Tag: link

THE MYSTERY OF GO, THE ANCIENT GAME THAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN’T WIN

Go-01
Remi Coulom (left) and his computer program, Crazy Stone, take on grandmaster Norimoto Yoda in the game of Go. Photo: Takashi Osato/WIRED

Wired article on the state of things in developing a Go-playing program that will beat the grandmasters, something that apparently might not only be farther off than we thought, but also more difficult.

I was surprised to hear from programmers that the eventual success of these programs will have little to do with increased processing power. It is still the case that a Go program’s performance depends almost entirely on the quality of its code. Processing power helps some, but it can only get you so far. Indeed, the UEC lets competitors use any kind of system, and although some opt for 2048-processor-core super-computers, Crazy Stone and Zen work their magic on commercially available 64-core hardware.

[…]

Many Go players see the game as the final bastion of human dominance over computers. This view, which tacitly accepts the existence of a battle of intellects between humans and machines, is deeply misguided. In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe.

The Ocean Is Broken

IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

[…]

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

“All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship,” he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

“Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble.”

But they weren’t pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

“And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish,” he said.

“They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

“We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That’s what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

“They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day’s by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing.”

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.

…

One of the saddest articles I’ve read in a while…

Reminded me of this.

 

We Need To Talk About TED

“Science, philosophy and technology run on the model of American Idol – as embodied by TED talks – is a recipe for civilisational disaster”

Great article on how TED makes people hungry for innovations they’re not willing to follow through with making a reality, and how the ruling class, willingly or not, likes it this way. But TED is so cool…

Winter Solstice 2013

winter_solstice 2013

This unusual and artistic image, made using a technique known as “solargraphy” in which a pinhole camera captures the movement of the Sun in the sky over many months, was taken from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope on the plateau of Chajnantor. The plateau is also where ESO, together with international partners, is building the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The solar trails in the image were recorded over half a year and clearly show the quality of the 5000-metre altitude site, high in the Chilean Andes, for astronomical observations.

Caught from Wikipedia.

Something Is Killing Life All Over The Pacific Ocean – Could It Be Fukushima? (Activist Post)

I’ll just drop this here…

noaawater

Note I don’t know how old this map exactly is, but somehow I won’t feel much better if it’s newer rather than older.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs Rage

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it…

Excellent article by David Graeber that had been sitting on my tab stack for a few months now waiting for me to post it here. It confirms my suspicion that we don’t need to work as much as we do and that much of what people are paid to do is purposefully not useful.

Of course, it could also be that I’m looking for further evidence and support to ground my avoidance of these bullshit jobs, what has made me prefer unemployment to -in my idealistic, INFP eyes- ridding my life of meaning. Some people would call such behaviour laziness, but I suspect those people probably wouldn’t agree with the article anyway.

Designer Leaves Board Game in Desert for Future Players

This is so cool I just had to leave some kind of reference to it here. I must say this game designer is rather optimistic about the chances of the human race surviving long enough to unearth his game. Furthermore, what if the desert transformed into something different due to climate change? In any case, I for one would love to discover it. But I’d probably not get it, right?

Jason Rohrer’s A Game for Someone isn’t meant to be played by anyone for at least 2000 years.

One of the hardest things about game unveilings is that you’ll usually wait a year or two before you can finally play the thing. Anyone who anxiously counts down the weeks before a pre-order arrives understands this feeling, but that wait is a cakewalk compared to Jason Rohrer’s timeframe. The designer behind Passage, The Castle Doctrine, and Diamond Trust of London has crafted a very special board game whose intended audience won’t exist for at least 2000 years. And to ensure that nobody finds it before he’s good and ready, Rohrer has buried the game and its rules in the Nevada Desert where even an organized search could take lifetimes.

Rohrer’s A Game for Someone was designed for the final Game Design Challenge at GDC 2013. Using the theme of “Humanity’s Last Game”, Rohrer was inspired by cathedral architects whose projects wouldn’t be completed until long after their lives ended. For that reason, Rohrer has done everything humanly possible to ensure that his game won’t be played for generations, going so far as to bury it away from roads and populated areas. According to Rohrer, the location is so indistinguishable from its surroundings that even he isn’t sure how he could find it again.

Since traditional playtesting wasn’t an option, Rohrer built a digital version of the game to be completed by AI. This version was the one presented at GDC, with key features blocked out to prevent anyone from reproducing its mechanics. After the AI rooted out any imbalances, Rohrer produced the game using 30 pounds of titanium, including an 18 x 18 inch board and pieces. He also included rule diagrams printed on archival paper, sealed in a glass tube, and sealed again in titanium before burying it all in the desert.

While no one but Rohrer knows how the game is played, he’s still giving players a sporting chance to find it. Rohrer has distributed over 900 sets of GPS coordinates to each person at the presentation, coming to over a million possible locations. Mathematically speaking, if one person were to visit a location each day with a metal detector, the game would be unearthed sometime within the next 2700 years. Short of a massive concentrated effort to find it this generation, it’s far more likely that a scavenger or technology-laden futurist will stumble across the game when they least expect it. The only question is whether A Game for Someone, now a GDC award-winner, can live up to over 2000 years of hype.