COMPUTERS - Game of GO: AI 5, Human Master 0

"Google artificial intelligence beats champion at world’s most complicated board game" by Nsikan Akpan, PBS NewsHour 1/27/2016

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An artificial intelligence program developed by researchers at Google can beat a human at the board game GO, which some consider to be the most complicated board game in existence.  And this AI program — dubbed AlphaGo — didn’t defeat any ol’ human, but the European Go champion Fan Hui in a tournament last October by five games to nil.  The findings, published today in the journal Nature, represent a major coup for machine learning algorithms.

“In a nutshell, by publishing this work as peer-reviewed research, we at Nature want to stimulate the debate about transparency in artificial intelligence,” senior editor Tanguy Chouard said at a press briefing yesterday.  “And this paper seems like the best occasion for this, as it goes- should I say, right at the heart of the mystery of what intelligence is.”

Known as wéiqí in Chinese and baduk in Korean, GO originated in China over 2,500 years ago.  The board consist of a 19 by 19 grid of intersecting lines.  Two players take turns placing black and white marbles on individual intersection points.  Once place, the stones can’t be moved, but they can be captured by completely surrounding an opponent’s marble.  The ultimate objective is control more than 50 percent of the board, but since the board is so intricate, there are numerous possibilities for moves.

“So Go is probably the most complex game ever devised by man.  It has 10^170 (that's 10 followed by 170 zeros) possible board configurations, which is more than the numbers of atoms in the universe,” said study author and AlphaGo co-developer Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.

Here's my take on Artificial Intelligence:  The danger portrayed in many SiFi movies can come about IF we forget that to goal of ALL life is to survive.  Couple this with an intelligent being and you get a being that will do what it needs to survive.  Now comes true AI, this 'being' will also do ANYTHING it needs to survive, and if it sees humans as a threat ........?

INEQUALITY - Game of Wealth

"In a game of wealth, fat cats who don’t share keep winning" PBS NewsHour 10/8/2015

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SUMMARY:  An online game asks players to share some of their wealth on faith that the others will reciprocate.  But each player has the option of choosing not to share, amassing more and more wealth.  In designing a game to test human behaviors that fuel economic inequality, Yale University researchers are finding that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich.  Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  So how does this game work?

AKIHIRO NISHI, Yale University:  So in front of you now, you have a tablet.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Right.

Akihiro Nishi is prepping me to play an economic inequality game at Yale University’s Human Nature Lab.  In the game, each player is at the center of a small group within the larger community.  And in each round of the game, without knowing what the others are doing, we choose either to cooperate, that is donate 50 units, which automatically double, to each of the others in our group, or to defect and not donate to anyone, just take from those who cooperate.

The game is designed to explore the human behaviors that fuel economic inequality, a hot political issue for several years now, which Senator Bernie Sanders has made the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

As he told Judy Woodruff in May:

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, Democratic Presidential Candidate:  Ninety-nine percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.  The top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.  That is immoral and unsustainable.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Back in the Human Nature Lab, it was time to recruit players online.

AKIHIRO NISHI:  If you will look behind you for a moment, you will see now the job is actually posted, and all these people are joining from all over the world.

PAUL SOLMAN:  And so here I have 200.

AKIHIRO NISHI:  Right.

PAUL SOLMAN:  In the game.

We’d each been assigned a certain amount of wealth.  The distribution mimicked the degree of inequality in the U.S.

And I have four other players with 200, and I have one player with 1,150.  Where did this guy come from, Silicon Valley?

MICROSOFT - Trying to Purchase Popular Gaming Company

"Microsoft considers buying gaming gold mine Minecraft" PBS NewsHour 9/10/2014

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GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  There are new reports out of yet another tech giant, in this case Microsoft, trying to purchase a popular gaming company.  It’s part of an industry and market that you may not know about unless you are wise in the ways of Xbox and PlayStation.

Game sales in the U.S. topped $21 billion last year.  The industry often boasts that it earns far more than what Hollywood makes at the U.S. box office.  And more than 70 million people worldwide watch games played as e-sports over the Web or on TV.

Hari Sreenivasan has more from our New York studios about this potential deal and the wider phenomenon.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  In the hit game “Minecraft,” players maneuver through a LEGO-like landscape to build whatever they can imagine or to battle monsters, as seen in this YouTube video by the game’s Swedish creator, Mojang.

WOMAN:  Yes, it’s very popular.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  With more than 50 million copies sold since 2011, “Minecraft” has even contributed to a trend of users simply watching others play online.

MAN: Why did I just do that?

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Now it’s being widely reported that Microsoft is in talks to buy Mojang for more than $2 billion.  The deal isn’t a certainty.

Markus Persson, who came up with “Minecraft,” has stressed the importance of smaller independent developers like Mojang.

MARKUS PERSSON, Game Developer, Mojang:  If you get a game from a big publisher, you kind of expect it to be something different, where, on the other hand, because the indy scene has grown so much and you kind of know where that is, you look at it with different eyes.  And you can actually explore new game ideas and concepts and even styles, which is really cool.