Cosmic Log
For the past week or so, a mystery player has been logging into online Go game servers and beating the world’s best. Today, the player’s identity was revealed at last.
It was none other than AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence program that triumphed over Go master Lee Sedol last March in a widely publicized $1 million showdown.
Google DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, let the world in on the secret today in a tweeted statement.
You don’t hear as much about Google’s (now Alphabet X’s) Project Wing as you do about Amazon’s Prime Air drones, but the flying-delivery project is still aiming to go commercial.
That’s the word from The Wall Street Journal, which delves into the trials and tribulations of Project Wing in a report published this week.
X is reportedly planning to create an online exchange called Wing Marketplace, which would let customers order food and other goods and have them delivered within minutes via drone for a $6 fee.
The inside look at Wing Marketplace is based on interviews with former X employees, and none of the companies involved was willing to comment.
Among the retailers who are said to have been contacted: Whole Foods Market, Domino’s Pizza and Starbucks. Starbucks declined to sign on, reportedly because of concerns over “X’s control of the user experience.”
Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries says it’s made a deal with Terra Bella to have the Google subsidiary’s Earth-observing satellites launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket next year.
The agreement makes Terra Bella, which was known as Skybox Imaging before Google bought it for $500 million in 2014, the lead payload provider on a dedicated-rideshare mission arranged through Spaceflight Industries’ launch services entity, known simply as Spaceflight.
“At this point, it looks like Terra Bella may be the only lead,” Spaceflight’s president, Curt Blake, told GeekWire in an email today. So far, seven of Terra Bella’s SkySat satellites have been put into orbit, and that number is expected to grow to 24. Blake declined to say how many of Terra Bella’s satellites would be launched on Spaceflight’s mission in late 2017.
How do you channel a flood of almost 5 million images into useful applications? Google Cloud is doing it with more than 30 years’ worth of satellite imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 missions, for free.
Satellite views have long been part of Google’s global mapping operation, of course. But putting them on the cloud is a different matter.
One of the newly added data sets draws upon the complete catalog of pictures from Landsat 4, 5, 7 and 8, amounting to 1.3 petabytes of data that go back to 1984. The other data set takes advantage of more than 430 terabytes’ worth of multispectral imaging from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite, which is part of the Copernicus program to monitor global environmental indicators.
The Landsat database keeps track of 4 million scenes, while the Sentinel-2 set offers 970,000 images. More pictures are being added daily.
The White House says it’s taking steps to speed up the development of civil and commercial applications for drones – including the experimental deployment of Google’s Project Wing, a delivery service that could rival what Amazon has in mind.
Today’s announcement comes a week after Amazon indicated that it would be shifting the focus of its own drone delivery tests from the United States to Britain. Amazon Prime Air may benefit indirectly from the Project Wing experiment as well – but if there is any benefit, Project Wing will get it first.
The Project Wing study is just one of more than a dozen public-private initiatives announced today to coincide with a workshop on drones and the future of aviation, organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Another initiative opens the way for Bloodworks Northwest to deliver blood medicine and medical products to remote communities in the San Juan Islands via drones.
The White House said the National Science Foundation would set aside $35 million in funding over the next five years for research into how drones, also known as unmanned aircraft systems, can be used to inspect infrastructure and farm fields, monitor the weather and respond to disasters.
Google co-founder Larry Page is reportedly funding not just one, but two competing teams to turn the decades-old vision of flying cars into reality … to the tune of $100 million.
That’s the top line from Bloomberg Businessweek’s lengthy report about the race to field flying-car concepts. The claim is based on interviews with people familiar with Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, the two Silicon Valley operations linked to Page. The bottom line is just as intriguing: The flying-car race pits those two ventures against slightly less stealthy companies such as Joby Aviation, Terrafugia, E-volo,AeroMobil and Airbus.
The ultimate Jetsons dream seems to be coming closer to reality. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlying technology,” NASA engineer Mark Moore is quoted as saying. “What appears in the next five to 10 years will be incredible.”
Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence program will take home the $1 million prize after winning the first three games in its Go showdown with South Korean champion Lee Sedol.
“Folks, you saw history made here today,” webcast host Chris Garlock said.
But today’s third win isn’t the end of the historic match in Seoul: The last two games will still be played, with Lee hoping to demonstrate that it’s possible for a human to beat the computer program.
“I think it’s going to be tough going,” match commentator Michael Redmond said during today’s webcast. Lee was never able to achieve an advantage in the third game, which lasted more than four hours. More than 65,000 viewers watched the YouTube webcast at its peak.
After today’s game, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis paid tribute to Lee, and particularly to the “really huge ko fight” that the champion executed during the endgame.
“To be honest, we are a bit stunned and speechless,” Hassabis told reporters. “Lee Sedol put up an incredible fight again.”
Lee apologized for his performance, and said he let the pressure get to him during the third game. “I should have shown a better outcome. … I kind of felt powerless,” he said.
The duel marks a milestone for AI, and for the millennia-old game of Go. Comparisons have been drawn to chess champion Garry Kasparov’s defeat in a 1997 match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer, and the triumph of IBM’s Watson computer over human champions in the “Jeopardy” TV quiz show.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence program won the first of five Go games in a milestone million-dollar match against South Korean champion Lee Sedol today – marking another milestone for machine learning.
“I am in shock. … But I am looking forward to tomorrow,” Sedol was quoted as saying afterward.
AlphaGo notched its first victories against a professional Go player in October when it beat European champion Fan Hui, five games out of five. But experts in the centuries-old game thought the AI program would have a harder time with Sedol, who is more highly ranked on the Go circuit.
Sedol ran out of options for the endgame and surrendered after about three and a half hours of play. “A big surprise, I think,” commentator Michael Redmond said during the webcast from Seoul.
This month’s human-vs.-machine Go match between South Korean legend Lee Sedol and Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI program is a teachable moment – not only for experts in the field of artificial intelligence, but for aficionados of the millennia-old game of Go as well.
The five games in the $1 million challenge will be streamed live online from Seoul, with the first game due to begin at 8 p.m. PT Tuesday.
There’ll be online commentary, but if you’re looking for more of the human touch, show up at the Seattle Go Center, at 700 NE 45th St. in the University District. The center will be streaming each match on a big screen, and if you’re a newbie, you can learn how to play the game while Sedol contemplates his moves.
“This is the ‘John Henry’ moment for the 21st century,” Brian Allen, manager of the Seattle Go Center, told GeekWire in an email. He’s referring to the 19th-century folk tale about a “steel-drivin’ man” who was pitted against a steam-powered hammer.
The latest twist in the race to provide high-speed Internet access from above comes in the form of a report in The Guardian, to the effect that a hush-hush Google project called SkyBender is testing drones in the skies above Spaceport America in New Mexico.
The Guardian says it’s obtained documents laying out how high-altitude drones could relay gigabits of data per second, using millimeter-wave, phased-array transmissions. Jacques Christophe Rudell, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Washington, is quoted as saying that “the huge advantage is access to new spectrum, because the existing cellphone spectrum is overcrowded.”
Millimeter-wave communications could open the way for 5G wireless service that’s 40 times faster than the current 4G LTE standard. But millimeter-wave signals have a relatively short range: According to The Guardian, Project SkyBender would have to use thousands of transceiver-equipped aerial vehicles to knit together the network.
The system is reportedly being tested using Aurora Flight Sciences’ Centaur optionally piloted aircraft as well as the solar-powered drones made by Titan Aerospace, which was acquired by Google in 2014 after a fling with Facebook.