
Thursday Nov 21, 2019
Belichick’s Secret Lies In An Ancient Chinese Game of Strategy
Should fans fret when the Pats don't "look good"?
The answer lies in a documentary about a computer built to defeat all comers in Go, an abstract strategy board game invented in China more than 2,500 years ago. The doc: https://www.netflix.com/title/80190844
In the words of one writer, “A peculiarity of AlphaGo is that it will pick a strategy that maximizes the probability of winning regardless of by how much. For example, AlphaGo would prefer to win with 90 percent probability by two stones than an 85 percent probability by 50 stones. Few people would give up a slightly riskier chance to crush their opponent in favor of eking out a narrow but surer victory.
(Full article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-computer-beat-the-go-master/)
Sound familiar? Like a team that can beat the Chiefs in a shootout and then slog out a painfully unartistic win to beat the Rams in the SB?
Well, you get the point. BB is a robot and robots don’t care about how they look. Special guest Ed Nathanson (see www.pod617.com/ed)