A Life in a Year – 10th February, Robots are officially cleverer than Humans

Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM and on February 10th 1996 it defeated Garry Kimovich Kasparov a Russian chess grandmaster and a player many consider to be the greatest World champion chess player of all time. Here finally was proof that robots were cleverer than humans.

I had grown up with robots of course and throughout my childhood and adolescence it was in the certain knowledge that one day robots would take over and mankind would be declared redundant. Every week from 1965 the BBC television programme ‘Tomorrow’s world’ presented new technology and inventions and made extravagant predictions (usually wrong) about what life would be like in the future and this generally involved a robot or a computer or both.

So who were my favourite robots? First of all it has to be Robert from Fireball XL5. Set between the years 2062 and 2063, the series featured the missions of a spaceship commanded by Colonel Steve Zodiac of the World Space Patrol. The crew included glamorous Doctor Venus, a doctor of space medicine; navigator, egg-head and all-round know-it-all Professor Matthew Matic; and co-pilot Robert, a transparent anthropomorphic robot and Earth’s most advanced mechanical man. Despite being completely see through Robert was really smart and made a full contribution to the space missions and every week he ended the show with his catchphrase ‘On our way home, on our way home’ in his irritating electronic buzzing voice.

Like most boys I was always fond of comics of course, Victor, Eagle, Wizard, Tiger and Lion, and a weekly feature in the Lion was Robot Archie who was built by Professor C.R. Ritchie to be the world’s most powerful mechanical man. Originally he was called The Jungle Robot (due to his early adventures taking place in the jungles of Africa and South America) and was remote controlled by Professor Ritchie and his nephew Ted Ritchie and his best friend Ken Dale.

Not all robots were good though and my favourite villain is the android gunslinger played by Yul Brynner in the film West World. The story is set sometime in the future, in Delos, a high-tech, highly realistic fictional adult amusement park featuring androids that are almost indistinguishable from human beings. One of the main attractions is the Gunslinger - a robot programmed to pick fights. Thanks to its programming, humans can always outdraw the Gunslinger and kill it but naturally things go spectacularly wrong and the robot cannot be controlled and goes on a killing spree throughout the holiday resort.

Now, Deep Blue might have been clever but it wasn’t the first clever dick robot because that was the Magic Robot which was a children’s general knowledge game would magically give the correct answers when asked a set of questions. As kids we were amazed at just how clever this thing was as it never failed to answer correctly. The robot figure went into a socket circled by questions and was turned it until the rod held by the robot pointed to the question that you wanted answering. The robot was then transferred to a circle of mirrored foil surrounded by the answers to the questions from around the socket and “by magic” the robot spun until the rod pointed at the correct answer!

It wasn’t magic at all of course because It was done with a simple magnet. The robot was fastened into a swivelling base and that, when fitted into the socket, was held fast so that when you turned the robot to your question it was turning it within its own base. This meant that the polarity of the magnet in the robot was positioned so that when it aligned with the magnet beneath the mirror, the robot would swivel to the correct answer every time! A real cheat really!

Clever but, let’s face it, cheating and when Kasparov was beaten by the computer at chess he accused IBM of cheating as well and we will never know if he was right because shortly afterwards they dismantled the machine for good.

A Life in a Year – 9th February, Jim “Spud” Murphy investigates the disappearance of Shergar

Shergar was a champion Irish racehorse and winner of the 1981 Epsom Derby by a record ten lengths the longest winning margin in the race’s 226-year history. A bay colt with a distinctive white blaze, Shergar was named European Horse of the Year in 1981 and was retired from racing that September and was looking forward to a life of stud.

Two years later, on 8th February 1983, a foggy winter’s evening in Ireland, a group of men wearing balaclavas and armed with guns turned up at the Ballymany Stud Farm in Co Kildare and kidnapped Shergar with the intention of holding him to ransom. Shergar was arguably the greatest racehorse to have ever lived but twenty-five years after he was kidnapped from the mystery of exactly what happened to him after he was snatched that night still persists. Then, as now, the story was one that gripped the world. From racing enthusiasts to ordinary members of the public, everyone wanted to know who had taken Shergar, why they had done so and what became of him and then, as now, no definite answers were forthcoming.

What happened next set the tone for a police operation that has been called “a caricature of police bungling”. Shergar’s groom James Fitzgerald called the stud farm manager, who for some reason called Shergar’s vet. The vet then called a racing associate, Sean Berry, who in turn called Alan Dukes, the Irish Finance Minister. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone to call the police and it wasn’t until eight hours had elapsed did anyone call the Gardaí on the next day.

Leaving aside the tragedy and the almost certain undignified death of Shergar the police investigation was the best bit of the story when on 9th February the investigation into one of sport’s greatest whodunnits began. The first problem for the police was the kidnapping’s timing because Shergar was taken the day before Ireland’s biggest racehorse sale – a day on which horseboxes were driven on roads across the country, making an impossible task to find the box containing the kidnapped horse.

The investigation was further complicated because officers from both Dublin and County Kildare were put on the case. The two forces reportedly refused to share information and believed that they were in direct competition with each other.

Leading the investigation into the theft was trilby-wearing Chief Superintendent Jim “Spud” Murphy, who immediately became a media hero because of his Inspector Clousseau appearance and tactics. His detection techniques were unconventional and a variety of clairvoyants, psychics and diviners were called in to help. During one famous interview Mr Murphy told reporters: “A clue?… that is what we haven’t got.”

Jim “Spud” Murphy became a regular on television news bulletins and he did the reputation of the Irish police enormous damage. My dad would watch all of the news programmes just to watch Murphy continue to make a clown of himself and by the end of the latest interview he would be in fits of laughter and I am sure that if he had had a video recorder he would have taped them all.

Despite numerous reported sightings and rumours of secret negotiations in the days following the theft there was little new information and a news hungry press pack began to focus their attention on Spud Murphy, ridiculing his inept investigation and his unconventional approach. During one press conference six photographers turned up wearing trilbies, identical to the police chief, after which, although he continued to lead the investigation, he was given a much lower public profile.

A Life in a Year – 8th February, The Devil Walks in Devon

On the night of the 8th of February 1855 heavy snow fell on the countryside and small villages of South Devon. The last snow is thought to have fallen around midnight, and between this time and around six o’clock the following morning, something (or some things) left a trail of tracks in the snow, stretching for a hundred miles or more, from the River Exe, to Totnes on the River Dart.

The mysterious footprints have never been adequately explained. According to contemporary reports, they went through solid walls and haystacks, appearing on the other side as though there was no barrier. The extent of the footprints may have been exaggerated at the time, and they may have been the result of freak atmospheric conditions but in truth the ‘footprints’, if that is what they were, still remain a complete mystery. Some clergymen suggested that the prints belonged to the Devil, who was roaming the countryside in search of sinners (a great advertising stunt to fill the churches), while others rejected the idea as superstition. It is true that a feeling of unease had spread through some of the population, who watched carefully to see if the strange footprints would return. They didn’t and after a couple of days the news spread out of Devon and made the national press and sparked correspondence in some of the leading papers including the Times.

I mention this because when I was about fifteen I was bought a fascinating book called ‘The Reader’s Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Facts’ and the story of the Devil’s Footprints was included and quickly became one of my favourite articles. The book was an almanac of random stories with tales of the supernatural, mythical beasts, feats of improbable strength, a glimpse into the future and was divided into chapters such as “Strange customs and superstitions”, “Hoaxes, frauds and forgeries” and “Eccentrics and prophecies.” There were photographs of the Loch Ness Monster, Sri Lankan fire walkers and “O-Kee-Pa, the Torture Test,” where young men of the Mandan tribe of Indians endured a brutal and horrific rite of passage that culminated in chopping off their own little fingers.

I learned that people sometimes spontaneously combust, and that an Italian monk named Padre Pio suffered Christlike wounds in his hands called stigmata that never healed. There were weird facts such as pigs being flogged in medieval France for breaking the law, and that the entire crew of the Mary Celeste disappeared one day, leaving the ship to float empty around the Atlantic. I became acquainted with Anastasia, the supposed Romanov survivor; and Spring-Heeled Jack, a demon who leapt about London in the nineteenth century, spitting blue fames in the faces of young women.

I acquired this book during my Ouija board occult dabbling days and the chapter on the supernatural I read over and over again. I was interested in the paranormal and here now was a book bearing evidence that ghosts were real and to prove it there were photographs of writings they’d scrawled on walls. You can’t dispute evidence like that. There was an article on the most haunted house in England and in another a photograph even showed how some ghosts could actually present their reflection on tiled kitchen floors I used to love this book, much to the despair of my dad who considered it to be a collection of useless false drivel that was distracting me from studying for my ‘o’ levels and he was right I should have been concentrating on Shakespeare and Chaucer but for some reason Henry V and the Canterbury Tales were just not as interesting as ‘The night the Devil walked through Devon’!

A Life in a Year – 7th February, Monopoly and other Board (or Bored) Games

In 1935 Parker Brothers bought the rights to Monopoly from the ‘inventor’, Charles Darrow. Monopoly is a board game named after the capitalist economic concept of owning everything and the domination of a market by a single entity. It is said to be the most popular board game in the World and it is estimated that since the game was created, more than one billion people have played it and Games Magazine has included Monopoly into its Hall of Fame.

When I was young we used to play Monopoly quite often but I quickly learned what a tedious and pointless game it is. Sometimes a game could go on for hours without anyone ever winning as it became a mind numbing procession of Scottie dogs and racing cars around and around the board with the only real excitement being when a piece started to approach Mayfair and Park Lane (depending on whether you owned it or not) which after three or four hours would have a couple of red hotels sitting on it and a slavering landlord waiting to demand a rental charge.

Dad always looked after his possessions so even in the 1960s we were still using his own school boy edition which had real wooden houses and the eight classic pieces to move around the board; a Scottie dog, an iron, racing car, thimble, wheelbarrow, top hat, a train engine and a boot. I have never begun to understand what sort of a mind would have come up with that rather absurd selection of items and I doubt if anyone could ever satisfactorily explain the randomness of it. My favourite was the train, my sister liked the Scottie dog and we always gave mum the old boot but I don’t think she ever grasped the significance of this.

Games would generally start with a great deal of enthusiasm but after an hour or so without any real progress the horse trading used to start with the selling and swapping of real estate. When everyone had a piece of the action and had assembled a land portfolio then there would be a flurry of property purchasing activity and little green houses would start to spring up all around the board. Someone would start accumulating a pile of money, someone else would begin to run short and start to rely on passing go as often as possible and someone would just get tired of the whole thing, go deliberately bankrupt and simply give up.

Sometimes we had the sense to put a time limit on the game and just see who had the most money after say, three days, and then declare them the winner. Curiously the banker more often than not seemed to win and I think this was because as everyone around the board slipped into a coma then it was possible to sneak a note or two from the bank into their own personal account! I know I did! In fact the only time these games became anywhere near exciting was if someone got really pissed off and trashed the board in the middle of the game but usually it just petered out, no one really cared who won or lost because they were just glad that the whole thing had come to an end.

We used to play other games as well, when I was old enough dad taught me how to play chess but I could never beat him and years later I taught my own son how to play and now I can’t beat him either. A game of chess could take a while as well sometimes but draughts was alright because that could be over quite quickly. When I was really young snakes and ladders was always good fun and so was ludo before it was modernised and spoilt with the pop-o-matic dice in the perspex bubble. Later we liked to play Cluedo and then I remember becoming obsessed with Scrabble and later Trivial Pursuits. These days we don’t play many board games anymore because most people seem to prefer a games console or a Wii board.

A Life in a Year – 6th February, The Munich Air Disaster

The most distressing piece of news in our house in 1958 was most undoubtedly the Munich air disaster of 6th February when an air crash at Munich Airport in Germany caused the deaths of eight Manchester United players and several club officials and sports journalists. In 1958 the Manchester United team was one of the most talented in the World and was known as the Busby Babes, which was a reference to their manager Matt Busby and to the average age of the players, which at twenty-four was unusually young.

Manchester United had been to Yugoslavia to play the second leg of a European cup match against Red Star Belgrade. The match had ended in a 3-3 draw and United had won the tie 5-3 on aggregate. In the 1950s domestic league matches were played on Saturdays and European matches were played midweek and there wasn’t the same amount of flexibility around fixtures that there is today and having played the match there was no alternative but to return home to England immediately despite poor weather conditions. The club had chartered an aeroplane to fly them home but the takeoff from Belgrade was delayed for an hour as one of the players had lost his passport, and then the aircraft made a scheduled stop in Munich to refuel.

The plane was a British European Airways Airspeed Ambassador, which was an aircraft that had carried nearly two and a half million passengers on eighty-six thousand flights since it began service in 1952 and had an immaculate safety record. After refueling the pilot tried to take off twice, but both attempts were aborted. When a third take off was attempted the plane failed to gain adequate height and crashed into the fence surrounding the airport, then into a house, and caught fire. Although the crash was originally blamed on pilot error, it was subsequently found to have been caused by the build-up of slush towards the end of the runway, causing deceleration of the aircraft and preventing safe take off speed from being achieved.

Seven players died immediately in the crash, Roger Byrne, the captain, Mark Jones, Eddie Colman, Tommy Taylor, Liam Whelan, David Pegg and Geoff Bent. Probably the most famous Busby Babe of all was Duncan Edwards who was tipped at the time to become one of the World’s greatest footballers but although he survived the crash he died from his injuries a few days later in hospital. In 1953 he had become the youngest footballer to play in the Football League First Division and at the age of 18 years and one hundred and eighty-three days, he had made his international debut for England in April 1955, and became England’s youngest post-war debutant. This record was not broken for forty-three years, when Michael Owen made his England debut in 1998.

Matt Busby who was himself very seriously injured in the crash resumed managerial duties the following season and eventually built a second generation of Busby Babes, including George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, who also happened to be one of the original Busby Babes, that went on to win the European Cup ten years after the disaster in 1968.

As a football fan this was devastating news for my dad who for many years afterwards always remembered the tragedy and spoke fondly of the lost Manchester United team. In a scrap book that he kept at the time he kept the front page of the Daily Mail which covered the story on the next day. The only other two newspaper front pages that he kept were those that reported the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Winston Churchill. That’s how much it meant to him. And he never bought me an Airfix model of the BEA Airspeed Ambassador either.

A Life in a Year – 5th February, The end of Sweet Rationing and good news for Dentists

For all of my adult life I have had an irrational fear of visiting the dentist and consequently I haven’t looked after my teeth as well as I should have. The reason for this phobia about having a stranger poking about in my mouth is the memories of the school dentist.

For the horror of the school dentist we had to thank the national health service which was one of the fundamental recommendations in the Beveridge Report which Arthur Greenwood, The Labour Party Deputy Leader with responsibility for post-war reconstruction had successfully pressed the cabinet to commission from economist and social reformer William Beveridge. The Government accepted this in February 1943, and after a White Paper in 1944 it fell to Clement Attlee’s Labour government to create the NHS as part of the ‘cradle to grave’ welfare-state reforms.

I am not saying it was a bad thing because the principle was fine it was the way it operated that I have issues with because a succession of over zealous dentist with their noses stuck in the NHS money trough left me with a mutilated set of dentures and a mouth full of ugly black fillings by the time I was sixteen. Most of this must have been unnecessary and to illustrate the point I compare my oral nightmare with that of my own children, who, now in their twenties, have not a single filling between them.

I am not saying that they were to blame entirely because when I was a boy I used to eat the most appalling sweets, all full of sugar and all attacking my teeth enamel; gob-stoppers, bubble gum, milky bars, sweet cigarettes and spangles and many more besides and I am prepared to concede that this obviously made some sort of contribution towards a bit of tooth decay. All of this was possible because just a year before I was born on 5th February 1953 war time rationing of sweets came to an end which meant all sorts of sugary items were unleashed on 1950s children. And it wasn’t just sweets of course because even some everyday food had unnatural amounts of sugar in them. Biscuits and breakfast cereals are a good examples, I used to like Kellogg’s sugar puffs and I think a food expert once proved that these were about 50% pure sugar.

The dental practice that I used to go to every six months or so was Cartwright, Wright and Cunningham on Whitehall Road in Rugby. It was a once grand old house now converted to a house of torture. On arrival I had to ring the door bell and a buzzer would sound and the latch was released and I had to step inside to be booked in by the nurse. There was a downstairs waiting room which overlooked the back garden and full of old furniture including a grandfather clock that tick tocked the seconds away. It was always deathly quiet because no one ever spoke in the waiting room and the clock was a bit like that one that they kept showing in the Gary Cooper film High Noon when every movement of the minute hand brought the dreadful moment closer. There were always old magazines on the coffee tables such as Punch and National Geographic and I would leaf through the pages without paying any attention to the content just for something to do.

Every so often an intercom would crackle into life and a name would be called out and it would be someone’s turn to go to the treatment room. Eventually it would call out ‘Andrew Petcher please’ and it would be my turn. The treatment room was upstairs and the dentist was Dr Cunningham who was a big man with a bushy beard and once the brief formalities were over he would invite me to sit down and he would get to work.

After only a few seconds there would be beads of perspiration forming on my forehead and I would have an involuntarily vice like grip on the arms of the chair. This still happens when I go to the dentist today by the way. Every now and again I would tell myself to relax and loosen the grip but every time he poked at another tooth my fingers tightened up again.

The inspection was soon completed and this led to the inevitable bad news that he would need to follow that up with a couple of fillings and then out came the anesthetic needle and after that had taken effect he would start to grind away at the tooth first with a slow drill that made my entire head buzz and then the high speed follow up to remove the last bits of whatever it was he thought he needed to take away. This was then followed up by a quick mouthwash and then a shiny new filling was squeezed in place to replace the tooth that he just destroyed.

For Doctor Cunningham and every other dentist too, the next part of the procedure was the most important because I was then required to sign a form to confirm that he had carried out the work and this and many more like them would form the basis of next month’s claim to the NHS because this was all one big scam and I dread to think how many unnecessary treatments must have been inflicted on school children in the 1960s while the dentists lined their pockets with tax payers money.

Thanks to these people I have had to live with teeth full of metal for forty years with each filling having to be replaced every so often so not only did Doctor Cunningham get a first payment for disfiguring me and thousands of others like me he guaranteed future revenue for his profession for the rest of our lives.

A Life in a Year – 4th February, Facebook and a Family Disagreement

The social networking site ‘Facebook’ went online on 4th February 2004 and whilst it has no doubt brought some people closer together, and has some value in that, it has also been responsible for breaking families up. Unfortunately I am an example of the latter experience.

I joined the site in Spring 2007, principally to keep in touch with my children, and like most people set about setting up a big network of friends as it seemed that popularity was measured by how many gravitars started to appear down the left hand side of the screen. I started in the obvious place with family and friends and then progressed to current work colleagues, old work colleagues, old school chums, random people with the same surname and then finally, and quite bizarrely (everybody does it), complete strangers.

Suddenly my life was a risky open book and I was living and sharing it with a dangerously increasing audience. Luckily I realised this quite quickly and soon began to remove the strangers, the people with the same surname, the old school friends and previous work colleagues who I realised I had no real desire to keep in touch with and then finally the current work colleagues because sharing my holiday snaps and private thoughts with them served no purpose whatsoever and made me perilously accessible and vulnerable.

So my list of contacts started to shrink but I carried on reducing it even though I was teased by my children for having so few friends. When I was back to family only, my own children obviously, and my brother and sister and their children, I thought this was a safe place to stop but how wrong I was because I was only days away from a family catastrophe that had the intensity of a tropical storm and nearly four years later still hasn’t blown over.

This is how it happened: By the summer of 2007 I had grown bored with my ‘wall’ being cluttered up with nonsense and trivia and especially that of my niece who used the site principally to share the details of her love life, desires, sexual adventures and infatuations, sometimes dozens of times every single day. So, having nothing particularly in common with her, except for a few shared genes, I removed her from my list of friends. I meant nothing by it except that I didn’t think that it was appropriate for me to have access to her private thoughts in this way. There was nothing malicious in what I did, it didn’t mean that I didn’t want her as my niece or even my friend I just didn’t want to share my life with her on Facebook. It was as simple as that.

One day in August, even though she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, I told my mum about this, thought nothing more about it and then went off on a backpacking holiday to Greece. In the first week or so we stayed in Athens and then visited the islands of Naxos, Ios, Sikinos and Folegandros and in this time it never occurred to me once to use an internet café or to access my Facebook account but in Ios for a second time there was a computer with complimentary internet access so one afternoon I couldn’t resist the temptation to log on. There was a message that a picture of me had been tagged so naturally curious I had a look. Yes, there was my picture and a tag that said ‘how disgusting, it makes me feel sick to look at it’ (Facebook wasn’t quite so secure in 2007) and it had been put there by my delightful niece. At first I thought this could be explained by a sense of humour but I was a bit hurt and I didn’t like it so I untagged it, closed the site down and really thought no more about it.

When I got home however all was revealed. It turned out that it had nothing to do with her sense of humour at all, she had taken unnecessary offence at her removal from my list of friends and she meant every nasty word of it. Mum, you see, had innocently told my sister that I had taken her off my friends list and the reason why and she had blown her stack. When I returned home I had even fewer friends on Facebook because my sister and her two sons had removed me, one of them was going to punch me in the face if he ever saw me again and the really sad thing is that I have barely spoken with my sister ever since except to squabble.

I don’t suppose that you could ever have described us as being devoted to each other, after all being related doesn’t oblige you to be friends or even like each other, but we used to get on well enough on the few times that we ever met or spoke. For a short time in 2003 when dad was ill and passed away we became quite close but that was only temporary because shortly afterwards things returned to normal and sadly in respect of our fragile sibling relationship the Facebook incident has turned out to be terminal.

Since then I have met with Lindsay only one time. That was in May 2008 when I was on a golfing holiday with my brother in Spain and she was staying close by in her apartment at La Maquesa so we arranged to meet one night in a Spanish restaurant in the town of San Miguel de Las Salinas. It was a pleasant enough evening (except for Richard’s son Scott making an unfortunate gaff) and for a brief moment I thought we may have mended the broken bridge but at the end of the evening I put my arm around her and kissed her to say goodbye and her response was so cold and unresponsive that it made me shiver and I knew that the bridge was still in ruins.

We have never spoken to each other since.