Deep Blue

Is it Friday already ?  Time flies when you are having fun.   Some weeks seem to go by so slowly but this one was like a time warp.  Worked about ½ the week in the office, and half from home with service people coming and Luke having a cold.  Breaking up a couple of days with half the time in the office maybe broke up the regular pace of things.

My solar panels are cranking out more WATTS the past couple of days so I think that issue is resolved.  The water in my refrigerator is still at a trickle and PC Richard has not called back with my part.  The forecast is for snow, rain, snain, and accumulations can get to be 2-4 inches.  Not too much but enough that Kyle’s soccer scrimmage tomorrow will probably get cancelled. 

Sue went to the Dr. today and has confirmed that her lingering cold and headache is actually a sinus infection.  A day or two on antibiotics and she will probably start feeling better.  It has been a long time since she had a sinus infection so hopefully this one will exit.

This day in history “On this day in 1996, after three hours, world chess champion Gary Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. An estimated 6 million people worldwide followed the action on the Internet.

Kasparov had previously defeated Deep Thought, the prototype for Deep Blue developed by IBM researchers in 1989, but he and other chess grandmasters had, on occasion, lost to computers in games that lasted an hour or less. The February 1996 contest was significant in that it represented the first time a human and a computer had duked it out in a regulation, six-game match, in which each player had two hours to make 40 moves, two hours to finish the next 20 moves and then another 60 minutes to wrap up the game.”

I have witnessed the increases in computing power and the size of computers over the past 30 years.  Artificial intelligence and processing millions of calculations per second is by today’s standards easy for machines that fit in your pocket.  Cell phones with dual core processors, copious amounts of memory and specialized processing chips have made smart phones and their big brothers and cousins tablets.  With all of this technology and modernization why do we work more hours now than our parents did at our age ?

I TEXTED Sue with the order number for her to pick up a couple of hero’s for dinner from Mama Lombardi’s.   Imagine a generation ago the instant communication we take for granted was only available to a select few military leaders and even then not as instantaneous as it is now.  As long as I get my chicken parm hero, I will be happy.

Kyle has a sweet sixteen to go to tonight.  His iPhone 4S equipped with Siri, wifi, 3G, GPS, etc is quite capable of making all sorts of calculations or finding the answer to all sorts of stuff.  It is even capable of making a phone call, but we know, Kyle will TEXT us later to pick him up.  Oh wait, he is getting a ride home.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

Photo of the day “Deep Blue”