User Profile

I’ve never been a particularly good chess player — when I played on my high school chess team, my rating peaked at just above 1700, which is, well, decent. But ever since I played and lost to my first chess computer, I’ve aspired to writing a great chess program.

I never got around to it, only writing a series of Othello programs on various platforms, but the dream is still there. So I’m quite taken with Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s twelve-year quest to build a chess computer capable of beating the world chess champion.

There are really two major contests in this autobiographical account — the well-publicized final match between Deep Blue and world champion chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and the early political tension between the original Deep Thought team at Carnegie-Mellon University and the more established computer chess group led by Hans Berliner at the same institution.

Hsu’s irritation with these two major rivals comes through clearly, but he does attempt to at least sound understanding of their respective positions. The emotional level of disagreement and surprisingly petty behavior (during and after the match, Kasparov insinuated that the Deep Blue team cheated) highlight the fact that this was not just a game to Kasparov and not just an academic exercise to the CMU researchers. All the participants had the pride and work of a lifetime at stake, no less than that of athletes seeking a championship ring or Olympic medal.

Chess and technology enthusiasts should find the level of computer hardware and chess detail interesting, although others may find it tedious. Hsu fails to provide any substantial discussion of other computer chess research, which could lead the reader into thinking all the interesting developments occurred during Deep Thought/Deep Blue’s development, when in fact, computer chess has been a rich topic for decades. For example, one surprising omission — International Master David Levy defeated Deep Thought in an early game, but Hsu doesn’t note that Levy is a well-known computer chess authority and would know how to exploit typical weaknesses of chess programs as well as anyone.

Considering he’s not a native English speaker, Hsu’s writing is passable, and his vocabulary is impressive, although the style is somewhat stilted. There is at least one misspelling/typo (the Sports Illustrated “swim suite” edition), but the most distracting aspect of the writing is structural — Hsu recounts some events out of sequence, referring to them back and forth, so I felt a little bit like the time warping traveller in Slaughterhouse Five. For example, Hsu recounts a 1995 international computer chess tournament in Hong Kong before discussing a 1994 tournament in the next chapter.

Compounding this confusion is the succession of names for the various incarnations of the hardware — Deep Thought, Deep Thought II, Deep Blue, Deep Blue Prototype, Deep Blue Jr. It’s hard to remember the differences between them (it’s still not clear to me how Deep Blue Jr. is different from Deep Blue, aside from being “scaled down”), and I had to flip back the pages a few times to keep track of which version of the hardware was playing at what tournament and when against whom.

The naming issue does provide the most humorous anecdote in this tale — when the project was adopted by IBM, corporate insisted on changing the name from Deep Thought, largely because of the trademark issue (Deep Thought was named after the unhelpful computer in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but also because a surprising number of people, including a nun, kept referring to the computer as Deep Throat.

In an attempt to explain his ambition and tendency to bump heads, Hsu intersperses his narrative with some background on his early school years in Taiwan, required service in the Taiwanese army, and his activities at Carnegie-Mellon, but it’s really unnecessary. His personal style comes through loud and clear throughout the rest of the story and there’s no need to explain — some people just have the combination of talent and contrariness to create something like Deep Blue, and in this case, the world had the fortune to watch Hsu and Deep Blue bump heads with a no less intense personality, Garry Kasparov.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the San Francisco airport (with the food court dim sum a close second) is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art store in the International terminal. I try to always stop there and pick up a design book that would be hard to find in my local Barnes and Noble (not to mention Crown Books, which is almost the only other bookstore where I live).

On one of my recent trips through SFO, I snagged Paul Rand’s Thoughts on Design. This is a small book, less than a hundred pages, largely with graphics (naturally), and it starts off with fairly general pronouncements, but there’s some good stuff once it gets going, in particular some directives I haven’t seen before, like making use of repetition, and avoid choosing a font style correlated with the subject (e.g. the cliche of “chop suey” lettering).

I wouldn’t say this is a must-have on your designer bookshelf, but, hey, it’s Paul Rand.

Despite my not being a Steve Jobs fan, or perhaps partly because of it, I found Walter Isaacson’s bio of Jobs absorbing. In aggregate, it didn’t tell me anything new (Jobs personality, failures and successes are pretty well documented), but it comprehensively filled in a lot of detail, especially from his childhood to his early adult years, and the depiction of his illness is wrenching.

As a business study, it is illuminating, covering not just Apple, but Pixar, all the way to its merger with Disney, NeXT, and competing players like Microsoft and Google, although the history lacks some technical insight. For example, it was clear to me and I’m sure others at the time that both Microsoft and Apple had to get over the OS hump (one of my Bay Area commented, core competency-wise, there are some companies that do OSs and Apple wasn’t one of them) from their early PC days; Microsoft ended bringing in people from DEC to get them Windows NT while Sculley unfortunately depended on a partnership with IBM. I always felt he was unfairly maligned (my favorite Macs were from the Sculley era), and he gets the same treatment here (but not as much as Amelio).

Although this book is about Jobs, I find the supporting cast just as interesting, especially his biological sister and his belatedly acknowledged daughter, but also his lieutenants and partners — Ives, Cook, Cue, Forstall….and of course Wozniak (let’s not forget him), who is perhaps as perfect a counterpoint to Jobs as could be conceived even in fiction.

In the end, what I find fascinating is not Job’s reality distortion field and his self-assurance that rules applying to everyone else didn’t apply to him, but how people reacted and still react to that. And I’m left with the perhaps the mundane question I can’t shake: how can someone who spent his whole life refusing to put license plates on his car and parking in handicapped parking spots still be allowed to drive? I guess the rules really didn’t apply to him.

Aside from the first week at my junior high school, where they apparently assumed I was a poor immigrant kid who would be a low performing student and thus assigned me to classes with other low performing students, I was generally considered a “gifted” student. That came with perks like, in grade school, going on a field trip to an aquarium, and, in high school, a day spent learning how to be “creative” (some fads never go away).

It seems to me every kid would have benefited from the aquarium trip, and maybe more than the so-called gifted kids, but they weren’t missing anything with the creativity class. We listened to anecdotes on how famous scientists experienced their ephiphanies and then we ran around smashing ice cubes (is that a band name?) to see who could make water the fastest.

That time would have been better spent reading a book like Leonard Midlow’s The Upright Thinkers, a recounting of the revolutions in scientific thought.

A major message of the book is that science is a hard slog, and often it’s a hard slog going down the wrong path (much unlike the quick-fix resolutions in the MacGyver episodes written by the author, who is not only a noted physicist but a screenwriter).

For example, Newton didn’t havean apple fall on his head. Or he could have, but that would have been just bad luck.

Rather, after an emotionally deprived childhood and working essentially as a grad student without a scholarship, he spent spent thirty years burning the midnight oil on alchemy before Edmund Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame) asked him to look over Kepler’s orbital laws, and then Newton spent another eighteen months burning the midnight oil putting together his Laws of Motion.

Einstein did crank out three revolutionary theories in one year at his patent office job, (which reminds me of the recent advice I received from a retired mailman telling me I should have worked for the post office). Still, he spent much of his career futilely trying to turn back the tide of quantum mechanics.

And those are the success stories. For every crackpot theory that turned out to be revolutionary, there are a bunch of crackpot theories that are still crackpot theories and theorists who’ve only come up with crackpot theories.

So there are no easy answers or shortcuts to success. Instead, there’s hard work and perserverance, good luck, and being in the right place and the right time. And being born in the right place and right time, and right gender (there’s a reference to Lise Meitner, who co-discovered nuclear fission but missed out on the Nobel).

But overall the book is an optimistic one, profiling those who were dedicated to their intellectual passions and eventually rewarded with brilliant insights, and overall furthering the march of human progress. And the author’s bio reminds us that, whatever your main job is, don’t give up on your bookwriting and screenwriting aspirations.

It’s been a while since I read that John McCain’s autobiography, but what stuck with me was his capture, imprisonment and torture for over five years during the Vietnam war and his refusal to be released for PR purposes before his fellow prisoners. It amazes me that he professes no hard feelings for most of his captors (except one sadist he’d probably still punch out if he got the chance).

I also liked how he admitted to and took responsibility for what he saw as his failings, including poor behavior as a student, the failure of his first marriage and breaking under torture to give a false confession (although obviously you can’t blame him for that).

Of course, I don’t agree with Senator McCain on all his politics (otherwise I’d be a Republican), but I admired him enough I might have voted for him in his presidential campaign if he hadn’t selected Sarah Palin as his running mate (dealbreaker). Certainly I would have preferred him over George W. in his earlier run.

The reason I’m writing this now is because this is Purple Heart Day, and it seems like an appropriate occasion to keep the word “hero” in perspective. Some were calling McCain a hero for his no vote on the Republican “skinny repeal” health care bill. Well, first he was called a hero by fellow politicans when his current cancer situation was discovered, then not a hero by those aghast at his return to vote yes on “consideration” of the Republican health care bill, and I saw one tweeter say the North Vietnamese guards who tortured him were heroes (which just goes to show there are always dumbasses on any side of an issue), and then back to hero again (and possibly Machiavellian genius), with some pointing out that actually the two Republicans who consistently voted no from the beginning were the real heroes.

Senator McCain is a hero for his service in the Vietnam War. Voting in the Senate and voting his conscience is his job, as it is for every Senator. Giving (and taking back) the term “hero” in this context disrespects the real risks and sacrifices he and others have made in life-threatening conditions and shows how far our standards and expectations have dropped.

I often complain how during my few months working in New York City, people there routinely assumed I worked in a Chinese restaurant (“I’m here to pick up my order”).

But, as I was reading Seinfeldia, a delicious (I use this word because I just said restaurant) dive into the history of Seinfeld, I remember seeing only two Asians in the show: one was the venerable James Hong, working at a Chinese restaurant with his trademark fake Chinese accent (I was shocked when I saw him in an old sci-fi movie talking in his normal American voice), and the other was a Chinese delivery boy who made a phone call to China.

The book touches on the lack of diversity in the show just briefly but also notes that Seinfeld formed America’s view of New York and (I don’t know about this) performed a key role in revitalizing the city. So, in a way, you could say the show provided an authentic display of New York’s diversity as viewed by a segment of New Yorkers (and not the first — take all those Woody Allen movies).

It’s not just the Chinese restaurant thing. When I was working in New York, we had a meeting with Samsung America with a white American guy and an Asian American guy. Afterwords, a coworker wondered whether the Asian guy was from Korea. Sure, his name is Sam and he has no foreign accent and the other guy is American, but OK, he’s from Korea.

And I saw on twitter a Chinese-American woman announced it was an anniversary of her arrival in New York, whereupon a New Yorker congratulated her and said America needed more immigrants like her. Except she’s not an immigrant, she’s from LA.

Also on twitter, a designer who moved to New York from California said he liked New York’s authentic diversity with people from all kinds of countries building communities together, vs. the “social justice” of Berkeley types. OK, he just moved there, but sounds like New York’s more his style. Anyway, I responded that I prefer California diversity more: the type where people don’t routinely assume I’m from another country.

Like when a Manhattan museum staffer asked if I was Korean because he was thinking of buying a Hyundai and wanted some tips. Even if I was Korean, what tips would I have? Like there’s a secret Hyundai newsletter for Koreans? This is starting to sound like a Seinfeld bit. If Seinfeld was Asian. Asian-American George, Elaine, Kramer, even Newman, I could visualize it… Hey, we’ve had two sitcoms in the last twenty-five years featuring Asian Americans, I think we’re due.