“ Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning… Brian Christian
“ Forrest Gander: Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of… Brian Christian
“ Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by w… Brian Christian
“ Simply put, the representation of events in the media does not track their frequency in the world. As sociologist Barry Glassner notes, the murder rate in the United States declined by 20% over the co… Brian Christian
“ What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. Brian Christian
“ Stanford ecologist Deborah Gordon and computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar discovered that ants appear to have developed flow control algorithms millions of years before humans did. Brian Christian
“ If changing strategies doesn’t help, you can try to change the game. And if that’s not possible, you can at least exercise some control about which games you choose to play. The road to hell is paved… Brian Christian
“ Consider how many times you’ve seen either a crashed plane or a crashed car. It’s entirely possible you’ve seen roughly as many of each—yet many of those cars were on the road next to you, whereas the… Brian Christian
“ Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience. What we project about the future reveals a lot—about the world we live in, and about our own past. Brian Christian
“ Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it,… Brian Christian
“ In memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, 'To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have bee. Brian Christian
“ To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs mo… Brian Christian
“ When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on… Brian Christian
“ Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark… Brian Christian
“ I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument f… Brian Christian
