15 Dec Letters from 1903 | Magna Carta | AlphaGo

Three Things – Dec. 15, 2020

First thing: I just recently finished reading a wonderful little book from 1903 entitled Letters from a Self-made Merchant to His Son. It is the wittiest, smartest, most entertaining thing I’ve read in a while–I regularly found myself full-on laughing while reading it and yet it was equally as insightful. (You can read my notes/remarks on the book here.) Also, the digital/Kindle version is FREE on Amazon. This has become one of my default high school/college-graduation gifts going forward.

Second thing: Did you know (or do you remember from high school?) that Magna Carta, a document adopted in 1215, was instrumental in the political formation of our government? Indeed, Magna Carta was perhaps the first of many ‘adaptive mutations’ in the evolutionary history of government that brought us to what we today call democracy. I learned this while listening to the “Founding Documents” series from one of my current podcast-favorites, Civics 101. One in a growing list of NPR productions, every episode I’ve listened to has been well-researched and well-balanced, plus the hosts have great personalities. (You might consider starting with their “Midterm Elections” series.)  

Third thing: The AlphaGo documentary is free to watch on YouTube. As you’ve probably seen, Chess is scoring a bit of a comeback thanks to the incredible Netflix miniseries, The Queens Gambit. (If you haven’t yet watched it, I highly recommend you do!) While Chess is inarguably the king of Western board games, I want to draw your attention to an even older and arguably more popular board game simply named “Go”. Predating Chess by over a millennium, Go is widely popular in China, South Korea, and Japan and is considered by some to be a form of martial art–the “martial art of the scholar” (here you can see Russell Crowe playing it in A Beautiful Mind.)
The first computer to beat a Chess Grandmaster was way back in 1996 (did they even have mouses back then?) Since then, software engineers had unsuccessfully attempted to develop a ‘computer player’ smart enough to defeat a real-world Go champion–the came is highly complex and leaves more room to ‘human creativity’ than a structured game like Chess. Finally, in 2016, a team from AI company DeepMind was able to defeat the reigning world Go champion with their software.  The AlphaGo documentary is the story of how a computer finally accomplished what many said was impossible, and it offers some great insight into the current progress toward developing Artificial Intelligence. Check it out!

If you’re in the Northeast, stay safe this week and enjoy the snow! Thanks for reading,

Aaron McNany