bah. moving too fast, forget to close an em tag. in the preceding comment, only the first paragraph should be em'd as a quote.
When I play against a superior player, I can't predict exactly where my opponent will move against me. [...] But I can predict the consequence of the unknown move, which is a win for the other player; and the more the player's actual action surprises me, the more confident I become of this final outcome."
Interestingly, playing an opponent which selects completely randomly from the range of possible moves gives a similar result: you never know what your opponent will do, but you can predict with a fair amount of confidence that you will win. And the...
I also found it frustrating that Lanier refused to engage on specifics.
Which is ironic, because I also came to the conclusion that the problem here was it was a discussion between (someone acting in the role of) a philosopher and (someone acting in the role of) an engineer, and it was the engineer who was refusing to talk about specifics.
Where I term philosophy the stuff you do with topics you don't have enough solid information yet to make a full-fledged science out of (as touched on in the discussions of the natural philosophy phase which preceded the sc... (read more)