Belated Thanksgiving

No no, that is not saying that I waited now to celebrate Thanksgiving. It means that I have finally gotten around to writing about it. And looking at how dedicated I have been to this blog as of late, this will not be the only retro-post I'm going to do. So, go go time travel! (man, I wish this was actually time travel)

For Thanksgiving, I went to Surabaya.This is the second biggest city in Indonesia. That last statement meant nothing to me because the only thing I could think about while being in that city is "dude! This city sells raisins! What the hell! Why doesn't my town have raisins!?"

The dinner was great. It was also free! Thank you diligent tax payers back home for giving me that. There was turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and cornbread (which was actually terrible, but let us not dwell on that) and apple pie and pumpkin pie and salad and. . . umm, I think that is it.

This was at the consulate's house by the way. The house was really cool. Like a mini museum, but with more mini. All sorts of things from all over the world. I was looking at this tapestry of a in progress chess game, trying to figure out t\just why the hell someone decided that they wanted to weave this particular moment from a game, and that is when the husband of the consulate gave me my answer. Totally cool story.

The scene was from a game between Gary Kasparov and Big Blue (the super computer IBM built). At that moment, Big Blue was about to sacrifice its bishop to ruin the castle formation of Kasparov and force the king to take the bishop, resulting in the King being exposed, at least temporally. The noteworthy thing was that this was an extremely reckless move by Big Blue as it really did not have a follow up to it and really the only purpose a move like this serves is to rattle your opponent's nerves while loosing a bishop in the process.

However, it did manage to do just that. After this game, Kasparov told an interview that it was at this moment in time that he got scared of Big Blue. He felt that for the first time, a computer was thinking like a human. A traditional computer would have never done something so reckless for so little reward, but Big Blue seemed to know a little more than just pieces on a board. Big Blue seemed to understand the concept of facing a human opponent. 

So that was my Thanksgiving. Hope to have another like it next year. (Hint, hint)