Morgan Griffiths

Background

About Morgan Griffiths

I have always been fascinated by games. Whether it was programming robots in RoboWars, exploring RPG dungeons or making up my own outdoors. While I often found rules arbitrary and annoying, i realized that games are fun and challenging because of their rules. The simplicity of the rules of a game, speak to me about how well the game is designed. Starting college at 15, i studied Russian (due to my Russian chess trainers) and functional linguistics. Linguistics teaches us about how we think, how language is a tool that we use to communicate and analyze the world around us. But it is also a box, with rules and constraints that forces you to think in certain ways. Just like how traveling opens your eyes to different modes of living, new languages open your mind up to different modes of thinking. And are better or worse at expressing different concepts. The beauty of deep strategic play in chess continues to remind me that optimal solutions are often surprising, subtle and can even appear to be going backward. The value of starting from what is known and working systematically to uncover the truth of the position. How the rules of a game dictate how the game should be played, something that isn't taken into account often enough in our governmental and political spheres. 11 years as a poker professional opened my eyes to the probabilistic nature of the universe. The fallacy of looking back on history at events as if they were certain. The importance of mixed strategies and how the frequency of an action can determine whether or not that action is correct. I've also learned a lot about how to consistently perform well as a competitor. How diet, exercise, meditation and routine can create the foundation for performing at a high level. When to accept that circumstances are not right for excelling. Knowing when to quit is often the more important skill. I went into programming and ML because i fear that humanity is ill suited to being good stewards of this planet and is on the path to self extinction. If we want our civilization to extend for millions of years, we must design systems that take the long tails of the future into account. With machine learning, we finally have the ability to create an intelligence outside of ourselves that can augment our understanding and make up for our blind spots. Fundamentally if truly intelligent systems can be developed on our digital substrate vs our analog brains. It would be a more alien form of intelligence than even octopuses.