
Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture (1985) [video] - espeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
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goldenkey
At 1:08:35 Feynman tries to put his glasses in his t-shirt, thinking he has on
a dress shirt with a pocket. He plays it off by rubbing the glasses against
his t-shirt. Pretty awesome how he's still making me smile and chuckle from
the grave.

Hats off to you Mr. Feynman. Your output may have been finite, but its effect
is limitless.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA&t=1h8m35s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA&t=1h8m35s)

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tosh
I like how he describes chess about 44 minutes in. Makes me wonder how modern
chess engines like stockfish rate a certain board configuration. I expect it
is quite more nuanced than his description of dead/not dead and summing up the
material on both sides.

~~~
jointpdf
There is a fascinating (and charming) paper by Alan Turing that describes his
"Turochamp" chess 'engine'. Apparently, it was the first program capable of
playing a complete game of chess, and the first program that could be
described as a computer game (although it sadly only ever existed on paper).
The general pattern he outlines (a heuristic evaluation function with hand-
tuned weights, along with minimax game tree search--i.e. backwards induction)
has formed the basis of most chess engines, both ancient and modern. Here's
the original copy:
[https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0xb4crOvCgTNmEtRXFBQUIxQWs/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0xb4crOvCgTNmEtRXFBQUIxQWs/edit)

Intriguingly, Turing posed the question, "Could one make a machine to play
chess, and to improve its play, game by game, profiting from its experience?"
This reinforcement learning approach to chess did not enjoy much success--
until AlphaZero. That story that has been well-told in many places, but
perhaps best so by David Silver in this recently released lecture by DeepMind:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld28AU7DDB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld28AU7DDB4).
The first ~40 mins are a lucid explanation of the classical methods, and the
rest covers RL/MCTS/AlphaZero.

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opo
>..."Could one make a machine to play chess, and to improve its play, game by
game, profiting from its experience?" This reinforcement learning approach to
chess did not enjoy much success--until AlphaZero.

Don't forget Samuel's computer checkers program from 1959. It was among the
world's first successful self-learning programs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Samuel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Samuel)

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mrtnmcc
Interesting that he noted pattern recognition as the limitation for computers.

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sweezyjeezy
It would be really interesting to know what Feynman would make of the current
state of machine learning. It's awesome what tasks can be performed with it,
but I imagine he would be disappointed with our level of understanding of how
these systems work.

~~~
laichzeit0
Why would you say we don't understand how these systems work? Stochastic
gradient descent, for example, is not particularly enigmatic. Pattern
Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher Bishop is a good place to
start if you want to gain an understanding of how and why machine learning
algorithms work.

~~~
faceplanted
He's talking about understanding their process, not their mechanics, machine
learning systems are usually black boxes with no guarantees, we run into
issues with this fact regularly because all we can do is train them and then
study the results, it can't tell us anything for certain.

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dang
A small discussion from 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457172)

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harry8
Note the way he picks on a woman in the audience for no reason to her surprise
and bemusement. If you've read "Surely You're Joking..." you'll recognise it
as one of his pick-up techniques. I'm a massive Feynmann fan, he has such
insight, wisdom and humour. All of us have foibles and we see (IMHO) one of
his in this one. They're all adults and I can completely forgive him for it
just as I could if it was him putting his index finger up his left nostril and
having a good dig while on camera. Not super pleasant to watch though. Adults
deciding or not to have sex is fine. Being jerks to try and do it, eh, no more
than yuk but, yeah, yuk.

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zorga
If you're going to make a comment like that, about a single moment in a video
over an hour long, you could try and be kind to the reader and at least say
where in the video this occurs.

