An AI has finally beaten human poker champions
An AI developed by Facebook and Carnegie Mellon researchers can reliably defeat a table of five professional poker champions (TechCrunch).
How an AI took down four world-class poker pros 20 days. One decisive victory. Chris Velazco, @chrisvelazco. February 10, 2017 Comments. Poker champs fought the AI system to a draw, then won in the first two of four rounds (each round had Polaris playing 500 hands against two humans, whose points were averaged.) But in the final two rounds of the match, Polaris beat both human teams, two wins out of four, with one loss and one draw. Jul 11, 2019 The AI, called Pluribus, defeated poker professional Darren Elias, who holds the record for most World Poker Tour titles, and Chris 'Jesus' Ferguson, winner of six World Series of Poker events. Carnegie Mellon creates a poker-playing AI that can beat the pros To be great at poker you gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to core dump.
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Multiplayer poker has long been a holy grail for AI research due to the complexity of reading human behavioural tells alongside raw probability calculations, but a key to the Pluribus AI's win was randomness, the team's paper says. By eliminating predictable patterns from its strategic choices, the AI won by simply not giving its opponents a handle on its playstyle, rather than by exploiting their weaknesses.
Some Google Assistant recordings are listened to – and leaked – by humans
Ai Poker Champion Gg
Human workers listen to and transcribe Google Assistant voice queries, but also some random conversations picked up when a Google Home, Android or ChromeOS device is inadvertently triggered, in some cases including intimate moments and detailed personal information (Ars Technica).
Like its voice assistant rivals, Google depends on humans to train its Assistant AI to understand human speech in a variety of languages – one of many concerns for the privacy-conscious. A recent leak of Flemish recordings has prompted Google to publish a blog post in which it clarifies its transcription process for AI training and promises to improve security to prevent leaks of any more customer recordings.
Hayabusa2 has collected a sample from Ryugu's interior
JAXA's Hayabusa2 spacecraft has successfully touched down on the asteroid Ryugu and appears to have collected the material that it shot out of the asteroid's interior with a 2 kilo copper bullet earlier this year (Science). These subsurface samples will form part of the sample collection that Hayabusa2 will bring back to Earth in December 2020.
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Peter Eastgate
There's no way that France's new eco-flight tax will work (yet)
France is the latest country to introduce an “eco-tax”, which the government estimates will raise €180 million (£161m) a year from flights taking off and landing at the country’s airports (WIRED). The tax, which peaks at just €18 (£16) for long business-class flights, will be used to generate revenue that will be spent on other forms of transport like trains, the transport ministry said. But experts say that, for now, it's primarily a symbolic first step to get travellers used to a carbon tax on flights, and that it'll have to be raised before it has any real impact on behaviour.
Protesters are defending one of Germany's most ancient forests against coal mining
Germany is one of Europe's biggest coal burners and it's in the process of tearing up the ancient Hambach Forest to get to the vast coalfield that lies beneath the trees (BBC News). The German state has been ripping up the forest for four decades, but environmentalists taking radical action to counter these deforestation efforts have drawn increasing attention to the fate of one of Europe's oldest woodlands.
The return of Netflix's Stranger Things
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