[computer-go] MoGo

[Don Dailey]

Chrilly,

I was recently interviewed by someone in the MIT wrting department
(about computer chess) and I was very hesitant to agree.    I have 
some anxiety about how it will come out!   However, the journalist 
seemed to really want to get the facts straight and I have some 
hope ...

In general, most journalists are looking for a phrase to latch on
to,  and they want their article to have appeal, often at the
expense of annoying and mundane facts.   

I think it's possible to write very informative and interesting
articles without taking any liberties,  but unfortunately 
journalists usually prefer to cater to popular myth and 
misconceptions - milking it for all it's worth!    

I was also interviewd around the time of the Kasparov Deep Blue
match on FOX news in Boston.   The interview lasted about an hour
but they took a single unimportant phrase out of the whole session
which added some dramatic appeal to the piece.   Of course the
piece itself was about 30 seconds at most.   What I remember most
was that I actually refuted a misconception that they ignored.
They used that same misconception to make it appeal to the audience.
They were not looking for real content - just a sound bite.   

I didn't have any problem with this, they didn't misrepresent anything
I said personally.  They just needed an expert to make the piece seem 
like serious journalism.   

A problem they have to deal with is that in a very short time they
have to try to get some information out.   So they will say stupid
things like "computers have proven they are better."    They cannot
give a course on probability and statistics and it's probably too
much, at least for an american audience, to explain that winning
a 4 game match doesn't consistitue "proof" of superiority in any 
scientfic sense.   

That's why I made the comment that if Mogo loses a match to a 6 dan
player,  and it's in the context of a disccusion where it is claimed
that Mogo is a mid-kyu player only,  it will come across as "proof"
that Mogo really must be only a mid-kyu player, because it lost to
a 6 dan!     I know that's silly to us but not to the general 
population.

After the Kasparov match I heard all kinds of nonsense that made
my ears hurt!

- Don



On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 18:48 +0200, Chrilly wrote:
> One further important rule. One should never be ironic in interviews.
> The ironie is almost always lost.
> E.g. when we played against Adams the default question was "why do you
> not play against Kasparov". I could not stand this question anymore
> and in a press conference shortly before the match I said "Because
> Adams is the much stronger opponent". I got bad comments on this
> sentence..
> Another rule is: Most journalists are writing almost all of the time
> about themselves and not about the topic at hand. If one is interested
> in a story, the easiest thing to get one is to invite the journalist
> and to cook for them. They can than write how they liked the eating.
> Which is already a story about themselves.
>  
> Chrilly
>         ----- Original Message ----- 
>         From: Sylvain Gelly 
>         To: drd at mit.edu ; computer-go 
>         Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 2:00 PM
>         Subject: Re: Re:[computer-go] MoGo
>         
>         
>         Thank you Don.
>         I did not know that, I am not used to :-).
>         
>         Then I'll stop worrying for these kind of things and stop
>         trying to give back the truth :).
>         
>         Bye,
>         Sylvain
>         
>         2007/4/4, Don Dailey <drd at mit.edu>: 
>                 On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 10:52 +0200, Sylvain Gelly
>                 wrote: 
>                 > You should also know that we never claimed that
>                 "MoGo plays 9x9 go
>                 > near the level of a professional go player", which
>                 is of course false,
>                 > and even if it was true should ask for many many
>                 experiments, and we 
>                 > would have never say that.
>                 
>                 It doesn't surprise me.  It's common to get misquoted.
>                 One thing that
>                 is
>                 even more common - at some point you are likely to
>                 make a quote that
>                 will
>                 live forever (and it can even be a
>                 misquote.)    Someone will quote it, 
>                 they will latch onto it, and others will "cut and
>                 paste" from the first
>                 author who quoted (or misquoted) you!
>                 
>                 - Don
>                 
>                 
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