The Masters of Chess
As I noted in the conversation, I’ve never been a big fan of chess, but I have always been intrigued by the famous matches between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue. So I decided to give the book a try. As Andy noted, it is written in a way that makes it accessible to pretty much everyone, so it was definitely a good read. I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in either chess or artificial intelligence.
The book also got me interested in the chess rating system and inspired me to explore it further. So I downloaded January and July ratings data for each year back to 2001 and created a data visualization. Click on the image or click hereto interact with it. Special thanks to Andy Cotgreave for the idea and to Neil Richards, a former competitive chess player, for reviewing the visualization and providing feedback.
Ken Flerlage, September 24, 2017
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