computers
Big iron endures
A lot of the big, complicated systems that undergird our economy—banks, airlines, stuff like Social Security—still run on old-fashioned mainframes. There’s still a lot of COBOL code out here. Florian Mueller writes:
At the recent launch of its new mainframe generation — the biggest event of its kind in 20 years — Tom Rosamilia, IBM’s general manager for System z, was so exuberant that he forgot about antitrust and told a group of UK journalists the truth: “Western civilization runs on this system.”
What are some of the key population-scale government computing applications? Other than, e.g., NSA signal processing stuff, I mean. That’s sort of the obvious candidate, and it’s gotten plenty of press. What’s not obvious?
Cyborg chess-masters
Oh man this is interesting. Clive Thompson points to Garry Kasparov’s new essay about humans and computers in chess. Clive sets it up like this:
But this gave Kasparov a fascinating idea. What if, instead of playing against one another, a computer and a human played together—as part of a team?
And then he blockquotes Kasparov (emphasis mine):
Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
How cool is that? How pregnant with possibility?
Clive riffs on it some more and really zooms in on the process that supports human-machine interaction as the key variable. If you have a better process, you win.
Actually, I want to amend the word “interaction” above; that’s the standard way of talking about it, but I like Kasparov’s language of “teamwork” and “coaching” a lot better. How about that: from now on, think of devices and apps as your teammates—your collaborators. How does that change the way you think about them? How does that change your standards for them?
Also: While we’re on the subject of tools, Frank Chimero has a neat post about tools and ambiguity. Peep the silent counterpoint design elements. YES.
‘The music’s not in the piano’
I like Howard’s take on the iPad a lot—he describes it not as a device but almost as an undevice. And I like this bit:
In the middle 1980s, [computer pioneer Alan] Kay visited Alaska for a lecture and was interviewed in the Anchorage Daily News, articulating intoxicating ideas that helped awaken me to the brewing information revolution. He was careful even then to caution against focusing too much on devices. “The music’s not in the piano,” he said. “If it was, we’d have to let it vote.”
The music’s not in the piano! That’s mantra-worthy.