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Heat is just another word for transferring kinetic energy. Temperature above absolute zero is just the random, kinetic energy of atoms. Heat is the process by which the kinetic energy of one thing is transferred to another. How the heat (energy) is transferred depends on circumstances. Radiation, convection, conduction are some ways, but in every case kinetic energy is transferred from one thing to another.

People without a pinky finger don't need one.

The pinky finger is your smallest one at the opposite side of your thumb.

If my right pinky is missing, I don't need a right ctrl key.

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There are many different layouts for keyboards, and many deviations from standard layouts. You can use keymapping software to change the function of a key.

And because of this, one more option is to explicitly limit the amount of time the computer has to "think."

This option is both subtle and powerful. To use the chess example once again, the likelihood of a "missed brilliancy" is not a lot lower than that of an ignored blunder. Perhaps somewhat lower, since the brilliancy may have already been discovered in a prior move, but if I'm forced to think fast, the likelihood of errors increases a lot.

One of my first systems Computer Science classes, my professor began with, “Computers are Stupid”

Add delays to its reaction time, have it make decisions that are clearly not optimal, have it calculate less far into the future as to not understand the consequences of the current moment

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There aren’t “like 20,” there are exactly 20 lol

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Computers are dumb to begin with. They do exactly what we tell them to do. If I want a chess engine to not pick the optimal move every turn, I just tell it not to. A chess engine will think of several possible moves and rank them from best to worse. I can program it to pick only its third best option for instance to make an easier opponent.

Yep.

To go back to the chess example, as chess isn’t a solved game, it’s impossible to always determine the most optimal move in chess. Computers can do lots of complex math to calculate what it thinks is most optimal, but it can never be known for certain.

That highly depends on what task you want to "dumb down".
On your chess example, if the pc calculates all possible moves, let it calculate less moves.
If it compares the current game to other gamers played by pros, give it less games as comparison.

In addition to this, OP seems to assume that an "optimal choice" is always an option. In reality, it can be really really hard to make a good AI, so the chess AI you're playing against might actually be "doing its best", because whoever made it couldn't make it any better.

Using the Chess example, the way a chess engine is "smart" is it can look ahead a bunch of moves, and see all the possibilities.

The way you make that "dumber" is you limit the number of moves the engine can look ahead.

To make it more general, you limit the thing that makes it "smart". Sometimes it's as simple as limiting input, see the chess example, sometimes it's more complicated, sometimes it's just adding a wait or a random element. Or a combo of the above.

One big issue, is that energy is an abstraction

It tells you a lot of useful things, with very simple math, but you can't ever measure energy directly. So you should give up the idea the energy is a actual "thing" but more of a "label".

So heat, is just the label that we give to a body whose particles move in a disorderly fashion. The more they move the more heat they have. (Actually to be precise heat is how much of the movement of the particles is/can be transferred to another body, but the point stands)

If you consider one single particle, it can't move disorderly, because relative to itself it always moves straight, so for a single particle we prefer to use the label kinetic energy, because a body whose particles move in an orderly fashion is simply a moving body and not an hot one.

Once again, heat and kinetic energy, are functionally the same thing, just two different names for two facets of the same phenomenon.

Heat is the transfer of energy from a hot object to another. The temperature of an object is a measure of the typical kinetic energy of the particles.

0% land is not floating on the sea it is just land that is higher than the sea floor. For anything to “fall into the ocean” you need to break off of the rest of the land and fall into the sea, this often happens dramatically with cliffs but it’s never more than 20-30 feet on a bad year.

Considering the most well-known fault line, the San Andreas Fault, doesn’t run parallel to the state line, not likely. Indeed, the majority of the north-south fault lines are west of the San Joaquin valley and into the Bay Area and coast.

So while the chances of losing part of California to the Pacific are not zero, it’s even less likely the state will split from Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Mexico along the state lines and international border.

(I live about 25 miles west of the San Andreas Fault, where it’s closest to me.)

No earthquake would ever cause California or any other place to "fall into the ocean" ever. Land doesn't work that way. At most a continent could be torn apart, slowly, and a new sea/ocean will fill in the gap. It would take millions of years.

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The vibrations, rotations and general movement of particles will always contain some kinetic energy. We can measure this general vibration as a temperature of the particle system.

When you heating something, say water on a stove, the energy from the stove is being conducted through a vessel into the water, adding energy into it. The particles in the metal then vibrate faster and faster, and those metal particles in contact with the water will then impart energy to the water particles, heating the water.