There were two stories relating to human cognition today that really had me thinking about the way we…think (how appropriate). The first involves the game of chess. You know, the game of kings invented so long ago in India:
Chess is commonly believed to have originated in North-West India during the Gupta empire, where its early form in the 6th century was known as caturanga (Sanskrit: four divisions [of the military] - infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively). The earliest evidence of Chess is found in the neighboring Sassanid Persia around 600 where the game is known under the name became chatrang. [Link]

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion (the current is India’s Viswanathan Anand) has penned a brilliant (absolute must-read) essay/review of the new book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. The title of his essay could have easily been, “How I Learned to Stop Battling and Love the Computer.” It chronicles his victories over the machines, followed by his losses, followed finally by a type of brutally efficient partnership. Let the human worry about strategy and the machine about tactics.
…I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.
It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: “a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright’s first flight, NASA’s landing on the moon….” [Link]










An NYU Professor of graduate and undergraduate courses in statistics, probability and analysis at 
Usually, an article related to the process of sex selection would sadden me because I think the brown preference for boys blows, but 






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A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required)
A great many tipsters are informing us that
I couldn’t find a strong Desi-angle beyond what we’ve already blogged about though. So instead, I’ve decided to write a post about “Un-intelligent Design.” Most people know that Hitler’s Third Reich 




post about Tamiflu

Congrats, Gauri!
late American astronaut Kalpana Chawla is the subject of the newest comic book (or graphic novel) in the
That should be an interesting read. I am curious as to how much fiction might be added into her real story to play to the young Indian audience that is most likely to pick up this book. Likewise, I want to see how much nationalism might be displayed by the comic book character. Bottom line though is whatever gets young kids interested in space and science is good to see.





With 

Bharat Bhushan, a MechE prof at Ohio State, is 
It’s not often that one hears of a government which is mandating an animal’s extinction; then again, India is and has always been a nation of exceptions. Her Central Zoo Authority (CZA) has decided that it is last call for the “cocktail lion”, a hybrid composed of Asian and African lion genes. All 300 of the mixed cats remaining in zoos and safari parks will be sterilised and allowed to die out, since Indian laws and traditions forbid killing them.
