The second word a professor told me to carry for life. It took me years — and a lot of vectors — to start understanding it.
A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.
The same professor — Sang Lyul Min — handed us these words one at a time in lecture. After trade-off, two more stuck with me. But before the second word itself, here are the two pieces of news he brought to class around then. The internet barely existed; information moved through journals, magazines, and word of mouth. Looking back, it's a little amazing how much still got through.
When a chess machine started winning
The first breakthrough I remember: computers had finally started playing chess on roughly even terms with the world's best. Deep Blue beat Kasparov around 1996, so the machines he was describing came just before — names like Deep Thought, ChessMachine, Socrates II. He told us, deadpan, that one human competitor's head had "physically burst" from the strain — and we groaned, "Come on, Professor, that's a bit much."
