It is a kind of Turing machine issue, whether Man can beat AI by simply appearing immune to stupidity rays, the fate of humankind hanging in the balance.

Martin Gardner’s fascinating article on Michie’s invention appears in “The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems,” and is called “A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine.”

It may be worth noting that, with programmable computers being widely available, the “matchbox” model described in Gardner’s article can be readily expanded to more complicated games. In other chapters of Gardner’s “Colossal Book,” he discusses several other non-trivial games that may lend themselves to the “matchbox” model.

Michie accidently took credit for a Human versus Machine chess theorem I’d invented in grad school (early 1970s) and published in SIGART. Accidently, because my theorem was transmitted to him via an International master with whom I played in Amherst, who then went to U Edinburgh as Chess advisor to Michie, but failed to pass on my contact information. Basically, I proved that if you KNOW that you’re playing against a machine that makes errors, your BEST move is not necessarily the optimal move that you would play against a machine that played “perfect” chess (which would take more matchboxes than the cosmos can probably hold).

To fill in some details: In Chess, however, I stated a
theorem, and gave examples, early in my CS grad
student days at UMass/Amherst, 1973-1977. I showed it to our resident International Master, Danny Kopec, who then went to be Chess Advisor to the AI programme at University of Edinburgh. SIGART had the Edinburgh professor.

I gave examples (horizon effect was shown in SIGART)
and classified situations with 1 error per game
players, 2 errors per game players, and suggested a
generalization with distributions.

Michie, sad to say, recently died in a tragic way. “Professor Donald Michie, 84, and his ex-wife, Dame Anne McLaren, 80, were in a car which left the motorway as they travelled from Cambridge to London. Prof Michie was a researcher in artificial intelligence who worked as part of the British code-breaking group at Bletchley Park during World War II.”

I iterate that I am not accusing the late prof. Michie of plagiarism; it was probably accidental on his part, because perhaps Danny Kopec did not have the right contact information for me. At the time, I was writing the world’s first PhD dissertation on Nanotechnology and Artificial Life, neither of which fields were yet
named.

When I was in elementary school, some children’s science magazine had a simplified version of this computer. They started the game a bit down the tree. I remember making up little boxes, each with a tictactoe configuration on it, and. as directed, putting in the appropriate colored M&Ms each indicating a possible move. Training the machine was great. When you won, you got to eat the M&Ms. Eventually, the machine learned how to beat you, and that was for M&Ms.

I had forgotten this gadget until recently reading Michie’s obituary. That may be most complex algorithm for eating M&Ms that I’ve come across, and as a side effect a game playing algorithm was optimized!

These rituals would seem entirely abstract, but if they were truly not invested with personal meaning, why bother?

An action can be deeply satisfying without having meaning. Making patterns with my M&Ms gives me that satisfaction, but not because it interacts with any higher intellectual process. I just like patterns.

All I do is eat groups of two to three with all different colors in the group - usually this requires including one of the most plentiful colors in all servings.

Unfortunately, I can’t do this while driving…

as for chocolates like kit-kats and peanut butter cups, does anyone else carefully nibble off the chocolate edges and tops before consuming the rest?

Ditto on the tan. I swear they tasted better. Kind of a mocha thing. I always saved them for last.

Elliot

e.

(1) if there are roughly equal numbers of each color, and more colors than representatives of each color (e.g. M&Ms, with many colors but maybe only 3 of each), I sort them into equal-size, single-color groups and rapidly eat any culls. Then eat one from each group (to keep the groups close to equal) until all gone. Order in which each color is eaten on each pass is random or based on flavor preference, and may change from one pass to the next. Sometimes this necessitates throwing one entire color category in with the remainders group to keep things neat (e.g. three or more of everything except only one yellow, the yellow gets culled along with the “or mores”.)

(2) If there are roughly equal numbers of each color, but fewer colors than representatives of each color (e.g. holiday Kisses, with 3 colors but several of each), I sort them into groups containing one of each color, eat any culls, then pick up one group at a time and eat its candies one by one.

(3) If the number of candies of each color lends itself better to a triangular sort (typical of M&Ms), I go with Julianne’s method, except that I never seem to have enough candy in my hand at once to have more than one row of a color, so I again eat the culls first. I’m going to try allowing more than one (non-adjacent) row of a color and see how it goes; I can’t believe it never occurred to me before.

(4) If there’s only one or two of each color (e.g. mixed jellie bellies) they usually go roygbiv.

This isn’t limited to candy; celery sticks, carrot sticks and mushrooms from the cut-veges plate at the A&S New Faculty reception work just as well. Also mixed nuts except then you have to decide whether to make allowances for the larger nuts (like 1 Brazil nut = 2 pecans = 3 peanuts).

If there’s an assortment of cookies I like to do kind of a “tower of Hanoi” kind of strategy.

I always always break chocolate along the lines and I’m always annoyed when a break goes wonky. Sometimes I end up eating more chocolate than I want at one time because of having to neaten up the bar before putting it away.

No seriously, I suspect CS people probably have the worst diabetes/blood pressure health because of all the eating without actually looking at what it is.

One of the more intriguing, but often overlooked trivial tidbits of the music industry is the concert tour contract rider, a fancy legal term for all the conditions that must be satisfied before a musical act will actually put on a scheduled show. From these documents spring nearly all the infamous stories of prima-donna rock stars complaining that their dressing rooms fail to provide obscure or highly specific items—such as Jennifer Lopez’s white drapes or Joe Cocker’s thrice-chilled beer.

Failure to provide a specified item will often prompt the talent to throw a show-canceling tantrum. Of course, contract riders didn’t start out as exercises in vanity.

We can largely attribute the practice of using contract riders to control backstage conditions to The Beatles, the first touring act with enough drawing power to cajole venue managers into complying with a few hospitality demands, such as refreshments and basic amenities. For example, the Fab Four purportedly requested only a black-and-white television set and a few Coca-Colas after their famous Shea Stadium concert—hardly unreasonable demands.

The Rolling Stones, no strangers to the rock-and-roll touring circuit, have employed several-dozen-page contract riders, with exacting specifications for the serving of gourmet food after the show. In response, renowned concert promoter Bill Graham allegedly served Mick Jagger and company nothing more than hot dogs. (No word on any tantrums that followed.)

Perhaps the most infamous contract rider, however, belongs to 1980s rock heavyweights Van Halen, which specified that a bowl of M&M candies be available in their dressing room—with all the brown M&Ms removed. One-time Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth has admitted to trashing a dressing room or two after finding brown M&Ms in his candy bowl, but he claims there was a higher logic—and a sound engineering reason—behind this oblique request.

WHAT WAS THE LOGIC BEHIND VAN HALEN’S “BROWN M&M” CONTRACT RIDER?

What was the supposed logic behind rock band Van Halen’s indulgent contract rider that required the removal of all brown M&Ms—and only brown—from the candy bowls in members’ dressing rooms?

The “brown M&M” line in Van Halen’s contract rider was a ploy the band used to determine whether concert venue promoters and managers had actually read every line of the contract. Specifically, one article of the rider read, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

While this may seem like an extravagant method of gauging a promoter’s attention, the band had good reason to go to such trouble. Van Halen was among the first musical groups to take a massive and elaborate stage and lighting apparatus on tour, yet still play so-called secondary and tertiary venues, such as college amphitheatres.

In many cases, the buildings the band was booked to play in simply weren’t able to handle the structural demands of the traveling stage. The band’s lengthy contract rider clearly spelled out the specifications and safety requirements for the stage, but many of the smaller venue administrators simply didn’t bother to delve into this intimidating legal document.

Thus, if Van Halen got to the dressing room and found brown M&Ms in the candy dishes, the band knew that a problem might exist with the stage. In many cases, the problem was worth canceling the show, for safety or liability reasons. From such cancellations sprang the rumor that Van Halen would back out of a concert date simply because the band found brown M&Ms backstage.

In fact, this reputation grew so well known that at one point The Rolling Stones, which was headlining a tour that included Van Halen, wrote into its own contract rider a request for all the brown M&Ms that Van Halen threw out. It’s ironic, considering that the brown M&Ms were merely a red herring, but such is the basis for great Geek Trivia.

When I was a Physics grad student, our dept had a pretty restrictive food budget for seminars. The few times a Nobelist was the featured speaker, we served catered food on fine china. If it was a senior faculty member, we had cut up fruit and veggies and a cheese platter. In the case of a junior faculty member or grad student, store bought cookies were served. I happened to mention this eminence dependent gradation of food quality to another grad student. He misheard the word “eminence” as M&M s. That made me come up with an M&M s scale corresponding to the stellar colors. I notice that there are blue, yellow, orange, red and brown M&M s. After that I think of M&M s in terms of stellar colors.

My children apparently did not inherit so it must be a recessive trait.

e.

I wrote my college entrance essay on this minor neurosis and apparently they liked it.