Month: March 2016

I’m following the match-up between the world’s best player of the game of go, and a computer from DeepMind*, an artificial intelligence software house in London that was bought by Google in 2014. Go is played on a 19×19 grid of vertical and horizontal lines with black and white checkers.  The number of games that can be played on it is enormous: The Economist’s article says a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10¹⁷⁰.  (Keep in mind there are only an estimated 10⁸⁰ particles in the observable universe).  Anyway : it’s 2-0 for the computer so far, but humans need not despair. General-purpose machine intelligence remains a long way off, says the article.

*Not to be confused with Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Update : Sunday 3/13.  I see it’s 3-1 for Deep Mind’s AlphaGo program. The South Korean Go master Lee Sidol won a game against the machine, at least denying it a clean sweep in the 5-game match-up.

There was a wide-spread Google server outage this Monday morning, which wreaked havoc on my ability to do any work.  Our Google ‘cloud’ e-mail is accessed through the Chrome browser, as are several other mission critical applications : Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Hangouts.   On top of that my local internet service provider Comcast, experienced a brief outage as well.

Finally, as I turned the TV on during lunch to check on the stock market close, it was apparently time for the monthly test of the King County emergency broadcasting system. Well ! I thought.  At least I will know if that 9.0 earthquake- tsunami is coming for me during the next 15 minutes!

(All this information from TIME magazine’s March 07 cover story). ‘You can’t have a person driving a 2-ton death machine’ said Elon Musk at a conference last year.  The numbers are sobering : about 33,000 Americans die in auto accidents in a year, with an additional 2 million or so injured.  Some 94% of accidents are the fault of drivers.  The price tag for this mayhem comes to some $836 billion by one estimate.  Even if only 10% of vehicles can be converted to self-driving cars or trucks, the number of accidents could be reduced by 211,000 and 1,100 lives be saved every year.   But it will not be easy. Whole industries (such as the auto insurance industry) will be upended, and as TIME puts it :  even though there is no ‘right to drive’ enshrined in the US Constitution .. ‘in the throne room of the American psyche, a driver’s seat occupies center stage’.

Man. What an embarrassment the Republican ‘Presidential’ debate on Thursday night in Detroit, Michigan, was.  (Quotes added since hardly any presidential demeanor was on display. It was a schoolyard brawl.) Donald Trump called Marco Rubio ‘Little Marco’ and Ted Cruz ‘Lying Ted’. Forget ‘Mister’ or ‘Senator’. Forget waiting your turn to speak.  Just interrupt as soon as the other guy starts talking. And is this exchange for real? (yes, it is, verbatim): Trump to Rubio joking about his anatomy. “He referred to my hands,” said Trump. “If they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.”    The nation averts its eyes and covers its ears.

The results for the ‘Super Tuesday’ elections are in. (Super Tuesday is called that since 11 states have their 2016 Presidential primary elections on this same day).   I love the maps of the USA that show the states that voted.   Here are the Republican Party’s results and the Democratic Party’s results on two maps (from the on-line edition of the New York Times). It’s looking more and more like it’s going to be Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton in the November general election.