The robots are coming for your … chess game.
Google’s AI, AlphaZero, developed a “superhuman performance” in chess in just four hours.
Essentially, the AI absorbed humanity’s entire history of chess in one-sixth of a day — and then figured out how to beat anyone or anything.
Awesome!
A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind’s AlphaZero AI has trounced the world’s top-ranked chess engine—and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training.
AlphaZero is now the most dominant chess playing entity on the planet. In a one-on-one tournament against Stockfish 8, the reigning computer chess champion, the DeepMind-built system didn’t lose a single game, winning or drawing all of the 100 matches played.
At the end of October, I delivered a keynote speech at the Cryptocurrency Expo in Dubai. That was just 5 weeks ago. When I left for the conference, Bitcoin was trading at $6,300/BTC. But in the next few weeks, it reached $10,000. Last week, I liquidated part of my investment at just under $13,000/BTC. Now, Bitcoin is about to cross $16,000. (I began writing this 10 minutes ago…but it has risen another $1600.00. Now, it is $17,000).
Dear Reader: I believe in Bitcoin. Yet, there is a “But” in the last paragraph below…
I believe in Bitcoin. Its rise is not fueled solely by investor hysteria. Rather, it is a product of delayed appreciation for a radical, transformative network technology.
Mukherjee is now 47 and lives in New York; Marsh, 67, lives in Oxford. To different extents both of these doctors still practise in their respective fields – Mukherjee at Columbia University’s cancer centre, Marsh as a visiting doctor at various hospitals around the world, including in Kathmandu in Nepal. Both men have continued to write: Marsh a second volume of autobiography, called Admissions, published this year, and Mukherjee a study of genetics called The Gene: An Intimate History, published last year. When they sat down to talk to each other over Skype one Saturday afternoon in November, they began with a subject on which their two lifelong disciplines overlap: the treatment of brain cancer.
The cancer specialist and the neurosurgeon talk about treating cancer, writing and facing death in their own families by Tom Lamont.
There are a lot of people in the world that need glasses on a daily basis. Despite their often expensive price tag, they do little more than correct poor eyesight. Let Glass updates glasses for the 21st century by integrating them with smart home connectivity.
While maintaining a slim form factor, Let Glass features audio entertainment, telephone communication, and voice interaction. Using Alexa and a built-in microphone, these frames allow users to control their smartphones without fumbling through their pockets. Simply tapping the legs of the smart glasses activate remote control functions, while voice commands handle everything else. In addition to Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Now are also supported.
Continue reading “Look into the future using the first smart glasses with Alexa control” »
Yes.
Physicists in the QUTIS Quantum Biomimetics and Quantum Artificial Life research group at the Department of Physical Chemistry, University of the Basque Country in Spain have harnessed the unprecedented power of the IBM Q Cloud Quantum Computer —recently made available for public use ( IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service) —to reproduce the hallmark features of Darwinian life and evolution in microscopic quantum systems, proving they can efficiently encode quantum features and biological behaviors that are usually associated with living systems and natural selection.
A team at MIT has genetically modified bacteria cells and developed a new 3D printing technique to create a “living tattoo” that can respond to a variety of stimuli.
Electronic tattoos and smart ink technologies are showing exciting potential for reframing how we think of wearable sensor devices. While many engineers are experimenting with a variety of responsive materials the MIT team wondered if live cells could be co-opted into a functional use.
Continue reading “3D-printed live bacteria creates world’s first ‘living tattoo’” »
In the mid-1900s, art historian Maurits Michel van Dantzig developed a system to identify artists by their brush or pen strokes, which he called Pictology. Dantzig found shape, length, direction, and pressure all contributed to a kind of stroke signature, unique to each artist.
New research with contributions from The Hague suggests that Pictology might be the key to helping machines understand art, allowing systems to quickly verify whether brushstrokes were from an original painter or a forger.
After analyzing 80,000 brushstrokes from 297 digitized sketches and drawings, an AI system was able to spot forged drawings in the style of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Egon Schiele with 100% accuracy. The “fakes” were commissioned recreations of specific drawings, which the algorithms had not been shown previously.
Continue reading “This AI algorithm probably means the end of high-end art forgeries” »
