Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [12]
But although it was luck that Krush’s particular microexpertise could help the World Team get the upper hand, that doesn’t mean it was simply luck that enabled the World Team to play so well. The game was widely publicized within the chess community, and hundreds of experienced chess players were following the game. Chess is so rich with possible variations that many of those players had their own individual areas of microexpertise where they too equaled or even surpassed Kasparov. The key to the World Team’s play was to ensure that this all this ordinarily latent microexpertise was uncovered and acted upon in response to the contingencies of the game. So although it was a lucky chance that Krush in particular was the person whose microexpertise was decisive at move 10, given the number of experienced chess players involved, it was highly likely that latent microexpertise from those players would come to light at critical points during the game, and so help the World Team match Kasparov.
This is, in fact, exactly what happened. As an example, after the game ended Krush singled out move number 26 as one of her three favorite World Team moves. Move number 26 wasn’t Krush’s idea, or the idea of one of the established chess experts following the game. Instead, move 26 was proposed by one of the posters on the game forum, using the name Yasha, later revealed to be Yaaqov Vaingorten, a reasonably serious but not elite junior player. This was part of a pattern, as during the game Krush drew extensively on the thinking of many unknown or even anonymous contributors to the game forum, people using pseudonyms such as Agent Scully, Solnushka, and Alekhine via Ouji. At the same time, she al consulted with established chess players such as international masters Ken Regan and Antti Pihlajasalo, and grandmaster Alexander Khalifman, of the GM School. The World Team wasn’t lucky at all. Rather, the World Team had such a diverse collection of talent available that each time a problem arose, a member of the team rose to the occasion; someone with just the right microexpertise would leap in to fill the gap.
Designed Serendipity
We’ve seen how collaborative projects such as Kasparov versus the World and InnoCentive harness latent microexpertise to overcome challenges that would stymie most members of the collaboration. In the most successful online collaborations this use of microexpertise approaches an ideal in which the collaboration routinely locates people such as Yasha and Zacary Brown, people with just the right microexpertise for the occasion. In particular, as creative collaboration is scaled up, problems can be exposed to people with a greater and greater range of expertise, greatly increasing the chance that someone will see what seems to most participants like a hard problem and think, “Hey, that’s easy to solve.” Instead of being an occasional fortuitous coincidence, serendipity becomes commonplace. The collaboration achieves a kind of designed serendipity, a term I’ve adapted from the author Jon Udell.
To understand the value of such serendipity in creative work, it helps to have a concrete historical example. Let’s take Einstein’s work on his greatest contribution to science, his theory of gravity, often called the general theory of relativity. He worked on and off developing general relativity between 1907 and 1915, often running into great difficulties. By 1912, his work had led him to the astonishing conclusion that our ordinary conception of the geometry of space, in which the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, is only approximately correct, and a new kind of geometry is needed to describe space and time. Now, in case you’re wondering what the geometry of space and time has to do with gravity, you’re in good company: it came as a surprise to Einstein, too. When setting out to understand gravity, Einstein had