[ExI] sports blammisphy

[Kelly Anderson]

> Ja, exactly.  That was my idea: get all fifty or so top chess engines, then
> let them vote on the best move.  So my counter attack would be to set up a
> team and determine what the composite move would be, then see if any human
> players match that composite.
>
> Thanks Kelly, good thinking.  That arms race notions was exactly what I had
> in mind.  Without that, we will likely face the same phenomenon with chess
> tournaments as was seen in postal chess ten years ago: it became meaningless
> because there was no way to determine if the participant was cheating with
> computers.  Today, the world title for postal chess is completely
> meaningless.  The International Correspondence Chess Federation has dwindled
> to practically nothing.  I can imagine the same thing happening to
> Over-the-Board (real time) chess tournaments as it gets harder to determine
> if someone is cheating.

spike, I think this points out a recurring trans-humanist, cyborg and
even fyborg theme. What is cheating in the brave new world we are
making? If the Olympics are only open to original unenhanced human
beings, then it just becomes a race to figure out who is enhanced, and
who is not. It's already happening at the top level of sports, of
course. But when we start talking about enhancements that are
"built-in" to people, especially in the context of intellectual
pursuits, is that really cheating any more?

I understand that now you can bring some kinds of calculators to your
SAT test; shades of a fyborgian future. When a cell phone can play
world class chess now, what will the calculators of tomorrow be
capable of? And what happens when that calculator is implanted
subcutaneously? Whether it's cyborg or fyborg makes little functional
difference.

As a computer programmer working for companies, I have sometimes
outsourced pieces of my job that required skills that I was weak on,
or that simply weren't interesting to me. I paid for the outsourcing
out of my own pocket. My boss was just interested in the job getting
done. The job got done. Is that cheating? By any scholastic measure,
it would be, but in business the results are more important than the
means used to achieve them. There are no urine tests in most computer
programming shops.

If football players get their bones strengthened by nanotechnology
embedding nano tubes, is that cheating? If so, why? I can use carbon
fibers in a football helmet. I understand that sprinters are limited
in how fast they can run to some extent on the fact that if they put
any more stress on their bones, that they might break. So there is a
limit to the G-Forces that can be put on bone by muscle. This is
certainly an issue in professional level arm wrestling.

As Kurzweil mentioned in his book, there will be high school students
routinely breaking what are now world records. How we will cope with
this "cheating" will be an interesting part of the future. I think it
is an interesting part of the present.

-Kelly