he said france, not paris. i think that makes a difference to the cringe factor. however yeah it was slightly weird, tho we're nit picking here.

but yeah he was in france, i remember him tweeting monte carlo f1 and cannes stuff.

I'm glad you linked this. I had kinda written 538 off and haven't been checking it out at all.

I interviewed Murray Campbell (head of programming team for Deep Blue, featuring prominently in the article) not too long after that match for a paper I wrote in HS. He was surprisingly easy to get on the phone for some completely random HS student, lol.

I also talked with Joel Benjamin, Grandmaster who was consulting for Deep Blue's programming team, at a chess tournament a couple years after that.

One thing that struck me the most was how much they geared Deep Blue to specifically play Kasparov. I mean, it makes sense since that was their opponent but there's a very good chance no other top 10 GMs would have had as much trouble. Deep Blue likely had a lot of blind spots but they didn't think Kasparov would realize how to exploit them in a short match. He was prepared for Deep Blue from a year before but unlike a human opponent, Deep Blue's style and ability of play changed drastically. Kasparov's approach fundamentally hadn't plus he had almost nothing to prepare with except his brief match the year before. Deep Blue had Kasparov's entire career of games.

Interestingly to me, Campbell seemed to be of the opinion Kasparov beat himself while Benjamin kind of thought "he" had out-tricked/beaten Kasparov himself.

Neither seemed to want to take much responsibility for Deep Blue not offering a rematch and blamed it on IBM (may be true). That was the most frustrating thing at the time to me. Kasparov never got a shot at revenge and a few years later computers had more clearly surpassed humans at chess. I think psychologically he would have been able to recover and have been much better (but still not all that well) prepared in a 3rd match.

Oh, also it's very common ime for a non-serious chess player to make tons of errors when writing about chess. It always seems weird since many can be so easy to fix if you just have a serious chess player proof the damn thing but, meh, I'm not surprised.

It's nice to be fondly remembered (though I'm not sure if the running game was me...it's been a long time and I'm not a Va fan particularly).

Somebody mentioned they just discovered I was an old school 2+2er so I figured my name must have popped up somewhere.

So, hey y'all.

Hello

well, in any event, hey hey =)

So what's Simba's handle here?

Really enjoy your writing 👍

this "guide to trash talking in pickup basketball" article is ****ing awesome.

don't have time to read it all right now but I scrolled down to see gary payton staring down mike and a bunch of other videos so I'm gonna save reading the rest for when I'm less busy...

I **** talk in everything, but in basketball it's baaad. had a principal say last year, "did you really tell _____ that his dad should be ashamed of him while you were playing basketball last night?"

I said, "yep. he's terrible" (I've met kid's dad enough times to know he'd just laugh).

I stay after school once/week when the gym is open and hoop with 8-10 kids for an hour. sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm at school bc I'll want to say some things, all in fun and in response to them, that wouldn't be appropriate. lol

lastly, playing against athletic but not really coordinated 7th and 8th graders is glorious. keeping up on (never ending) fast breaks is rough sometimes, but whenever I want to just bully my way to a hoop I can.

lol, good job wiper beating little kids.

Anybody else bummed about Emily yoshida leaving grantland? Girls in hoodies was always solid, even after tess Lynch left

Its my favorite podcast (would maybe prefer hp but I don't watch much TV). She's also a really entertaining writer, even though she doesn't write that often.

I get that it might have been cringe worthy but it was just a matter of me not remembering if i was at g7 or not, and if not why not - then i was like oh, i was in france.

This, so much this:

(1/2) If your article is called "Send Alex Gordon!" with a goddamn exclamation mark, its upshot should not be "if the chance of his being

(2/2) safe was at least 30%, then he should have been sent." Especially with zero analysis presented therein as to his actual chances.

you know the taek is piping hot when SKIP busts out the all caps

Because I wouldn't give Skip Bayless a clickthrough if my life depended on it, is there anything in there besides RANGZ?

where is the nfl picks column gdamnit

Too busy having one last go with Yoshida

So is Molly lambert going to have a solo podcast now?

<shudder>

Gee, how'd you guess.

Concluding paragraph:

DEVILISHY DIFFICULT

RANGZZZZZZZ

Bradys going to win another super bowl on Sunday?

The clumsy phrasing is the least of the problems with the article.

well i suspect the % of 2p2'ers that would just LOVE, LOVE to have a 3some with emyo to be 100%

Simmons dogged the picks column unless you wanna read yet another pointless take on Brady and Manning.

Wait, who is the third person???

Simmons

Obv answer is obv.

****