AI research in chess has been primarily focused on producing stronger agents that can maximize the probability of winning. However, there is another aspect to chess that has largely gone unexamined: its aesthetic appeal. Specifically, there exists a category of chess moves called ``brilliant" moves. These moves are appreciated and admired by players for their high intellectual aesthetics. We demonstrate the first system for classifying chess moves as brilliant. The system uses a neural network, using the output of a chess engine as well as features that describe the shape of the game tree. The system achieves an accuracy of 79% (with 50% base-rate), a PPV of 83%, and an NPV of 75%. We demonstrate that what humans perceive as ``brilliant" moves is not merely the best possible move. We show that a move is more likely to be predicted as brilliant, all things being equal, if a weaker engine considers it lower-quality (for the same rating by a stronger engine). Our system opens the avenues for computer chess engines to (appear to) display human-like brilliance, and, hence, creativity.

This article is adapted from Oversharing, a newsletter about the sharing economy. Self-driving cars have met their match in the form of the humble traffic cone. If you're on TikTok, you may have seen what I'm talking about: a viral video of San Francisco activists disabling autonomous Cruise and Waymo vehicles by placing bright orange traffic cones on their hoods. This content requires consent that you have not granted on Slate. To view this content please visit www.tiktok.com

To use a horrible but tech-friendly analogy, language seems to act as a type of "bytecode" for facts and ideas, which can be chopped up and combined according to fairly simple combinatorial rules. This always works syntactically, and can lead to correct answer prediction without actually understanding any of the underlying semantics. It is analogous to a programmer combining functions in C# purely by compatible type signature from the compiled DLLs: in many cases this will generate plausible programs, and sometimes even correct ones, especially if the DLL was written by a careful programmer. But it can also lead to critical mistakes no human dev would make if they knew what they were doing. Decompiling such a program, assuming it was written by one person, and trying to figure out what the dev was thinking would be confounding: brilliance alongside bizarre negligence and boneheaded errors. The mystery is explained once you understand how the program was written, and that most of the brilliance was inherited, the rest was accidental.

I have never lived in Los Angeles, but I have probably spent more time thinking about L.A. than any other city that I haven't resided in. This is partly the fault of Hollywood, of Ice Cube and The White Album, of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Party Down, of the despised Lakers, but it's mostly the fault of Mike Davis. Davis, the historian and urban theorist who died on Tuesday, was probably my favorite writer about cities that I have ever read. He didn't only write about L.A., not by a long shot, but L.A. was his Beatrice, his Dark Lady. Every time I visit Los Angeles Davis' work floods through my brain, often down to specific words, phrases, and sentences.

The close of Act II Scene ii, and Hamlet questions how the performers in a play about the siege of Troy are able to convey such emotion -- feel such empathy -- for the stranger queen of an ancient city. The construct here is complex. It is no coincidence that in this same work we find perhaps the earliest use of the term "my mind's eye," heralding a shift in theatrical focus from traditions of enacted disputes, lovers passions, and farce, to more a more nuanced kind of drama that issues from psychological turmoil. Hamlet is generally considered to be a work of creative genius. For many laboring in the creative arts, works like this and those in its broader category serve as aspirational benchmarks.

Strategy: "What is your plan, how do you think about it?" Executives need to account for the fact that the economics of AI are unlike previous technologies. "With machine learning and AI, if you implement one thing, it modifies the cost function for everything else," Mason says. "When you do one thing well, it makes others things do well, and cheaper. At the same time, it's difficult to predict the outcomes of AI projects. "Unlike other engineering disciplines, at the beginning of an AI project, you don't know how you're going to solve it, and what the quality of the end result will look like.

Every emotion has a purpose--an evolutionary benefit," says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good. "I wanted to know why we have this emotion of boredom, which seems like such a negative, pointless emotion." That's how Mann got started in her specialty: boredom. While researching emotions in the workplace in the 1990s, she discovered the second most commonly suppressed emotion after anger was--you guessed it--boredom. "It gets such bad press," she said. "Almost everything seems to be blamed on boredom." As Mann dived into the topic of boredom, she found that it was actually "very interesting." Wijnand van Tilburg from the University of Southampton explained the important evolutionary function of that uneasy, awful feeling this way: "Boredom makes people keen to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those at hand." "Imagine a world where we didn't get bored," Mann said. "We'd be perpetually excited by ...

Why do so few women end up in physics, mathematics and other fields traditionally associated with "brilliance"? Part of the answer may lie in what happens to girls by the time they're out of kindergarten. A new study finds that 6-year-old girls are less likely than boys to think members of their own gender can be brilliant -- and they're more likely than boys to shy away from activities requiring that exceptional intelligence. That's a serious change from their attitudes at age 5, when they're just as likely as boys to think their own gender can be brilliant, and just as willing to take on those activities for brilliant children. The results, described in the journal Science, shows how early these gender stereotypes begin to affect the self-perception and behavior of girls -- which may limit their aspirations and careers into adulthood.

For someone who devised a computer chess program as an MIT undergraduate in the late 1950s, helped create the world's first video game, and held a leadership role with the World Wide Web Consortium, Alan Kotok got his start in an inauspicious fashion -- or so he was told. Subscribers to the Boston Globe get unlimited access to our archives.

Peter Clark is a senior research manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, overseeing Project Aristo, an effort to build an AI system with the ability to answer questions from standardized exams, starting on 4th grade science tests, with the goal of advancing to higher grades in the future. Clark was the featured speaker this week for the 2016 corporate kickoff event for Geeks Give Back, an annual philanthropic campaign presented by Bank of America in partnership with GeekWire, benefitting the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program. Clark gave an overview of the state of artificial intelligence, and his work at AI2, before fielding questions from me and members of the audience. Continue reading for highlights from the discussion, and stay tuned this fall for more information on how participating in this year's Geeks Give Back campaign. Todd Bishop: People look at artificial intelligence, and traditionally they think of a robot or a machine, but the internet is essentially the world brain.