Weekend econlinks: The quest for perfection

• Gelman writes a useful overview on causality and statistical learning (caveat lector: I have only read through Angrist and Pischke's book, among the three Gelman mentiones; that one is very well written, but aimed at junior graduate students at best: hence, the book's tag "an empiricist's companion" is overselling it; and that has nothing to do with Josh Angrist kindly "advising" me to change my PhD topic/focus, sometime in my beginning graduate years, because 'nobody serious would be interested in structural modelling' :-)). I guess I would position myself more within the “minority view” set, represented here by Heckman (I wouldn’t say that is really a "minority" within Economics alone, by the way), but the usefulness of these debates cannot be questionned. And an outsider's (to Economics) opinion, such as Gelman's, is always more than welcome. Related, the WSJ talks about statistical time travelling to answer interesting counterfactuals; I have a feeling I'll stick to my structural guns for now...

• An excellent article on the junior meritocracy and the perils of standardized testing at very young ages. I share most of the worries expressed therein and indeed agree that the marshmallow test would say at least as much, and probably more, than a standardized intelligence test, in the case of toddlers. My general take is that young humans have much more complex personalities than usually warranted, in ways that elude any catch-all type of tests: after all, some even fall in love at 3 years old.

• The perfect, employer-focused, resume. Uses creativity somewhat differently than its more modern counterparts; I am sure Leonardo would be the one to get all the flyouts and job offers today, as his modern CV were obviously recession-proof.

• The ubiquitous problem with such academic et al rankings (which I brought over and over, including in earlier posts and articles, particularly concerning the academic ranking obsession in Romania, where they also-- still! -- have problems understanding that a publication 'anywhere in ISI' can be total nonsense) is that they try to rank overall, ie. over all disciplines, often over (too) long periods of time etc. The only meaningful hierarchies in science are those done on specific disciplines and, even better, subdisciplines, and over shorter periods of time, thus revealing top new places etc. Then, inter alia, one would not be able to claim that biological sciences are advantaged, since there would be a within-discipline focus. I haven’t heard a single serious (but plenty of marginal) scientist(s) stressing the relevance of the rank of her/his university/institution over that of her/his department/research group. Politicians and journalists should take note, too.

• The perfect chef? That is intriguing enough: I would certainly like to know whether one can trace his whereabouts anywhere around Chicago, in the near future. And the (allegedly) perfect place for the greatest wine-- Rekondo, San Sebastian-- for the far(ther) future.

• Gastronomic sacrilège: where have all the great cheeses gone-- roquefort, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Félicien, gruyère, comté, münster, pont l’évêque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de Savoie, crottin de chavignol?! Worse, together with the cheese, soon gone might be oysters, and epsilon common sense... Quo vadis, France?

• Searching for the perfect chess player, human or machine... Put your money on AI; leave poker for humans.

• The most exciting scientific upshot I've heard about in a great while: explaining the tip-of-the-tongue moments. It comes finally clear (although at this stage I understand it is still just speculative/conjectural, and needs more testing) why polyglots (such as I like to consider myself...) have more of a problem in remembering specific words than people who use a single language: “ […] this kind of forgetfulness is due to infrequency of use; basically, the less often you use a word, the harder it is for your brain to access it." Good, I will feel much better when invoking 'lapsus memoriae' next time :-).

• The quest for the better, simpler, (American) living times: old, but superb Daily Show clip, via Tabarrok, on MR

• Economics research in perfect worlds.


• How very true, though my feeling is that the battle for the brightest junior (and not only) Economists is far from over. It is sadly not Europe overall that might offer an alternative for European economists (not a chance: for starters, Europe needs to cut that embarrasing red tape where academics depend on useless, worthless, ridiculous bureacrats, and to think of attractive real wages... ), but Canada and Australia, which look more and more like worthy competitors to the USA (top; the bulk is way worse than pretty much anywhere in western Europe) places (related, earlier).

The 6th sense. In practice

Watch & listen (TED talk by Pattie Maes), and be amazed.

More about the project.

More about Pranav Mistry, the MIT Phd student behind all this.

Chess games, more and less serious

First, the powerful Corus Chess tournament has started today (first game tomorrow) in Wijk aan Zee. Time for last year's Group A winner, Magnus Carlsen, to really make history. Ivanchuk did quite well lately, but I still don't see him with too many chances against the Viking Chessmaster, this time. Aronian is, however, always 'unpredictable': hence, if anything, he's the one Magnus should watch out for the most... Group B will also be very interesting: my bet is on the new hope, Fabiano Caruana: I saw some unbelievably smart games he played in different tournaments last year.

Second, computer chess games for the less professional players, such as myself :-). In order to have an idea whether I should get the new chess program for my Ipod (see also here), I should ask Susan Polgar how does the tChess compare to the Kasparov Chessmate , the latter available within the set of games offered on the screens in KLM intercontinental flights (now you know that other than watching good movies--2nd bullet point-- I also play a lot of chess on such flights...). I am obviously no pro when it comes to chess, but I won 15 games (and lost only 3) against the highest level the Kasparov Chessgame has ('strength' 2300, ie. playing against Kasparov's avatar...), which clearly says more about that game than about myself :-). If the Ipod chessgame is similar or lower in strength, I wouldn't bother (though in any case, I think it is absolutely great to have such a chess game on Ipods and Iphones)... All in all, I am definitely looking forward for Fritz-like strength in chess games on such devices as Ipods, KLM screens and the like...

CES 2008 and Bill's last keynote speech

SciAm's full coverage of the '08 CES. From where surely you won't miss the Bill Gates bits: Bill on the future of robotics; Bill giving a personal tour of MS's new "surface". And, of course, Bill's last CES keynote address, fully available for instance on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, plus of course, the end-- where Bill has his Guitar Hero moment & Slash literally rocks). You might as well just forget the noise around the Vista... or not :-).

Celebrate: Checkers is solved!

In today's Science online: wonderful title, wonderful article, wonderful research. Took quite a while, but the victory is sweet indeed...

"If two players face off at checkers and neither makes a wrong move, then the game will inevitably end in a draw. That's the result of a proof executed by hundreds of computers over nearly 2 decades and reported online by Science this week."

You can read the free abstract, but need a subscription to download the pdf (you can download the supporting online material). Caveat lector, however! If you were on the verge of thinking "and now to the final frontier: CHESS", you should hold your horses: solving that will still require a hell lot of time, as the conclusion of the article (pasted below) makes clear. So there is still plenty of scope to play some nice chess games, but from now on checkers is history from my point of view. In particular, this also means that all you fellows who liked and who'd like to challenge me in checkers, knowing you'd always lose from me in chess, need to find some other challenges :-)

The checkers computation pushes the boundary of what can be achieved by search-intensive algorithms. It provides compelling evidence of the power of limited-knowledge approaches to artificial intelligence. Deep search implicitly uncovers knowledge. Furthermore, search algorithms are well poised to take advantage of the dramatic increase in on-chip parallelism that multi-core computing will soon offer. Search-intensive approaches to AI will play an increasingly important role in the evolution of the field.

With checkers done, the obvious question is whether chess is solvable. Checkers has roughly the square root of the number of positions in chess (somewhere in the 10^40- 10^50 range). Given the effort required to solve checkers, chess will remain unsolved for a long time, barring the invention of new technology. The disk-flipping game of Othello is the next popular game that is likely to be solved, but it will require considerably more resources than were needed to solve checkers.

SuperBots!

I've always loved those 'Transformer' cartoons. Well, it seems that researchers affiliated with the 'Information Sciences Institute' at the University of Southern California are very close to designing some real-life Transformers. For now they are called SuperBots and they can already do an amazing range of things. Here's a short characterization of a SuperBot:

Superbot consists of Lego-like but autonomous robotic modules that can reconfigure into different systems for different tasks. Examples of configurable systems include rolling tracks or wheels (for efficient travel), spiders or centipedes (for climbing), snakes (for burrowing in ground), long arms (for inspection and repair in space), and devices that can fly in micro-gravity environment.

Read more and watch videos of SuperBots in action here or here.

The machine era has just started

It's all over, the human chess player lost the ultimate battle (little do the $500k that Kramnik would have gotten anyway confort the rest of the humankind). The king is dead, long live...Deep Fritz! 2 victories over Kramnik (see live last game or just its report), only one due to a surprinsing Kramnik blunder.

At least Deep Fritz cannot - yet! - really enjoy its (his?) victory. Indeed, the very informative 'Technology Quarterly' section in the Economist's most recent number (2nd of Dec) does not hint anywhere close, but describes enough amazing new developments that suggest we might not be that far. My favourite articles in this section are about the buildings and the cars of the (near) future. The road to KITT looks indeed somewhat shorter than the road to David.