Go champion Lee Sedol meets the press after winning Game 4 in a five-game showdown against the AlphaGo AI program. (Credit: Google DeepMind via @thegoblognet)
Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI program may have won the $1 million five-game Go match with three straight wins, but Go champion Lee Sedol struck back with a consolation win today.
“Because I lost three matches, and I was able to get one single win, I think this one win is so valuable I would not trade it for anything in the world,” Lee said during a post-game news conference that was webcast from Seoul, South Korea.
Lee said he was driven on by the “cheers and encouragement” of his fans.
South Korean champion Lee Sedol (upper right) contemplates a move during his game against Google DeepMind’st AlphaGo artificial intelligence program. (Credit: Google DeepMind via YouTube)
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 clock at Seattle’s Pike Place Market will have to be set manually after Sunday’s switch to daylight saving time. (Credit: Erik Stuhaug / Seattle.gov Imagebank)
Spring = forward. It’s a simple algorithm, but this weekend’s switch to daylight saving time can get complicated. The bottom line is that timepieces have to be pushed forward an hour in most (but not all) of North America.
Traditionally, clocks skip ahead an hour, from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. local time Sunday. Smartphones, computers and other connected devices should pick up the beat automatically. Old-school analog devices as well as standalone electronics such as microwave ovens will have to be set by hand, typically at bedtime on Saturday night.
But maybe there should be another way to think about all this, particularly because of 21st-century social trends.
Scientists say spring’s switch to daylight saving time is more of a strain today than it was a century ago, when it was instituted as a wartime energy-saving measure. Today, many of us lean toward going to bed later, and getting up later, too.
That’s because we receive more exposure to artificial light during the evening from technologies that include television and smartphones, according to Daniel McNally, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at UConn Health.
This image shows a network of neurons reconstructed with large-scale electron microscopy. (Credit: Clay Reid, Allen Institute / Wei-Chung Lee, Harvard Medical School / Sam Ingersoll)
Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science is in on a multimillion-dollar campaign to trace the connections between the neurons in a mouse’s brain and figure out what they do, well enough to create a 3-D wiring diagram.
The five-year project – backed by the federal government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA – is aimed at reverse-engineering the way the brain processes information. The project is called Machine Intelligence From Cortical Networks, or MICRONS.
“The reason IARPA is funding this is not merely to get a better understanding of the brain, but to get inspiration from biology to do the next iteration of machine learning,” R. Clay Reid, the Allen Institute’s principal investigator for the project, told GeekWire.
IARPA is the U.S. intelligence community’s equivalent of the Pentagon’s DARPA think tank, and you can assume that the new types of artificial intelligence programs inspired by MICrONS could help give the United States an edge when it comes to analyzing data for national security purposes.
At the same time, neuroscientists will benefit from seeing how neurons work together in unprecedented detail. “It’s absolutely a win-win situation,” Reid said.
Go champion Lee Sedol, at right, studies the game board during a match against the AlphaGo AI program. Google DeepMind researcher Aja Huang, at left, made AlphaGo’s moves on the board. (Credit: Google DeepMind)
The second game of a million-dollar, man-vs.-machine Go showdown was a real nail-biter, but the outcome was a repeat of the first game: Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence program vanquished Go champion Lee Sedol.
Today’s game in Seoul, South Korea, lasted almost four and a half hours. The battle went on so long that Sedol ran out of regulation time and eventually was forced to make each of his moves in a minute or less. AlphaGo racked up an unassailable lead in points, and Sedol resigned.
“Yesterday, I was surprised, but today, it’s more than that,” Sedol said afterward at a news conference. “I’m quite speechless.”
Sedol said that during the first game, AlphaGo may have made some questionable moves. In contrast, the program played a “near-perfect game” the second time around, he said.
DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said AlphaGo’s playing style was more confident than it was the day before. “AlphaGo seemed to know what was happening,” he said.
Tim Blais, the singing scientist behind “Bohemian Gravity,”“Rolling in the Higgs” and “The Surface of Light,” is back with another pop parody that’s packed with physics. And this time it’s as big as a black hole – or at least the gravitational waves generated by black holes crashing together.
Last month’s announcement about the detection set off a wave of wonderment, in part because it affirmed one of the predictions made a century earlier by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Gravitational-wave observations are also expected to provide a new way to study the universe’s most dramatic phenomena, such as supernovae, black hole mergers and neutron star collisions.
Go champion Lee Sedol (seated at right) reviews the final moves after surrendering his first game to Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence program. (Credit: Google DeepMind via YouTube)
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.
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.
Scientists and technicians insert one of the optical components into the iTOP particle identification detector at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan. The “Imaging Time of Propagation” apparatus, or iTOP, is part of SuperKEKB’s Belle II detector. (Credit: PNNL)
What happened to all the antimatter? A particle-smasher in Japan is well on its way to addressing that question and others on the frontier of physics.
The SuperKEKB accelerator is designed to smash together tightly focused beams of electrons and anti-electrons (better known as positrons) and track the subatomic particles that wink in and out of existence as a result.
The collider will follow up on an earlier round of experiments at the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba. Over the past five years, KEK’s 1.9-mile-round (3-kilometer-round) underground ring has been upgraded to produce collisions at a rate 40 times higher than the earlier KEKB experiments did. Europe’s Large Hadron Collider may smash protons together at higher energies, but SuperKEKB will trump the LHC when it comes to the “Intensity Frontier.”
On Feb. 10, scientists circulated a beam of positrons around the SuperKEKB ring at nearly the speed of light. Then, on Feb. 26, they sent a separate beam of electrons at similar velocities, but going in the opposite direction. These “first turns” serve as major milestones on the way to next year’s first physics run, when both beams will circulate simultaneously and smash into each other in SuperKEKB’s upgraded Belle II detector.
Spoiler Alert! This post doesn’t reveal any major plot twists, but it does explore significant elements of the “X-Files” season finale. Stop reading now if you want it to remain a surprise.
This week’s season finale of “The X-Files” is one of the first prime-time TV shows to reference the revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9, but it won’t be the last.
We won’t delve into the details of how CRISPR figures in the alien conspiracy. Let’s just say that the ability to snip out and insert genetic coding with molecular-scale precision is as good a match for the “X-Files” mythology as Scully is for Mulder.
Sea star wasting disease can cause starfish to turn white, lose their limbs and disintegrate in a matter of days. (Credit: Kevin Lafferty / USGS)
The mass die-off of starfish off the West Coast is becoming a little less mysterious: Scientists say the starfish, also known as sea stars, fell prey to a one-two punch of virus infection plus unusually warm sea water.
The die-off started in 2013, reached a peak in 2014 and continued last year. Infected sea stars developed lesions that gradually dissolved the creatures from the outside, causing the arms to break away and leaving only whitened piles of starfish goop.
The outbreak has virtually wiped out ochre stars in the coastal waters of Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the Olympic Peninsula. More than 20 other species have suffered from Mexico all the way north to Alaska.
