I’m in the airport. It’s two hours before my flight leaves. I got to wondering if I could post a blog entry from my iPhone.

I guess I can.

A game is considered to be “solved” when all of the possible moves have been mapped out in a mathematical tree and thus the perfect set of moves can be determined regardless of an opponent’s play.

Tic-Tac-Toe is a pretty easy one. You solved this as a kid. There are three opening moves – corner, edge, center. And then you work from there.

Connect Four was solved in 1988. That’s because those new-fangled computer thingies were starting to get some real power behind them. If you want to play Connect Four against the best opponent you’ve ever played in your life, check out the applet on John’s Connect Four Playground which is programmed to play flawlessly, based on a database of pre-determined best moves. But if you go first, and play just as flawlessly, you can beat it.

Checkers was solved this past April by researchers from the University of Alberta. You can play against Chinook, which will play flawlessly, but the best you can hope for is a draw. It doesn’t matter how amazingly good you are at checkers. You will never win. For me, there’s something a little disturbing about that.

Could chess be next? There are an incredibly large number of possible games, but it must be finite. And if it’s finite, then the tree must conceptually exist even if nobody has been able to come close to mapping it yet. Some see chess playing ability as intutive and creative, and not merely a number cruching process. But if number crunching continues to get better, it might evolve to the point where we get a chess-playing program as unbeatable as Chinook.

To be clear, we’re not talking about a really, really good chess-playing program. We have that now. We’re talking about a program that can access an exhaustive database of pre-determined best moves in order to ensure the most favorable outcome possible.

What do you think?

Will computers ever solve chess?

A reader and fellow blogger writes in to ask how much of this blog is me and how much is WordPress.

The content is all me. The WordPress team keeps sending me Shakespeare anagrams, but I have not published any yet. Frankly, they aren’t very good.

The tech is all them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to create and manage a MySQL database? Neither do I, and I don’t need to. There is some minor tech stuff you need to do to get set up, but I was fortunate to have veteran blogger Ro of Pensive Musings as a personal tutor, and was able to get it set up without a problem.

The design is a combination of me and them. WordPress uses a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allows you to use a pre-made design to format the information in your MySQL database. I used this one, though obviously I made a lot of modifications. I made the font bigger and darker, removed the buttons from the top, created a new title banner, changed the picture, changed the quote box, etc. A lot of this was trial and error, and thanks to readers who gave me feedback, and to my visually-gifted sister who checked the blog after each update and reported by phone how each change looked from remote.

But the credit for the real heart of this blog goes to you, the reader. To those of you who answer the Questions of the Week and the Thursday Morning Riddles. To the Conundrum solvers and the Francis Bacon linkers. To the silly and the serious, to the friends and strangers, and to the anonymous posters too. To DeLisa and Annalisa and Andrew and Brian and Neel Mehta and K-Lyn and UnixMan and Susan and Lee and Bronx Richie and DB and Duane and Kenneth W. Davis and Ro and to everyone else who has posted here. And to the those of you who read along silently too. Without all of your visits and contributions, there would be very little reason for me to continue to do this.

Shakespeare Teacher will turn eleven months on Saturday.

My friend DeLisa White is the queen of telling me things I’d rather not know. Usually it leads to me no longer being able to use a particular product or patronize a particular business because they’re – I don’t know – torturing kittens in the rainforest or something. But I trust her, so I paid close attention when she included me in this e-mailing about the writers strike, reprinted here with permission from the author.

(By the way, when I told DeLisa I was going to put her writing online and not pay her for it, she said “Wow, I feel like an official Guild member!”)

Dear Friends,

The studios, networks and producers of The Office made $13.9 million dollars last year on iTunes downloads of the show alone.

Amount the writers, directors, and actors got of that?

Zero percent.

While among the Writers Guild’s 12,000 members there are television writer-producers like Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” who take home up to $5 million a year, on the other extreme are junior writers who – if they work at all – make $50,000 or less (just like the rest of Americans.) Furthermore, about 48 percent of West Coast members are unemployed, according to guild statistics, and rely on residuals to do things like, well, eat.

IMHO, I think this is a thoroughly just cause – I support the writers and their creative colleagues completely. I was sick at heart to discover that the shows and movies I’ve downloaded from iTunes did not compensate the people who created them, without whom my joy in them wouldn’t exist. This should have been automatically addressed by producers and studios. It’s egregiously unethical for them not to have done so and that they continue to resist is unconscionable to me.

I have just read and signed the online petition:

“In support of the WGA strike”

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/WGA/

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself.

Very best wishes,

DeLisa :-)

I don’t think I need to belabour the point. After all, the people who come to this site are here because of their adoration and admiration for an individual writer, and his tremendous contribution to our culture and language. But enough about me.

Let’s do what we can to support the writers who have brought so much joy to our lives, and who deserve to benefit from the fruits of their talent and hard work.

There’s a new website called FreeRice that helps you improve your vocabulary and fight world hunger. When you go there, you play a simple but addictive vocabulary game, and every time you answer a question correctly, the site donates ten grains of rice through the UN World Food Program.

At first, I thought this was another site to get humans to participate in an automated task that computers can’t do, like read book scans or create picture captions. But it works by generating advertising revenue. When you click on the answers, you indicate your visit to the advertisers, and they pay for the rice.

I just donated 2200 grains of rice, and was able to reach a vocabulary level of 48. And I was worried I was going to be unproductive today!

In the 1950’s, Alan Turing suggested that artificial intelligence would not truly exist until a machine could pass a particular test, which we today call a “Turing Test.” It goes like this: a human examiner poses a question to two unseen participants, who return typewritten responses. The examiner knows that one of the participants is human and the other is a machine, but does not know which is which. The examiner must determine which is the human and which is the machine based on the responses returned. If the machine can fool the human examiner, it passes the Turing Test.

Today, however, it’s the machines who have much more of a need to make this determination. With automated spam-bots trolling the Internet, many Web 2.0 sites and blogs have had to adopt automated mechanisms for determining if the contributor is a live human being or not. One common method is a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which shows an OCR-proof graphic image of letters and asks the would-be contributor to type those letters out. Spam-bots can’t read graphic images, at least not yet.

But, as in any arms race, the opposition hasn’t given up just yet. Some enterprising young hacker has put together a program to lure humans into helping crack CAPTCHA codes in the guise of a strip tease program. Type in the correct CAPTCHA code and “Melissa” takes off another article of clothing. Never mind that you’ve just helped give an automated program human bona fides.

Hoping to harness the same energies for good rather than evil, a group working out of Carnegie Mellon has released a program called reCAPTCHA, which has the user demonstrate humanity while also contributing to it. When encountering a reCAPTCHA, the user will enter the text of a word that OCR technology wasn’t able to read, which is meant to speed up the ongoing effort to digitize print books. A known word is included as well, as a human-check.

That sounds like a worthwhile cause, except then the user has twice as much to type to contribute a comment. I haven’t put any CAPTCHA on this blog, yet, because I want to encourage people to post comments freely. But I have to say that I do spend a good amount of time deleting spam, and so when I’m ready to go Turing, maybe reCAPTCHA is the way to go.

The whole reCAPTCHA idea reminds me of the ESP Game, in that it allows users across the Web to contribute to a piece of a mostly automated project that only humans can do. Actually, both of these schemes remind me of the ESP game, except that one is good and one is evil.

And I hope we need no Turing Test to tell us which is which.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you only have room for 650? Enter “Content Aware Image Resizing” or the retargeting of images:

This is truly amazing, another step in the ongoing campaign to make images as dynamic as text in the XML Internet.

It does raise some questions about the medium of photography, though. This isn’t the first time images have been digitally altered to be sure, but there does seem to be a difference here. To begin with, a photograph should not be mistaken for reality. Photographers make choices, and a photograph is a selective representation of the world. A resized photograph, I would argue, is basically the same photograph. A cropped photograph is not, but it can be considered another photograph, as it is a different selective representation of the real world. A digitally altered photograph can no longer be considered a photograph in the same way, but it remains a visual representation of an imagined world.

What, then, is a retargeted image? It is a new concept for a new world. Take the example of the image of the two figures on the beach (about 46 seconds into the video). Resizing the image would make it hard to see the figures. Cropping the image would lose one of the figures. Retargeting the image keeps both figures in their current size, and loses only the beach between them. This may seem like an ideal solution, but what is lost is the distance between the two figures. That is a major element of this photograph. It was deleted, not for artistic or functional purposes, but for practical purposes, to help it fit better on the page. The thousand words represented by a picture can now be cut down to just the verbs and nouns. And one imagines this being one day automated, even built into Web browsers of the future – a future where everything is as adjustable as Quick Text Shakespeare, and with similiar nuance.

Even the phrase “Content Aware Image Resizing” gives me the willies in the same way that the term “content provider” seems to imply that the content is just one of many elements that make up a deliverable product. Under this system, Shakespeare was a content provider. And the process described in the video is not aware of content. For that, you still need a human.

I know I’ve blogged favorably about the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and many of them are inevitable, but others are not, and we have a responsibility to keep up with the changing definition of information literacy. Now we have one more question to ask ourselves when we see a photograph online.

I was originally posting this because I thought it was way cool. But I don’t want us to be so dazzled by the new technologies that come out that we stop asking the critical questions.

In addition to the websites recommended earlier, here are a few more Shakespeare resources you may enjoy:

In Search of Shakespeare: The companion website to the PBS series also includes a resource page for educators.

Shakespeare Defined: A resource for looking up definitions of words in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Resources: A Shakespeare portal by a professor in Tennessee.

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation has a map of future forces affecting education that attempts to lend some insight into the trends, dilemmas, and hotspots facing the educators of tomorrow.

The form of this map seems to overshadow the content, but the matrix does offer some food for thought once you delve into it.