A book by its cover

“People do judge books by their cover.” Yes, and even when you think you know this, you may not appreciate it properly: the effect can turn out to be an order of magnitude stronger than you expect. I spent a lot of time some years ago working on a computer program to choose the best move in the game of Go — a “go playing program” in the sense of the more common “chess playing program”. One of the unexpected things I learned from that experience was how qualitatively more impressed people were with the appearance of the graphical wrapper that I used to demo it (which was fine but nothing special: free software that I didn’t write myself, a standard program for displaying the board position when two people e.g. play against each other over the internet) than with any of the thinking/choosing/analysis issues that my program was about.
--- William Newman says: October 6, 2015 at 2:35 am