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Notes -
What do you think motivates Elon Musk to do some of the weird things he does? He has a lot of tweets that feel like /r/iamverysmart material, like saying chess is a simple game and now that we have computers games like Polytopia are way better. Or how he tried to buy twitter, then back out of it after already signing a contract saying he would leading twitter to sue him to force him to buy. Or offering his analysis of the Ukraine-Russian war on twitter, which even if you would agree the broad strokes of his suggestion were good, Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace.
Is he just doing stuff for attention? Does he think he's genuinely making a world a better place with those actions? Does he have some sort of social media manager planning this stuff to keep his name in the news and stock price high? Is he just bored and tweeting/making impulse purchases to pass the time, like what everyone else does just on a much larger scale? For the life of me I don't know why he does what he does.
So I'll just offer my response on Musk's points...
Chess isn't a simple game. But it is a solved game at the lower levels. The winner of an amateur match is going to be whoever spent more time studying chess books.
Musk has better things to spend his time on, but doesn't want a bunch of mediocre people running around bragging that they beat him at chess.
So he tweets that to avoid the whole situation.
His Twitter purchase is an interesting topic, and there's a lot of speculation. But keep in mind that there were left wing groups planning to go to court to stop the purchase, and around that time tech stocks took a big hit.
So it was probably a mix of trying to get a lower price, replacing funding that had backed out, and waiting to see if the DOJ anti trust division was going to come after him.
As for Ukraine, this is pretty straightforward. Western governments have committed over $100 billion dollars to help Ukraine, and lots of groups have gotten in on the grift. Weapons developers are getting money to fund new systems to "help Ukraine" that won't be ready for years. If you dig, I'm sure you'll find a bunch of lefty groups getting big bucks for dubious services.
No one expects any of them to work for free.
But Starlink was providing critical communications services for free and it's clear that everyone was happy to leave them holding the bag. Musk just wanted to get paid for services or for the war to end.
So it's not for attention. He's just trying to advance his interests in various ways.
There's a lot more to chess than memorizing openings and specific tactical patterns, practicing and being able to see moves into the future matters a lot too. Also, Polytopia's not different in that the person with the knowledge/practice advantage will probably win.
Has that been happening?
Chess is a lot less in a sense that very crude algorithm which evaluates trees is enough to beat an average human, because of low branching quotient and it's a perfect information game. Games with incomplete information require more complex AI.
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