| Arcade Fire – Deep Blue Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Interesting that no-one's really put together the dead star or the song from the speaker of the passing car. I'd say that song he heard as a child could only have been "Video killed the radio star", another song about the how technological progress alienates us from the simpler things. The dying star he prayed to must have been the disappearing radio star. Then at the end of the century video itself started making way for laptops, cellphones, etc. Year 2000 video, which we watched on tiny screens before the massive plasma and LCDs came in, was the new dead star collapsing. Meanwhile "it" (technology) is starting to "see through you", not the other way around. A computer can now beat the world champion human at chess - "the show is over, so take a bow". We're now "living in the shadow of" (cue that old song again to represent the march of technology.) As an aside, I can remember reading about these chess games at the time in 96/97, and seeing it as a showdown between humans and computers. Like most people, I wanted the human to win, but the computer did in the end. From the Wikipedia article about deep blue... "On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls." The computer then won a full 6-game match against Kasparov in 1997... "Writer Nate Silver suggests that a bug in Deep Blue's software led to a seemingly random move (the 44th in the first game) which Kasparov attributed to "superior intelligence". Subsequently, Kasparov experienced a drop in performance due to anxiety in the following game" ... "After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players had intervened on behalf of the machine, which would be a violation of the rules. IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games." |
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