The ultimate World Chess Championship viewing setup

Indeed, although we gave our heartfelt recommendations for the best experience possible, there is one way to make it even better: two screens. Before you close this article feeling you will not be able to use this How-To guide, first scroll down and look at the list of requirements since the two screens do not need to be two monitors.

First, you need to know why this setup truly beats a single screen setup. The official site, as well as ChessTv.com, will be providing live high-definition video coverage of the players, boards and more, There is no question that watching the game live on Playchess with grandmaster commentary is as good as it gets, but if you have ever seen the great video coverage offered by some events such as the Tal Memorial, you also know that being able to see the players, their expressions, their concentration and their nervousness, brings an added dimension to the viewing. Choosing either this or the board and analysis becomes a question of pros and cons, gives and takes. But what if you did not have to choose between them, and could watch both at the same time? You can!

The full scoop here. I never played chess much growing up so I wonder if I'd appreciate the matches. Still, I'm tempted to try.

We live in an age in which you can watch almost anything online, from sex to people playing Starcraft to people just living their everyday lives. The next frontier, as indicated by examples like this proposed chess setup, the NFL Sunday Ticket Red Zone channel, or hole cameras in poker broadcasts, is even more enhanced viewing experiences. To compete with these great experiences, sports stadiums are going to have to up their game in a big way. As one example, I can barely get a signal from the AT&T Park wifi network during games. Someday that will be an expected amenity at every park.

Taking stock

My piece on Amazon last weekend elicited a lot of email and comments, many of which were about Amazon's stock price. People who are bullish on Amazon were reassured by my piece, but many more comments and emails were from Amazon bears who thought I was deluded. It's worth reiterating for new readers: nothing I ever write here should be read as investment advice on Amazon, whether pro or con. 

Amazon's stock price (or company stock prices in general) is a topic that doesn't really interest me, and I'm going to disappoint those hoping for me to come up with some long-term valuation model for Amazon. I believe Amazon's business model is often misunderstood, but as to whether it's current stock price is fair or not, I can't claim any more insight than the average armchair analyst. Honestly, I don't even know what Amazon's share price is right now. I could find out without moving my mouse cursor more than a few inches, but I decided long ago that I didn't find stock picking very fulfilling.

This might seem disingenuous coming from someone who still owns some Amazon stock, but I'm sure I'm not the only former employee of a company who kept a small equity stake. It's difficult to be more familiar with the people, processes,  and business of a company than the one you worked at for so many years, and there is not some small amount of sentimental value in my Amazon stake.

If you want my serious investment advice, though, buying individual stocks, especially those as volatile as technology stocks, is not a game the average investor should be playing. When people ask me for advice in playing individual stocks, I tell them to only invest with money they're comfortable losing entirely, the same advice I give to people wondering how much to take to the blackjack table in Vegas.

For most everyone I know, I recommend diversifying your portfolio across a set of low-cost index funds, rebalancing occasionally, and spending the time you save stressing about the stock market on doing something more enjoyable and productive. That's how I manage my own finances, with a small play fund set aside for a few individual stocks including Amazon.

I'm far more interested in the strategic questions surrounding Amazon, Apple, and other technology companies than what their stock prices are. For entrepreneurs, investors, or other people working in technology, there's more to learn from how those companies create value and defend their businesses than the vagaries of the stock market. In only a few cases does a company's stock price hold interest for me: when it impacts their ability to retain employees, when they can use stock to purchase other companies, or if I'm thinking of working there and I'm negotiating my compensation.

While my last two pieces on Amazon, spread across a year, highlight some strengths of their business model, I certainly don't think Amazon is perfect. I view companies as networks, and you can tell a lot about a company's strengths and weaknesses purely from their outputs. From the Amazon bears, I'd love to hear more analyses as to why Amazon's business might fail and fewer discussions of what the proper P/E ratio is. GAAP earnings may have a strict definition, but within that definition companies can willfully manipulate their earnings up or down, moving them in or out, depending on their strategic goals.

A mental heavyweight championship bout

Chess is an all-consuming focus. “Sometimes when people are talking to me I will suddenly remember some chess position, and then it’s very hard for me to concentrate on what they are saying. They can see in my eyes that I am drifting away.” Yet contrary to his good-natured image, he admits to a steelier side. “What you can concede outside the chessboard will eventually haunt you in the chessboard as well. A match is really a contest of space between two people, and you can’t give the other one any quarter.”

-----

He describes the preparation process as akin to plotting an ambush in a giant forest. The terrain is too vast to comprehend in its entirety, he says. “But there are areas that you will know better than your opponent”, and that is where you prepare to attack, aided in your preparation by the most important change to sweep through the game of chess in decades: computers. “The way people play chess nowadays, which is to keep on switching their openings, being much more opportunistic – I think that is a direct result of computers. Even the way people play tournaments – everything has changed.”

Top competitors who once relied on particular styles of play are now forced to mix up their strategies, for fear that powerful analysis engines will be used to reveal fatal weaknesses in favoured openings. The result has in some ways made chess more defensive, increasing the risks of daring, adventurous gambits. But in championship matches, where draws are common and the final result is likely to be decided by just a handful of victories, unexpected approaches become even more prized. “Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer,” Anand says.

From an interview with chess grandmaster Viswanathan Anand a few days before his World Championship match against the heavily favored young prodigy Magnus Carlsen. Some interesting material throughout about the impact of computers on how chess is played at the highest levels, but even more insight into the stress of such prolonged mental combat.

I predict increasing novelty appeal for contests in which humans do things that computers can do better.

 

Art created by and for computers

But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.

These are the ideas of the Canadian media scholar Darren Wershler, who has been making some unexpected connections between meme culture and contemporary poetry. “These artifacts,” Wershler claims, “aren’t conceived of as poems; they aren’t produced by people who identify as poets; they circulate promiscuously, sometimes under anonymous conditions; and they aren’t encountered by interpretive communities that identify them as literary.” Examples include a Nigerian e-mail scammer who writes out the entire “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” in longhand, a data engineer who renders the entire text of Moby Dick into emojicons, and a library scientist who converts “Ulysses” into Q.R. bar codes.

Wershler calls these activities “conceptualism in the wild,” referring to the aspect of nineteen-sixties conceptual art that concerned reframing, and thereby redefining, the idea of artistic genius (think of Duchamp’s urinal). Conceptual projects of the period were generated by a kind of pre-Internet O.C.D., such as Sol LeWitt’s exhaustive photographic documentation of every object, nook, and cranny in his Manhattan loft, or Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong practice of taking a photo of himself every hour, on the hour. Today’s conceptualists in the wild make those guys look tame. It’s not uncommon to see blogs that recount someone’s every sneeze since 2007, or of a man who shoots exactly one second of video every day and strings the clips together in time-lapsed mashups. There is guy who secretly taped all of his conversations for three years and a woman who documents every morsel of food that she puts into her mouth. While some of these people aren’t consciously framing their activities as works of art, Wershler argues that what they’re doing is so close to the practices of sixties conceptualism that the connection between the two can’t be ignored.

More from the New Yorker here. The article notes that much of this new conceptual poetry is published on LuLu. In 2007, just after we came out with the name Hulu, we were sued by LuLu because, well, I guess our company names rhymed. That lawsuit certainly seemed like some form of modernist joke.

Certainly the internet and the rise of computing has lowered the bar to creating conceptual art of staggering size. The economics of many types of conceptual art has changed, and that has shifted its appeal. Emoji Dick was created through a crowdsourced labor pool of over 800 people from Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. The means by which it was produced is more interesting than the work itself, almost like David Blaine holding his breath for 17 minutes. In another age, perhaps a single person would have produced Emoji Dick and we'd marvel at the obsessive persistence and endurance. Now we chuckle at the idea of leveraging an Amazon Web Service to crowdsource the entire effort.

I loved this paragraph from the New Yorker article. 

Fifty years ago, when Andy Warhol said things like “I want to be a machine,” and “It’s easier not to care,” he was romanticizing the formal and emotional cleanliness of machine-based production. Humans, after all, court messiness. Warhol’s salvo was extended by the poet Christian Bök, who, in 2009, claimed, “We are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a audience of artificially intellectual peers …. If poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among our own anthropoid population, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that must inevitably succeed our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it.”
 

Indeed, much of this modern conceptual art is unreadable, but what if that's because it's only meant to be read by other computers? Someday, when a computer reads this blog post, I hope it has a sense of humor and irony.

Hello computer crawler, hope you enjoyed this post, and if you did, please share it to whatever social network is popular among you robot folk!