Friday 3 June 2016

Where two of my current worlds collide

Eighteen months ago I had what might be best termed as a 'change in my employment status'. This allowed me to spend a year drinking coffee, riding my bike and playing some chess (interspersed with some freelancing, tournament organising, and writing job applications). After a year of doing that I moved into the area of cyber security (a very trendy field in Australia at the moment).
Now all the usual attributes and abilities you develop as a chess player can probably be applied to IT security. You need to anticipate threats, plan ahead, and most importantly, keep up with current theory. I'm not sure *I* bring all those attributes to the field, but chess metaphors to apply.
At least one person has made a more direct link however, matching roles in the security fields with the roles that pieces have on the board. Chris Conacher believes that chess provides good lessons for companies and people working in the field. At a subsequent conference participants were even polled about what chess piece they would like to be, and this provided some interesting answers.
If you a chess player working in IT it makes a good read, especially if IT security is a foreign field. Who knows, you may end up like me, falling unexpectedly into the field, and so like in chess, a bit of pre game preparation can't hurt.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess it's better than asking someone what kind of tree they wish they could be.

Anonymous said...

And after applying the Shannon number, the result will be.........?

Jim said...

With the assistance of the good Dr Z and the almighty(?) Wiki, it is a conservative lower bound (not an estimate) of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10 to the power of 120, based on an average of about 10 to the power of 3 possibilities for a pair of moves consisting of a move for White followed by one for Black, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves.

Shaun Press said...

Thanks Jim!