In 1988, IBM invested $10 million developing a project – Deep Thought – to create a rudimentary artificial intelligence program that could eventually beat a grand master at chess. The original program could calculate 720,000 moves per second. In 1993, the project’s name was changed to Deep Blue and on February 17, 1996 world chess champion Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue and Kasparov won four out of six matches and took home $400,000 in prize money from IBM. One year later, Deep Blue successfully beat Kasparov and became the first computer system to beat a human world champion in a standard chess match. In a press conference afterwards Kasparov…

Several years ago I read an article using research to illustrate how the brain reacts to gain and loss. It seems the amount of pleasure we receive from a gain of $1000 is not equal to the amount of sadness we feel for a loss of the same amount. Our capacity for regret seems to outpace our capacity for happiness. In fact, it turns out that happiness is fairly transitory. Brian Christian in “The Alignment Problem” writes that one of our hormones for creating a sense of happiness – dopamine – plays games with us. While serotonin stabilizes our moods and feelings of well-being, dopamine sends a message to the…

By now, many of you have read the frequent articles and responses to the latest Pew Research showing the number of people who identify themselves as Christians is declining. Over the last seven years, that number has fallen 8 percent. While no one is surprised that the majority of the decline has been in mainline Protestant churches with evangelicals remaining relatively stable, there was a marked rise in the number of adults who indicate no religious affiliation— up 8 percent from 2007. In other words, there is either a significant numerical decline or people taking the poll simply fail to identify for whatever reasons with any particular religion. They may…

When my father became ill near the end of his life, he fought death as hard as anyone I knew – just as he had willed himself to overcome every other obstacle in his life. He often told us about his mother who would set chairs across the kitchen to hold her upright when she could no longer stand. She had drilled into him, “When nothing but your will says go.” As his physical condition deteriorated, my father’s will to beat death only grew stronger. His enormous spirit to persevere that had served him well for so long was not open to – or capable of – allowing him to…