Group items tagged

"This wasn't the first time a person of authority told the video game creator to quit doing what he cared about. Luckily, "I had grit and I didn't let them discourage me," said Hawkins."

""No-limit Texas Hold'em is a game of incomplete information where the AI must infer a human player's intentions and then act in ways that incorporate both the direct odds of winning and bluffing behaviour to try to fool the other player." The designers said their computer didn't "bluff" the human players. But by learning from its mistakes and practising its moves at night between games, the AI was working out how to defeat its human opponents."

"Google stunned the world by defeating Go legend Lee Se-dol yesterday, and it wasn't a fluke - AlphaGo, the AI program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has just won the second game of a five-game Go match being held in Seoul, South Korea. AlphaGo prevailed in a gripping battle that saw Lee resign after hanging on in the final period of byo-yomi ("second-reading" in Japanese) overtime, which gave him fewer than 60 seconds to carry out each move."

"Scientists from University of Washington have been struggling for the past decade to decipher the complex structure of an enzyme that exhibits behavior similar to that of an enzyme key in the development of AIDS from an HIV infection, and which might hold a critical role in building a cure for the disease. Gamers playing spatial game Foldit have managed to collectively determine the enzyme's structure in ten days."

Oooh this looks like fun...I might come stalking with this... :)

"For now, however, Hammond tries to reassure journalists that he's not trying to kick them when they're down. He tells a story about a party he attended with his wife, who's the marketing director at Chicago's fabled Second City improv club. He found himself in conversation with a well-known local theater critic, who asked about Hammond's business. As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you're going to replace writers with robots? "I just looked at him," Hammond recalls, "and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That's the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.""

""Kids forget passwords all the time," says Alexander Cole, the chief executive of Edinburgh-based Peekabu. "They're often unfamiliar with the concept of logging in, there is often no username or social media account to remind them of their password when they forget it. And it's a real problem because the BBC's really keen to have children creating accounts, making friends with one another, and playing multiplayer games with their friends from the real world."

The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at this year's BETT conference.They must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking, according to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell.Schools should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, he argued.The gap between those schools embracing technology and those not is getting bigger, he said.Prof Heppell was speaking to delegates at BETT, the world's biggest educational technology show.

"An Israeli company is trying to prove that augmented reality is not only the premise of video games, it can also save lives. iOnRoad is a new mobile application, developed by Picitup, that is "helping smartphone users make smarter driving decisions" by using a phone's camera and GPS."

"The really significant thing about AlphaGo is that it (and its creators) cannot explain its moves. And yet it plays a very difficult game expertly. So it's displaying a capability eerily similar to what we call intuition - "knowledge obtained without conscious reasoning". Up to now, we have regarded that as an exclusively human prerogative. It's what Newton was on about when he wrote "Hypotheses non fingo" in the second edition of his Principia: "I don't make hypotheses," he's saying, "I just know.""

"Google's AlphaGo AI Go player has defeated Ke Jie, Go world champion, in the opening match of a three game series that will include matches with Jie on Thursday and Saturday. The win was by a narrow margin, but AlphaGo has been programmed to ensure victory, not to run up the score or devastate its opponent, so the margin by which it wins isn't necessarily a good indicator of how easy or hard it was for the computer player to win"

Sounds a bit extreme just to make sure no one can log on to your laptop or smartphone, but a team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities as well as SRI International is nonetheless experimenting at the computer-, cognitive- and neuroscience intersection to combat identity theft and shore up cyber security-by taking advantage of the human brain's innate abilities to learn and recognize patterns.

"Criminals often hide illicit data on the XBox in the hope that a gaming console will not be seen as a likely evidence target especially when conventional personal computers are present in the same premises, for instance"

"According to tweets from DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, however, this time AlphaGo really did make mistakes. The AI "thought it was doing well, but got confused on move 87," Hassabis said, later clarifying that it made a mistake on move 79 but only realized its error by 87. AlphaGo adjusts its playing style based on its evaluation of how the game is progressing."

This did not bode well for PS3 when it did happen :P