Graduate Speaker Series

Join a discussion about Engines of the Future: On Chess Algorithms and Temporal Topography on Thursday, October 3, where you will explore the world of chess engines—algorithms that evaluate chess positions at superhuman levels—by focusing on their ability to predict the future in real time. 

ABOUT THE SESSION

By continually calculating billions of possible positions, dozens of steps into the future state of play, these engines demonstrate a novel framework for temporal becoming that is enabled by the affordances of contemporary computation: a near-objective estimate of a game outcome that is updated every second. Through a tour of how these algorithms work to a discussion of how chess amateurs and masters alike use and think through their outputs, this talk will then introduce the concept of temporal topography, or how real-time prediction technologies are altering the surface of the present.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

John Cheney-Lippold is an associate professor, associate chair, and director of the Undergraduate Studies program in the department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. Cheney-Lippold teaches and writes on the impact of digital media on our social and political lives. He is also the author of We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of our Digital Selves (NYU Press, 2017). Currently, he is working on a book project about the future as an analytic, tracing ideas of the future through Catholic eschatology, political theories of fascism and socialism, and the business and cultural imaginaries of Silicon Valley.