Author: Bruno Codenotti

The calculation of probability can help significantly in the small and big decisions of life, and Cicero had already encouraged to face uncertainty by being guided by examining the probability of events happening.

In this book, using simple probability tools, the authors show with examples and anecdotes how uncertainty situations can be faced rationally, with logical and mathematical skills.

Some of the themes examined, for example the birthday paradox and the Monty Hall problem, will show that our intuitive understanding of probabilities is not good at all, especially when estimating how frequently extremely unlikely events will occur.

A journey behind the scenes of a chess game with a humanoid, proving how deeply computer technology and artificial intelligence have penetrated the world of chess.

The new book by Godena and Codenotti explains the mechanisms behind an AI player, alternating the narration of significant events – many witnessed first-hand – with technical insights.

The authors begin with great figures such as Turing and Shannon, who laid the foundations of the digital revolution in the 1940s and at the same time formulated the first ideas on the automation of chess-player thinking (from Fischer to Kasparov), showing how the history of chess programming has always gone hand in hand with the history of information technology.

Eventually we meet AlphaZero, an AI player developed using the latest advances in machine learning.