Computers aren't smart, they're just fast.

I have this argument with myself a lot when coding. "Why isn't this doing what I tell it to do!?" I sit back and remind myself that it's doing exactly what I'm telling it to do. That's all it can do. I'm telling it to do the wrong thing.

I learned that one from the best TV series ever (The Wire).

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The only winning move is not to play

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The only correct answer is not to play the game. Or something like that. Joshua taught me that.

People, even smart people sometimes fall for the myth that everything a computer outputs is correct, so as developers we have an obligation to do our very best to ensure that computers always output the correct data.

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At the end of the first game, Kasparov had forced Deep Blue into an unsalvageable position after 43 moves, and Deep Blue's response was to move its rook in a way that didn't make any sense to its human opponent. This may have rattled Kasparov, who could not understand the move and may have decided the computer was playing at a higher level than him.

As it turns out, the move really didn't make any sense. According to an anecdote from the book, initially recounted by the Washington Post, a bug in the program, which the engineers thought had been fixed, made it so that when Deep Blue was cornered, it picked a move completely at random.

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