> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.
> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.
Fewer cones may be better for low-light vision. Apparently mammals grew out of a evolutionary niche where this was important, and they generally only have two cones while other vertebrates have four. Remember how dogs have poor color vision? That's true of almost all mammals. Primates are unusual among mammals in having 3 types of cones and better color vision. Meanwhile reptiles, birds, amphibians, insects have 4 types of cones and much better color vision than us.
The eye has a limited amount of real estate for light sensitive cells, and animals have a limited amount of energy to dedicate towards eye growth. More cones generally means fewer rods, which means poorer night vision. You can see this for yourself at night, because cones are concentrated at the center of the field of vision and rods are more common at the periphery. A common trick in astronomy is to look next to a star rather than directly at a star, it is not too hard to find stars which are invisible when you look at them directly but which become visible when you look to the side. Various nocturnal and deep sea creatures also feature a number of different adaptations, such as the tapetum lucidum (which reflects light to pass through the retina a second time) and special inverted rods which increase light sensitivity. These structures come with their own various tradeoffs. For example, the tapetum lucidum reduces image sharpness.
In spite of this, humans have very good eyes, with a balance of good low-light vision, good color vision, and good image sharpness. There are other animals better at each of these, but humans are still pretty amazing.
If the host can choose between doing nothing and revealing a goat, and the host wants the contestant to lose, then the contestant's best strategy is to never switch, in order to avoid being exploited by a host who only reveals a goat when switching would lose. Any reader who wrote in to say the probabilities were 50-50 after a goat was revealed was probably not thinking the host wanted the contestant to lose (or to win).
They tried, but I'm not convinced that they succeeded. Their video resembles Street Fighter in the way that https://youtu.be/-2gJamguN04 resembles Football. It's possible that their mapping works, in that there's some non-unpleasant piano sequence that maps to at least superficially convincing gameplay, but their video didn't show it.
The connection of analog (piano) to digital is impressive. The additional claim of having mapped music to fighting is not yet substantiated.
> The [...] claim of having mapped music to fighting is not yet substantiated.
(project and article co-author here)
Hopefully our writing does not come across as too much of a claim that we reached the single one and only best way to map music to fighting!
Our goal was to bring the most fun from both these worlds combined. Not an easy proposal to make, and obviously a personal one.
The overwhelmingly positive reactions from the audience during the public performance really made our day and validated this proposal to our eyes, but we'd be even happier if the project lived on with third parties pitching in other music/game metaphors. This is why we made it 100% open source/open hardware.
Speaking of the audience, we noticed that people were intimidated or thrilled by the possibility to play piano, others by the possibility to play a Street Fighter game, usually on a mutually exclusive basis. But if they dared to come and play, a balance could be quickly reached, and we considered this a success.
Obviously, it was't always the case. Some moments were just plain unlistenable.
But some other moments during were pure magic. We would like to give immense credit to pianists Alvise Sinivia and Léo Jassef (who appear in the video) from the Conservatoire National de Paris. They are incredibly talented musicians, and they played with our installation long enough that they knew the combos inside and out. It was an absolute delight to see and hear them play/fight during the public event.
It's neat that they can play a duet that results in actual gameplay; but generally I think you are correct, a player trying only to win would inevitably play something pretty awful sounding. (It would be hard to establish a musical parallel to game play on one piano - let alone two!)
Take the demo of a fight between skilled players and derive what keys they would have had to press on the piano to make it happen. I know that some (most modern fighters?) fighting games have options to show inputs on screen.
Sortof. For one if it could be done it would only work for that particular fight. Even that is highly unlikely though.
For one consider that music at least in terms how we (culturally, or biologically) are predisposed to listening to it: must keep time, you can change from 4/4 to 5/4 in the next section, but not arbitrarily (if you want it to sound like what people are inclined to call music at least).
(i.e. the drum-pad as a controller video someone linked in one of the responses, which is totally non-musical - is a good example).
Of course in a live-fighting game you don't care about structured timing, only about relative timing as to what your opponent is doing. Perhaps you could run a game through an emulator that enforced actions into particular time-blocks. Anyways I think it's very difficult, even to get something satisfactory rhythmically, not to mention tonality and a second piano.
« Assuming Anand and Carlsen’s blunders were independent events, what we saw was a 1 in 10,000 occurrence. »
Are they independent events though? In a game between mediocre players, if there is only one move to take advantage of a blunder, the computer analysis will repeatedly cry "blunder!" each turn until either that move is played or the initial blunderer defuses the opportunity. As for grandmaster play, I have no clue.
My hypothesis would be that GMs are much less likely to blunder when there's a winning move on the board. They're generally very good at finding such moves.
Yes, that's the idea as far as I understand it, too: Rouble just dropped 4x, so it made sense that it might recover somewhat. That must have been in 1998 (I am Russian)
I remember accounts of Westerners in Russia at the time. Supposdly the official exchange rates were rubbish and you could get 10 times as many rubles for your $ from most taxis.
> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.
> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.