Ed Felten posts that a computer named Hydra has beaten the world's seventh-ranked chess player in six of seven games. That's not really all that interesting to me; computers are just better at that than we are. I did like this bit, however. Probably because I'm a human programmer.

Indeed, algorithmic improvements have been a much bigger factor even than Moore’s Law over the years.

Chess computers have succeeded by ignoring what human chessplayers do best, and doing instead what computers do best. And what computers do best is to run programs written by very clever human programmers.

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