Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 50 - Stockfish - Crafting an Unforgettable Presence Series

In this episode of the Desk Tap Podcast, the host discusses the concept of crafting an unforgettable presence. He shares a story about the competition between the chess software Stockfish and Google's AlphaZero. Despite Stockfish's ability to calculate millions of moves, AlphaZero, which had only learned chess in less than a day, defeated Stockfish in every game. The lesson here is the importance of always being willing to learn and adapt in order to stay successful in a changing world. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Desk Tap Podcast with me, your host, The Podcast where we focus on holistic professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today's installment is a long-awaited addition to the Crafting an Unforgettable Presence series. Now, if you don't know what the Crafting an Unforgettable Presence series is, it's a series inspired by a book called Make Yourself Unforgettable by Dale Carnegie, and the series aims to highlight little-known stories or little-known versions of stories about mostly little-known people that would possibly add value or possibly ask you questions of yourself and of your experience and of life that perhaps you haven't considered before, and maybe sometimes teach you something about the things that make those stories unforgettable that could help you become unforgettable as well. Today's story is about stockfish, and stockfish is not a person, but they're certainly worth considering in the idea of Crafting an Unforgettable Presence. I came across the story of stockfish in Mark Manson's book, Everything is F'd, a book about hope. If you're reading the book and you want to know where to find the story in the book, it's in Chapter 9. So I'm going to tell you the story as told by Mark Manson, and as we go along, as we've always done in this series, we will glean the lessons that we need to from it and discuss them. And so here we go. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer developed by IBM, beat Garry Kasparov, the world's best chess player. It was a watershed moment in the history of computing, a seismic event that shook many people's understanding of technology, intelligence, and humanity. But today, it's but a quaint memory. Of course a computer would beat the world champion at chess. Why wouldn't it? Since the beginning of computing, chess has been a favorite means of testing artificial intelligence. That's because chess possesses a near infinite number of permutations. There are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. In any board position, if one looks only three or four moves ahead, there are already hundreds of millions of variations. For a computer to match a human player, not only must it be capable of calculating an incredible number of possible outcomes, it must also have solid algorithms to help it decide what's worth calculating. Put another way, to beat a human player, a computer's thinking brain, despite being vastly superior to a human's, must be programmed to evaluate more or less valuable board positions. That is, the computer must have a modestly powerful feeling brain programmed into it. You will recall from a couple of episodes ago that Mark Manson posits the idea of the difference between our thinking brain and our feeling brain. And he argues that we make a huge mistake in overlooking our feeling brain. So he says we want to instruct ourselves, based on our thinking brain, to go to the gym because it's healthy. That's your thinking brain working. But we disregard the feeling brain that says, but I don't feel like it. I don't want to. But I don't feel good when I go there. I don't feel good in the moment. And the idea is learning to have the two work together in order to achieve the outcome. And here he argues that where a computer has primarily a thinking brain, in order for it to truly play the game well, it has to at least develop some part of a feeling brain. Since that day in 1997, computers have continued to improve at chess at a staggering rate. Over the following 15 years, the top human players regularly got pummeled by chess software, sometimes by embarrassing margins. Today, it's not even close. Kasparov himself recently joked that the chess app that comes installed on smartphones is, open quotes, far more powerful than Deep Blue ever was, close quotes. These days, chess software developers hold tournaments for their programs to see what algorithms come out on top. Humans are not only excluded from these tournaments, but they're not even likely to place high enough for it to matter anyway. The undisputed champion of the chess software world for the past few years has been an open source program called Stockfish. Stockfish has either won or been runner-up in almost every significant chess software tournament since 2014. A collaboration between half a dozen lifelong chess software developers, Stockfish today represents the pinnacle of chess logic. Not only is it a chess machine, but it can analyze any game, any position, giving grandmaster-level feedback within seconds of each move a player makes. Stockfish was happily going along, being the king of the computerized chess mountain, being the gold standard of all chess analysis worldwide, until 2018, when Google showed up to the party. Then stuff got really weird. Google has a program called AlphaZero. It's not chess software, it's artificial intelligence software, AI. Instead of being programmed to play chess or another game, the software is programmed to learn. And not just chess, any game. Early in 2018, Stockfish faced off against Google's AlphaZero. On paper, it wasn't even a close fight. AlphaZero can calculate only 80,000 board positions per second. Stockfish, 70 million. In terms of computational power, that's like Mark Manson entering a footrace against a Formula One race car. But it got even weirder. On the day of the match, AlphaZero didn't even know how to play chess. That's right. Before its match with the best chess software in the world, AlphaZero had less than a day to learn chess from scratch. The software spent most of the day running simulations of chess games against itself, learning as it went. It developed strategies and principles the same way a human would, through trial and error. Imagine the scenario. You've just heard and learned the rules of chess, one of the most complex games on the planet. You're given less than a day to mess around with a board and figure out some strategies. And from there, your first game ever will be against the world champion. Good luck. Yet somehow, AlphaZero won. It didn't just win. AlphaZero smashed Stockfish. Out of 100 games, AlphaZero won or drew every single game. Listen to me. A mere nine hours after learning the rules to chess, AlphaZero played the best chess playing entity in the world and did not drop a single game out of 100. It was a result so unprecedented that people still don't know what to make of it. Human grandmasters marveled at the creativity and ingenuity of AlphaZero. One Peter Hein Nielsen gushed, I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and they showed us how to play chess. I feel now that I know. When AlphaZero was done with Stockfish, it didn't take a break. Breaks are for frail humans. Instead, as soon as it had finished with Stockfish, AlphaZero began teaching itself the strategy game, Shogi. Shogi is often referred to as Japanese chess. But many argue that it's more complex than chess. Whereas Kasparov lost to a computer in 1997, top Shogi players didn't begin to lose to computers until 2013. Either way, AlphaZero destroyed the top Shogi software called Elmo by a similarly astounding margin. In 100 games, it won 90, lost 8, and drew 2. Once again, AlphaZero's computational powers were far less than Elmo's. In this case, it could calculate 40,000 moves per second compared to Elmo's 35 million. And once again, AlphaZero hadn't even known how to play the game the previous day. In the morning, it taught itself two infinitely complex games and by sundown, it had dismantled the best known competition on earth. What can we learn from this story? Stockfish came onto the scene and it had the ability to play chess. It had the ability to think about chess in a way that had never been seen before. It had the ability to synthesize the rules of the game and to apply them in a technically sound manner against even the grandmasters of chess, humans, who could play the game. That was Stockfish's superpower. And Stockfish, going against a fellow chess-playing program, could defeat any other program. What is it that toppled Stockfish from power? It wasn't another chess-playing program. It was another program with one ability, the ability to learn. That is what toppled Stockfish from its position of power. There is such a strong parallel between Stockfish and the way that we behave as people, especially if we are leaders in our field or seek to be leaders in our field. We go in sometimes and with blinders on after a while become so specialized at achieving a particular outcome that we forget what a superpower it is to always be willing to learn, to always ask why, to always think to yourself, even if it has always been done like this, if we were to do it differently, could we optimize? Sometimes it's not about having more options. Remember that Stockfish had the ability to synthesize and to come up with far more by-the-millions moves than Alpha Zero did, but Alpha Zero did not need all those millions. Alpha Zero, with just tens of thousands, which were nothing compared to what Stockfish could do, was able to defeat Stockfish repeatedly, over and over and over and over again. I see this played out so many times in the workplace, in careers and in professions. It's blackmail. It's blackmail and blackmailing. It's Blackberry ignoring the advent of the smartphone. It's Kodak ignoring the advent of the smartphone. It's Fujifilm realizing the advent of the smartphone and switching to skin care. These are the things that determine the longevity of your success or your demise due to a change in conditions. You see, change will come. Change is truly the only constant. Even now, the world around us is changing. AI is the buzzword of the day. How do you use it to make things better in your workplace? I hear a lot of people say, it's useless. I doubt that it is useless. I think perhaps it hasn't been harnessed correctly for the space that we are in. I think back now to the time Twitter became a thing, social media became a thing. I remember a young associate in a law firm in Stanton declaring themselves a social media specialist. That was at a time when there were no laws at all governing what goes on in social media. I remember her posting articles, writing about it. She started getting invited to give talks. She gave talks, but I could tell, as could any lawyer, that what she was basing her interpretations on were very innovative ways of looking at existing legislation, but there wasn't any legislation that dealt with that area specifically. Then she talked about the issues of the day, the young lady whose ex-boyfriend had posted nude pictures of her on the Internet, and what possible recourse she could have, and all of these things. She was a person who had a skill that was traditional. Recognizing the change wave that was coming in social media, she jumped on it and did the best that she could to just keep learning and to learn as she went. The result is that she currently owns a law firm that is recognized as the top social media law firm in South Africa. That law firm has been in existence since about that time. It's quite impressive what a person can do when they have a traditional skill and the willingness to learn to learn to do something else or to adapt that skill to the changing times. All you're required to do by the Storkfish story is to understand that to stand still and to focus on becoming a technocrat or a superstar at a particular skill in the current context without a view to ever changing it is in some ways guaranteeing that you will one day become obsolete. It's understanding that change waits for no man. It's understanding that it doesn't matter what your skill set is and how good you are at it. It only matters that you're willing to learn and adapt repeatedly, over and over. That is how you stay on top over time, even if you are an algorithm. There will be things like Hi5 that come in. Everybody is using it and we think that's all there will ever be. Then there will be Facebook. Then maybe there will be Instagram. Then there will be WhatsApp. Then there will be this. Then maybe they'll all be owned by one person or maybe they'll all be replaced in due course by something else. This is the way of the world, evolution. When you step into any form of success and you think that evolution is not required of you, then you are making a mistake. There are things like being liked, things like having influential friends, all of these things. Sometimes these things get you in the door. But in order for you to stay inside the room, in order for you to grow inside the room, in order for you to elevate yourself into the next room, you have to have the ability to learn and adapt. It is less about having a million possibilities and more about the ability to see the finite number of opportunities that you have in a different light. When you see this wave of change coming for your industry, what does it mean for you? How can you use it to change? How can you use it to adapt? Should you be using ChatGPT to write adverts for your business, for example? Should you be using ChatGPT to suggest better, catchier ways of doing things? Should you be using ChatGPT to find out what the SEO words for your type of product are? Should you be using ChatGPT to determine how best to look for a job? Should you be looking at your LinkedIn profile and thinking maybe that picture is too old? What kind of profile is doing well? Should I go check that one? Have I adapted my profile to it? Should you be looking at your social media presence as a brand that's being built? Should you be considering maybe taking your writing skill and using it maybe to write a column in a magazine or to write a book or to write a blog or to write more creatively at work? It could be any one of those things. It's simply the idea that you must have the ability, one, to see things differently and, two, a willingness to learn always, understanding that if you do not embrace change, if you do not accept change, if you do not step into change, you will inevitably become obsolete. This is not to say that Stockfish did not have an incredible time in the sun. It did. Stockfish was a superpower for years, right? It won every single significant chess tournament for years before it was toppled by AlphaZero. And when it was toppled by AlphaZero, it was toppled purely because AlphaZero did not style itself purely as a chess-playing program. AlphaZero was styled by its developers with the ability to learn. And purely with that ability to learn, AlphaZero learned how to play chess in one morning and beat the grandmaster of algorithms later that day and still had time to learn another complex game and beat the grandmaster of shogi at its game. It was years later, but still. Ask yourself whether you are Stockfish or you are AlphaZero. Most of us will fall into one or the other. Some of us will fall into one in respect of some areas of our lives and the other in respect of the rest of the areas of our lives. Ask yourself whether you are AlphaZero in the areas of your life that matter, in the areas of your life that allow you to grow, in the areas of your life that add value to your relationship with your children, the areas of your life that add zeros to your bank account, the areas of your life that will add joy to your everyday. Are you AlphaZero in those areas or are you proudly one of those people who's been at an organization for a long time and says, this is the way things have always been done and has no real grasp of why they've been done that way and why they should change. I would call to your mind a story that I have told you before on this blog, on this, I'm calling it a blog because I've been a blogger for a really long time, but I would call to your mind a story that I told you many moons ago on this podcast, the story about the fish. It's the man who liked whole fish and he married a beautiful wife who could cook and she tended to cut the fish in half despite the fact that he liked whole fish. He bought her a bigger pan, he bought her all the things that could do, that could facilitate the frying of a full fish for his pleasure, but she continued to cut the fish and she said, this is how her mother had always done it. And then he then asked her mother why she cut the fish and the mother said, that's how her mother had always done it. And eventually he had occasion to sit with his wife's grandmother and to ask, mom, why have you always, grandma, why have you always cut your fish when you're cooking it? And she said, that's how her grandmother, her mother had always done it. And so eventually he sat with the great grandmother and he says, please tell me why is it you guys cut the fish every time you cook it? And he expected to hear something about flavor, something about what it does, something else about that. But do you know what her answer was? Oh, my pan was always too small. And generations after followed in those footsteps without ever asking why. Always just following this pre laid path without ever asking, could I do this differently and achieve a higher level of joy or achieve a better level of joy? Could I do this better? Ask yourself if you have the ability to learn and adapt or you frown upon change. You're offended by change. And if you are, that's all right. Just understand that you will be left behind because change is not going to wait on you. If, however, you have the ability to learn, the openness to see opportunity, the willingness to give it a go, the willingness to try and see how it works out, my goodness, then you are AlphaZero. And AlphaZero in a match with Stockfish will always, always, always win all a hundred of the games. Go forth and conquer and may you always be AlphaZero. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share, like, subscribe, leave a comment. And thank you for listening. Have a great weekend.