gort

Link didn't work for me, but Google brings up this:

https://qz.com/897498/by-sparring-with-alphago-researchers-a...

There are a number of questions that are probably answered behind the paywalled article...

* In order to reproduce (and maintain the new bases in its DNA), does the organism need a source of these nucleotides in its growth medium? (i.e. in its food?) The alternative would be to produce them itself, but that would require scarily advanced genetic engineering, I think.

* If one of these bases is in a gene, what happens during mRNA transcription? Total failure?

Point 1 at least should more-or-less ensure this can't escape the lab.

It was given a "9d" ranking and a "(P)" mark (for "professional") by the Tygem server, who presumably knew its real identity. Also, I get the impression some of the pros did in fact know.

I believe its record is 60-0, against mostly or entirely high level pros. It's impressive.

Now confirmed to be AlphaGo.

https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/816660463282954240

I think the strongest commercial engines are Zen and CrazyStone. Zen has certainly become pro-strength on fairly modest hardware (it had an exciting BO3 against a Japanese 9-dan, which it lost 1-2), but the strong version isn't available to the public yet, I think.

Interestingly, for the past 3 or 4 days there's been a mystery Go Bot playing on 2 servers calling itself "Master" which is currently about 50-0 (!) against professional opponents, many at the very highest level. Nobody knows its identity yet. It's stronger than the commercial engines, and its presence must be some sort of stunt or test by someone.

http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=13913

He could, of course, say that nobody is forced to share their beliefs on Facebook. (My own "religion" is currently blank, for instance.)

Still I get the impression that Facebook does so much tracking of users via embedded wotsits that they know your religion / politics / sexuality et cetera...

Was this deleted (or heavily down-weighted) for disagreeing with some admin's politics?

I'm pretty sure when I saw this it was on the front page, now it's totally disappeared, except from the "New" tab.

[All these downvotes, but no reply. Am I wrong about this? If so, say so.]

Things are not this simple though, are they? It's certainly not the case that Jews or people of Jewish descent will reliably support Israel. (I was interested to learn today that Jill Stein is aligned with BDS, for example. And Greenwald, author of the piece, also has Jewish parents.) Even if they did, such support need not lend itself to unfair practices re: censorship.

(I will add: if you could plausibly argue that media owners tended to be Catholic, or vegetarian, or Scottish, or whatever, I think you should be able to express concerns about how that would affect discourse without being called a bigot; and likewise here. So I do not condemn your comment. But no group of people are a hivemind.)

Are you labouring under the impression that The Intercept is a British thing?

British media?

What fraction of people using the word intend it in that sense, and what fraction do not, and how are we ever to discover these numbers?

I saw this rhetorical move once before, where someone complained that the concept of "SJW" -- as in "Social Justice Warrior" -- was racist, as Nazi forums used it to mean "SJeW" (whatever an "SJeW" is). In that particular case it was obvious the obscure meaning was basically unknown. In this case it's slightly less clear, but I still suspect most people using the word "globalism" have something like its obvious meaning in mind: globalisation, open borders, etc.

The article mentions the problem of "local minimums". The author suggests occasionally accepting worse solutions, in order to escape from such. "The hope here is that by following this worse solution, we can eventually get to the global minimum." This is good but one may wish to take it further.

I once messed with something called "metropolis coupling", where you run multiple threads in parallel, with different thresholds for how often they accept worse solutions, i.e. one thread is "cold", one is slightly "hotter", and so on. If a hot thread's current solution is better than the solution of the neighbouring colder thread, the solutions are swapped. In this way the coldest thread (which is the one we're paying attention to) gets pulled out of the local minimum.

As I say, I messed with this once and it did seem to help. It seems to have been developed for inference in evolutionary phylogenetics, and is perhaps a bit obscure?

I'm not sure this is the name to use if you want people of only average political commitment to use your app. Although at least it's a striking name.

"Isn't the current theory that all life on Earth has a common ancestor? Wouldn't this point put that into question"

Not really. For one thing there's too much commonality across life in terms of things like the genetic code, i.e. what a sequence of genetic letters "means". The genetic code is arbitrary but essentially universal with minor variants.

For another thing, the organisms now present can be separated from each other by as much as 8 billion years of evolution (4 billion on each branch) meaning there's no particular reason to expect some shared gene to be present everywhere. New genes arise as mutations from old ones, old genes become obsolete and get removed, etc.

It's vaguely like how, if you fork a coding project, and the two projects are allowed to continue indefinitely, eventually there might be no code in common, even without a complete rewrite ever happening.

I'm no crypto guy, but what's all this about different versions of OpenSSL succeeding or failing to validate a signature? That sounds like it should be interesting in its own right...

Yes it's quite common, but probably requires reading about strategies. (I've never done it.)

Fan Hui played more than just the official 5 games against AlphaGo, and did win some of the others.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/fig_tab/natu...

Looks like it, see:

https://github.com/lukaszlew/EasyGoGui/blob/master/src/net/s...

And search for MSG_RESIGN_2

Likely they're using SGF format to store game records:

http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/properties.html#RE

I had a similar experience in the opposite direction. Two weeks ago I moved some code from a mutex-based design (including a map of string to mutex, which itself needed to be behind a mutex) to channels, and I love it, though the result seemed about 10% slower.

I guess the message is: everything has its place; don't make a straight-jacket for yourself.

Unable to validate my email. Earlier it wasn't working at all, now it tells me I need to be logged in (but I am, I think).

Edit: Fixed for me now.

They're different people. The Turkish air force shot down the plane, but it crashed in Syrian territory and the pilots were allegedly killed by ethnic Turkmen in Syria, who are not under the control of the Turkish government.

Also, these planes travel fast enough that it could be fired upon while in Turkish airspace, but hit while in Syrian airspace. Or it could be hit while in Turkish airspace, but crash in Syrian territory.

It supposedly came down 4 km inside Syrian territory, which is a tiny distance for a supersonic plane, which the Su-24 is.

I suppose going to war with Valve would have been pretty bad PR. Still, Valve was forced to change a bunch of Dota characters' names and visuals so as to not infringe on Blizzard's IP.

Examples: Windrunner changed to "Windranger"; Pudge made to look less like a Warcraft "abomination"-style creature; Skeleton King renamed and remodeled to "Wraith King".

"incessant attacks on Christianity ... sneers at Christianity ... slandering Christians ... vitriolic sneers at Christianity ... strong antireligious prejudices"

Sheesh. His main point is a reasonable one, but this sort of righteous fury against the infidels is off-putting.

Good rule of effective rhetoric: make it seem you're being totally fair to the other guy. Then the neutrals might listen to you, rather than instantly pattern-matching you as an obvious partisan.

Are the messages true?

Slightly better audio of the Heathrow incident at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcGA3vRwzuE

The number of chips. So if there are 3 defects in 7 chips...

  Some specific chip has the first defect.
  The odds that it has the 2nd defect are 1 in 7
  The odds that it also has the 3rd defect are 1 in 7 squared.

Which equals 0.020408....

> The only explanation that makes sense to me is that HIV has emerged previously, but only in dead-end strains that have very low infectivity, rather like the HIV-1 groups N and P mentioned in the article.

Or that modern innovations like transportation and so on made it possible for it to spread before it died out.