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Who’s BETTER AT .CHESS–computers or humans NICHOLAS CARR link to link. (Unlike footnotes , to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.) For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes […]

Is Google Making Us Stupid? NICHOLAS CARR “DAVE, STOP. STOP, WILL You? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death

Which is smarter at chess-humans or computers? CLIVE THOMPSON brings us back to our original question here: Which is smarter at chess-humans or computers? Neither. It’s the two together, working side by side. We’re all playing advanced chess these days. We just haven’t learned to appreciate it. Our tools are everywhere, linked with our minds,

Smarter Than You Think from the other’s peculiar powers. The computer would bring the lightning-fast-if uncreative-ability to analyze zillions of moves, while the human would bring intuition and insight, the ability to read opponents and psych them out. Together, they would form what chess players later called a centaur: a hybrid beast endowed with the

Then Kasparov did something unexpected. The truth is, Kasparov wasn’t completely surprised by Deep Blue’s victory. Chess grand masters had predicted for years that computers would eventually beat humans, because they under- stood the different ways humans and computers play. Human chess players learn by spending years studying the world’s best opening moves and endgames;

Why would anyone bother playing? What’s the challenge? NICHOLAS CARR that scene. What happens to HAL and Dave, and how does this outcome support his argument? 4. How does Carr use transitions to connect the parts of his text and to help readers follow his train of thought? (See Chapter 8 to help you think

Better than Human piece of software by Narrative Science . . . that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games’ stats or generate a synopsis of a company’s stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by

  Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? IT’s HARD TO BELIEVE you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that- in slow motion-is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early

Should Vaccination be Mandatory? Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases of the 20th century. In America, smallpox spread among the population at a very fast rate and killed over 50% of all those who contracted it. It was estimated that over 300 million people across the world. The spread of the disease was witnessed

‘Stolen Rivers’ by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers Read the poem on page 282 of Seasons Come to Pass several times, and then answer the questions that follow. 1. Read the poet’s biography on page 282 of Seasons Come to Pass. Her style is referred to as part of the ‘spoken word’ movement. What does this