chickenhead
02-19-2010, 02:21 AM
General interest for sw cappers, perhaps.
Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model? (http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2010/02/like-a-lot-of-people.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+harvardbusiness+(HBR.org)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher)
except
Kasparov writes that in competitions allowing any combination of people and computers, "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."
This is incredibly good news, isn't it? It suggests when we talk about the inimitable spark of human creativity and intuition we're not just patting ourselves on the back, even in rational domains like chess. In this arena, a thoughtful human expert and a well-designed technology has proved to be a powerful combination. Kasparov says it well: when playing with the assistance of computers, "we [people] could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions." (yeah!)
My favorite aspect of these 'freestyle' competitions was the specific type of human creativity that led to victory. Instead of pure chess genius, it was something much closer to business process design brilliance. The overall winner was a team that contained neither the best human players nor the biggest and fastest computers. Instead, it consisted of "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."
Kasparov was surprised at this outcome and I have to confess that I was as well, despite my deep conviction that a well-designed process is a potent weapon. I didn't think that smart process design — in this case, a process for determining the "best" chess move — could overcome both cognitive and computational deficits. But it did, even in this domain where brains and calculations would appear to be the only things that matter. As Kasparov writes of this amazing result, "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process." I think that's my new motto.
Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model? (http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2010/02/like-a-lot-of-people.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+harvardbusiness+(HBR.org)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher)
except
Kasparov writes that in competitions allowing any combination of people and computers, "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."
This is incredibly good news, isn't it? It suggests when we talk about the inimitable spark of human creativity and intuition we're not just patting ourselves on the back, even in rational domains like chess. In this arena, a thoughtful human expert and a well-designed technology has proved to be a powerful combination. Kasparov says it well: when playing with the assistance of computers, "we [people] could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions." (yeah!)
My favorite aspect of these 'freestyle' competitions was the specific type of human creativity that led to victory. Instead of pure chess genius, it was something much closer to business process design brilliance. The overall winner was a team that contained neither the best human players nor the biggest and fastest computers. Instead, it consisted of "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."
Kasparov was surprised at this outcome and I have to confess that I was as well, despite my deep conviction that a well-designed process is a potent weapon. I didn't think that smart process design — in this case, a process for determining the "best" chess move — could overcome both cognitive and computational deficits. But it did, even in this domain where brains and calculations would appear to be the only things that matter. As Kasparov writes of this amazing result, "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process." I think that's my new motto.