Ken's blog

apply neural network machine learning on positions of a theoretically drawn but hard to defend chess endgame such as KRBKR.  can an AI playi...

variations on the classic artificial intelligence task of mimicking a specific human (the Target) while being questioned by an Interrogator:...

fix a determinstic chess engine and play a game against itself as follows.  set it to do MultiPV, and, for each move, use an entropy source ...

start with a collection of chess engines all at or below some baseline strength.  by "engine" we typically mean instance of an eng...

what does a perfect game of go 囲碁 look like? assume appropriate super-ko rules are in effect, and the side destined to lose tries to postp...

16 directed graphs, one for each of the movement directions: 8 for queen, 8 for knight.  all graphs share the same set of nodes, correspondi...

the Hitchhiker's Guide aliens ("mice") who received 42 as the answer to the Ultimate Question were probably surprised (among o...

in the 1990s, a NASA engineer, as a joke, inserts code into a Mars lander instructing it to Kill All Humans once it lands on Mars.  (it was ...

preserve the illusion of free will. why?  how? perhaps we live in a simulation.

a team consists of a lead player and a support crew.  the lead player is separated, and communication between the lead player and support cr...

Many characters in Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire are well characterized, and their universe is established as one in which anyone...

Although computing the winning strategy for Nim is quick and easy for a computer, it is not so easy for a human to do in his or her head if ...

Finding an algorithm for factoring general numbers quickly (faster than known algorithms) seems difficult. Easier (and more fun) might be ...

There are many theorems conditional on the Riemann Hypothesis (even more the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis), or logically more strongly, ma...

An entertaining game has many ways to win.  This allows opponents to conceptually race two different ways to win to see who gets there first...

Humans have two pretty good input interfaces: vision and hearing.  High bandwidth and good sensitivity. Humans have two pretty good output i...

Mass surveillance seems inevitable given its decreasing cost and economies of scale.  Therefore, the best way to regulate it is to monitor ...

Groups of people can change the world through politics, but only if they are organized.  To be organized traditionally requires a manager, s...

Create a robot that can hit baseballs pitched by a skilled pitcher.  Has this already been done?  Some ways to make it even more difficult: ...

Create a rhythm game (Guitar Hero, etc.) in which you can not only earn points by playing what's on screen accurately, but also by playi...