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Showing posts from January, 2019

Is AlphaStar what intuition without reason looks like?

Deepmind, a group owned by Google, has been making waves recently with their game playing AIs.  First there was the one that taught itself to play Atari games.  Then, most famously, they created AlphaGo which went on to beat the world champion at Go.  That really generated waves since nobody had been expecting a computer to crack Go any time soon.  They've also done a few other things such as figuring out what shapes proteins fold into just from their chemical composition. Last Thursday they revealed their newest creation, AlphaStar the Starcraft 2 playing bot.  Starcraft 2 is the sequel to a game I played way back in high school.  It's an example of what is called a realtime strategy game or RTS.  The way these work is that you have a bunch of soldiers or other forces which you use to fight your opponent.  But at the same time you have other units under your command that can gather resources which you can use to create more units.  So you ...

Drones still need license plates

I  wrote earlier  about how we need to figure out some way to give drones some equivalent of license plates to let their users be identified.  Anonymity is all fine and dandy online but far less so when someone is interacting with the real world. Well, recently a drone  shut down a major UK airport  for a day.  Police were entirely unable to find out who was responsible.   Hopefully the manhunt will scare people off trying similar things in the future but, well, the person responsible did  get away so maybe not.