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Comment Safari's privacy mode is for local privacy (Score 2, Insightful) 133

Safari's "Private browsing" mode is not intended to keep info on your computer (e.g. previous cookies etc) from being sent to web servers. It is intended for the reverse - to keep the details of your browsing session private from others who might access your account using that computer. I.e. it merely prevents records being kept about your browsing session.

Comment 37. Be4 is no longer a mystery (Score 1) 368

There was a crucial move one of the early games where Kasparov essentially set a trap -- a situation where computers always opt for one move, but a more subtle human player opts for a different strategy. Given the computers play so far, which had conformed exactly to how computers play, Kasparov was fairly confident. But then deep blue went the other way, against anything any other computer would have done, and completely against all expectation. That really threw Kasparov; he thought IBM was cheating since the move deep blue made was so uncharacteristic for a computer
The move in question was move 37 of game 2 in the 1997 match.
Deep Blue moved 37. Be4

This positional move was unexpected by Kasparov and commentators - many called it a "Karpov-like" move. But the fact that it so surprised Kasparov was more an indication of how much he underestimated the chess knowledge and positional sense that was built into the hardware. The special purpose chips designed by Hsu allowed for a huge amount of positional evaluation in hardware that was far beyond the purely software "brute-force" calculation done at that time by PC programs like Fritz. Kasparov had trained for this match with Fritz and he evidently thought that Deep Blue would merely be a faster Fritz and hence was surprised when Deep Blue's play revealed a qualitative difference due to the special-purpose chess hardware.

Today, there would be no surprise since currently available PC programs routinely evaluate Be4 as the best move in that position. This is a consequence of both much faster CPUs (more brute force available thanks to Moore's law) and much more chess knowledge being built into the programs (faster CPUs also allow faster access to positional evaluation algorithms).
In other words, in the 10 years since the match, ordinary PCs (with better chess software) have caught up to Deep Blue - at least in some respects.

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