Deep Blue | Hacker News Reader

Deep Blue

simonwillison.net

35 pointsPhilpax13 comments

Actually an insanely ironic analogy.

A large part of the original deep blue win was smoke and mirrors - humans researched how it should play and hardcoded it in, humans researched the specific openings it should play based on what they decided would work best and hardcoded them in, humans tweaked it / changed its programming mid-match to fix bugs and get better results, the moves it decided on its own were based on pure brute force analysis of positions, no "thought" involved, humans waged psychological warfare against Kasparov to get him to play worse, just massive smoke and mirrors. And yet the public knew none of the details and just gobbled up the hype / result as "computer smart, ai beats human".

Now we've got a new system of smoke and mirrors and hype and people that don't understand what's actually happening under the hood, don't actually understand the technical details of what's involved, just fully buying into the smoke and mirrors put up by people making billions of dollars by convincing people of the hype.

> Now we've got a new system of smoke and mirrors and hype and people that don't understand what's actually happening under the hood, don't actually understand the technical details of what's involved

And that's just the developers who make the models! :P

> just fully buying into the smoke and mirrors put up by people making billions of dollars by convincing people of the hype.

I can't help but notice how this smoke and these mirrors are solving an increasing fraction of my side-projects for me.

With the free trials, too.

It's not a perfect analogy but I often compare the advent of LLM development to the Battle of Crécy [1], where the introduction of the longbow meant that a common peasant with minimal training could potentially bring down a knight who had spent his entire life mastering the art of combat.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Crecy

The longbow didn’t require “minimal training”, it took years of regular practice and physical conditioning.

Weekly longbow practice was even a legal requirement for most English men to ensure there were enough skilled archers.

The crossbow was the weapon that allowed an untrained peasant to kill an armoured knight and was widely illegal for that reason

Rule of conversation on hn - never use an analogy. Someone will be along to tell you "well ackshually..."

> The crossbow was the weapon that allowed an untrained peasant to kill an armoured knight and was widely illegal for that reason

So I heard as a kid. All the medieval weaponry youtube channels I see demonstrating them tell me this, too, is a myth; that the real benefit for a crossbow was to be able to prepare a weapon and hold it in the ready-to-fire state — the same state Hollywood shows for normal bows without considering that they're supposed to be massive springs that some skinny archer is apparently holding extended for ages without effort.

However, I'm not a historian, for all I know the medieval weaponry youtube channels I see are all GenAI output.

> “The code they write isn’t any good” doesn’t really cut it any more.

I propose that it cuts deeper than that. Many of us 'nerds' have/have had a love affair of sorts with computers and software, deeply rooted in our personalities: ambiguity no more, what you put in is what you get out. Not like the messy social interactions where things can hold a multitude of meanings simultaneously, and where none of those meanings need to be true in a logical sense. The strict logic of programming is being dethroned, in favor of prompts that can be ill-written and ambiguous as hell, but the damn things still produce approximately what the vibe-coder was thinking, at a fraction of the cost.

Of course there will be a place for old school good programmers, just like a fine carpenter will always be in demand, no matter how many new Ikeas spring up. But we used to be kings.

I think the most comforting thing to be said is that all things must pass, new things bring new opportunities and everyone need to adjust, always. It is still a bit hazy what those opportunities are in general though.

I don't know.

IBM's landmark chess-playing supercomputer that beat Kasparov in 1997 will always be what I think when I hear Deep Blue.

https://www.ibm.com/history/deep-blue

Yes, that's the joke?

I must have a more sophisticated sense of humor.

Oh, so he discovered Marx's theory of alienation and called it Deep Blue?

TIL a new shorthand for "the real problem is capitalism", thanks!

Arcade Fire's song Deep Blue fits this mood well. And the album it's on, The Suburbs, is a story of civil war in suburban America.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com