Who gave Viswanathan Anand his first break? and chess computers | #42
Also, why '42' is the answer to life, the universe and everything?
What is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything?
Philosophers and thinkers have tried to answer this question since time immemorial but in our opinion only one person has come close to answering this question - the incomparable Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7 1⁄2 million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be…
...hold your breath...
...42.
It's our 42nd issue, so in dedication, here are some fun facts about the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything.
Things we learnt this week:
One theory regarding the selection of the number ‘42’ is that it’s meant to represent whatever the recipient wants, since the 42nd character in the ASCII sequence is the asterisk * which is often used as a wildcard in search algorithms. In any case, Stephen Fry - a close friend of Adams claims he knows why the number 42 was chosen. Here’s a video of him “explaining why”.
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the computer created to come up with the Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life is called Deep Thought. In the late 80’s, IBM designed a chess computer with the same name which ultimately became the first computer to beat a Grandmaster in a regular tournament game when it beat Bent Larsen in 1988. Deep Thought was easily defeated in both games of a two-game match with Garry Kasparov in 1989 but its legacy in the naming of chess computers has continued in this vein with Deep Blue, Deep Fritz, Deep Junior, etc.
Speaking of chess, back in 1983, a 13 year old Viswanathan Anand was part of a junior chess team called the Madras Colts. They were on the verge of dropping out of the National Team Championship as they had no money to fund their participation. That’s when playback singer SP Balasubrahmanyam stepped in to volunteer to sponsor the team. Anand beat 9-time national champion Manuel Aaron and as they say, the rest is history.
From IWTK, with love
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Things we’re reading / watching / listening to:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the iconic first in a trilogy of five books. Yes that’s how the author Douglas Adams rolls! It is the story of Arthur Dent, a hapless human being who is saved by his friend who happens to be a hitchhiking alien freelance travel journalist. This is just before a race of bad-poetry loving aliens destroy the earth to build an inter-galatic highway. And, this is literally the first few pages of the book! There's only one way for you to find out how Arthur encounters the loudest band in the universe, a two-headed President, a translating fish and the answer to life, the universe and everything.. keep reading!
How could you not watch a video with a title like this:
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