stormed back to win the match 4-2 (+3=2-1), winning the sixth game in a particularly gruesome manner; he was in such high spirits as to spontaneously agree to a rematch during the press conference; and then next year came and crumbled in front of the world, losing the 1997 rematch 3.5-2.5 (+1=3-2) after another particularly ignoble sixth game, dual to the previous match; and that was it, chess is something you can calculate, and, incidently, all the hopes of the early AI pioneers that it would take real intellect to make a fine mechanical chess machine -- just vapour, like so much else.

But one didn't have to be a chess mystifier to know it just wasn't so. The computers were still weak relative to the best, demonstrably so, to those wanting to take enough time to demonstrate it, even if it was long past the time a humble patzer could hope to score a few points off his laptop any more than off a flesh-and-blood master, and Kasparov's loss was far from convincing.

So despite Deep Blue's "retirement" the experiment continued. The computers got better. Man still had some triumphs; for example, Ilia Smirin's 2002 match against four leading programs, which he won, 5-3 (+2=6-0). The game against "Gambit Tiger" was particularly curious and prompted one commentator to remark ironically that although computers were superior in strategy to humans, we could still overpower the machines tactically, (as Smirin did in a dubious position).

Fast-forward to 2004, with two high-profile matches between leading players and leading machines: Kramnik v. Fritz and Kasparov v. Junior. (You can always tell which side is computer by the goofy name, and which side human by the Russian name.) In the former Kramnik looked to be coasting to an easy victory before dropping two points in the second half to end 4-4 (+2=4-2), once simply hanging a piece and once playing a slightly speculative combination with a very deep refutation which the machine very impressively found. In the latter things looked up when Kasparov cooked the machine in a knife fight in the first round, then slightly down when in a later game he overlooked a mating attack from the machine, then slightly askew when in the final game he agreed to a draw in an unbalanced position -- in front of millions (maybe), since the game was televised on ESPN (!). Ending up at 3-3 (+1=4-1), one could be forgiven for having lost almost all interest in Man-Machine matches.

Then, of course, there was Hydra, which pretty much made it mandatory to lose all interest. ("Lasciate ogni interesse, voi ch'entrate"?) Finally the knowledge that the tail wags the dog came true with a painful demolition in Adams v. Hydra. (Finally not a Russian, but still, to be sure, a world-class talent. For the record, Smirin is Israeli.) This travesty took place just a few months ago and saw the bon vivant Englishman lose 5.5-0.5 (+0=1-5). Ugh. Even worse, the prize fund was structured so that money only came for scoring points (unusual: usually the purse is split in some specified way to the winner and loser of the match, irrespective of the score), so for enduring this drubbing poor Michael Adams picked up only 10 thousand. (For comparison, Kasparov and Kramnik pocketed mid-six-figure sums for their labours -- minus pay to their seconds, and so forth.)

Finally, today started the second annual (so far) Man v. Machine tournament in Bilbao, Spain. Three men, all former "world champions" (so to speak; they comprise an Uzbek, a Ukrainian, and a -- Russian), against three leading programs, two microprocessors you too could own (Fritz and Junior) and one supercomputer (Hydra, again). Care to guess the day's score? Yes, that's right.

Certain chess fans might note encouragingly that all is not yet completely lost: correspondence chess players, who play games over duration of months instead of hours, sending moves by post, still know how to take the machines' measure. But this wagging wolf will just give a desultory woof!. It's all true. If a chess titan spends months preparing for a match, then we'll watch it, for sports' sake. But these sideshows are dispiriting.

Zwischenzug: "Das Leben, doch nicht den Ring!"

This week I went to see a short lecture series entitled "Love, Justice, and Power in Wagner's Ring," just for a bit of colour, you know, break up the 'math, math, math' monochrome monodrome. (Speaking of math jokes.) It was staged by a visiting professor, who gave three lectures ranging from understanding the Ring in terms of Kant's philosophical anthropology to the epistemological (?) and dramatic status of the leitmotif. He gave his talks in a lecture hall in the musicology building, where they have pianos and large speakers, of which he took advantage.

Almost needless to say, this was quite too much for me to handle; I broke down and ordered that seven-DVD set of the Ring. I felt a little shameful, some pathetic Puritan atavism, so I got Neurkirch's "Cohomology of number fields" too, which promises to be entertaining reading.


Getting chilly here (single-digits centigrade). Still no snow, I guess not for a week or two yet. Not especially looking forward to walking to Fine Hall in the snow but I've been advised there's actually a shuttle bus to there (among other places) from the Graduate College (and back) which might obviate this difficulty. Since I need new shoes (among other things) I may have to avail myself, but then where would I take walks?

Realpolitik: "but by blood and iron"

With all this chit-chat about Civ IV, I finally broke down and got the Civ III CD from where I'd hidden it away. Fortunately, this was well-timed to occur during the (drum roll) Fall Break. It's a week-long lacuna, during which your scribe has evidently been too busy building the envy of the world and fighting wars of aggression defence and, from time to time, condescending to read his Safarevic and recall his old forbidden configuration problems -- not to mention the squirrel-like scrounging -- to communicate with the Outer World.

These people are break happy, but I guess you have to do something about your woefully misplaced Thanksgiving holiday. (I believe it's the week after the midterm exams.) Since many students have taken the opportunity to ditch this joint, it's relatively quiet; but there are still us local globe-travellers who must endure the fardels heaped during this time when the weather is temperate and no one ostensibly is here: the film crews, the steam system maintenance, the absent dining service, though in deference to the squirrel analogy they've continued to serve breakfast throughout.

Well, I guess this is about what I learned this week:

• Bismarck definitely is responsible for World War One.


• If you can't have desert power, at least have air power.


• If you don't have iron, you're going to have blood. (In this way history diverges from biology.) No wonder Rome eclipsed Egypt et al.


• Railroads built the world. Thanks, Cornelius Vanderbilt, despite being a shift competition-ransacking robber baron.


• When in doubt, analyse the group of locally mimsy borogroves modulo globally mimsy borogroves. You'll learn a lot about jabberwock lairs.

I hear it's snowing or about to back in the various parts of the old country. I don't know what it's like here. Still sunny but I couldn't tell you the temperature -- the university newspaper doesn't print during the break.