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http : // www.businessinsider .com/ the-signal-and-the-noise-nate-silver-2012-9

http : // www.businessinsider .com/ the-signal-and-the-noise-nate-silver-2012-9 #ixzz3MqHaE4wC


http://www.businessinsider.com/the-signal-and-the-noise-nate-silver-2012-9

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-signal-and-the-noise-nate-silver-2012-9#ixzz3...


When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, it was because of a bug

One of the best chapters in the book is Silver describing a fast paced, high stakes chess game with the infectious enthusiasm of a Monday Night Football commentator. 

He looks back at the famous chess match between Garry Kasparov, then the best chess player in the world, and Deep Blue, the IBM chess computer. Kasparov was savvy, and made a number of early moves designed the throw the computer off. But even when he won the first game, something the computer did scared the life out of him. 

Deep Blue, in the end game, moved a rook in a seemingly irrational move. Kasparov, who understood the plausible trajectory of the game around five moves ahead, would interpret this as the computer seeing a dozen or more moves ahead, startling him deeply. He changed his play to adapt to this possibility, and would go on to forfeit winnable games because of it. 

Here's the most interesting part though. The move of the rook, according to the IBM programmers, was because of a bug in the code. The programmers thought they had removed all of the code that said "if Deep Blue cannot win, make a random move" but failed to, and the move of the rook was nothing more than a goof.
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