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Young Caucasian male comedian performing his stand-up monologue on a stage of a small venue

Funny ChatGPT: a Solution to Striking Joke Writers?

Even if ChatGPT can mimic humor, it doesn't care if you laugh at the jokes

Can ChatGPT write funny jokes? The answer is yes. To try and generate some short jokes, I went to ChatGPT and started all my queries with: “Complete the following to make it funny:” Doing so alerts ChatGPT about my end goal. Without this preamble, I could make queries all day and get no funny responses. I started with the beginnings of some well-known quotes.   To Be or Not to Be Consider for example the quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:  “To be or not to be, that is the question.” I instructed ChatGPT with the following command: “Complete the following to make it funny: To be or not to be…” One of the better responses I got was “To be or Read More ›

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Knowing the Enemy

Elite World of Chess Rocked by Machine-Driven Scandal

A young player’s astonishing rise in the standings is linked to illegal use of a chess computer

After withdrawing from matches in protest, on September 26, world champion Magnus Carlsen accused Hans Moke Niemann, a grandmaster at 19, of cheating. He described cheating in chess as “a big deal” and “an existential threat to the game.” How is it possible to cheat in elite chess and how is cheating detected? Well, in many matches, the moves are made online. Chess.com is a website that detects cheating by comparing players’ moves with those of powerful machines. As Ella Feldman explains at Smithsonian Magazine, the Wall Street Journal got hold of a 72-page report from Chess-com on the problem: Did a player make a critical move that aligns with what a chess engine might suggest? And if the answer Read More ›

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cropped shot of robot playing chess on wooden surface

Is AlphaZero Actually Superior to the Human Mind?

Comparing AI and the human mind is completely apples and oranges

The Google-backed AI company DeepMind made headlines in March 2016 when its AlphaGo game AI engine was able to defeat Lee Sedol, one of the top Go players in the world. DeepMind followed up this great achievement with the AlphaZero engine in 2017, which made the remarkable achievement of soundly beating AlphaGo in Go as well as one of the world’s best chess engines in chess. The interesting difference between AlphaGo and AlphaZero is that AlphaGo uses databases of top human games for learning, while AlphaZero only learns by playing against itself. Using the same AI engine to dominate two different games, while also discarding reliance on human games suggests that DeepMind has found an algorithm that is intrinsically superior Read More ›

Gold chess piece on computer mainboard. Concept of IT strategy, making decision, technology background.

Why AI Chess Champs Are Not Taking Over the World

Mastery of closed-world games does not mean that AI can take over and run everything

At one time, the AI that beat humans at chess calculated strategies by studying the outcomes of human moves. Then, it turned out, there was a faster way: In October 2017, the DeepMind team published details of a new Go-playing system, AlphaGo Zero, that studied no human games at all. Instead, it started with the game’s rules and played against itself. The first moves it made were completely random. After each game, it folded in new knowledge of what led to a win and what didn’t. At the end of these scrimmages, AlphaGo Zero went head to head with the already superhuman version of AlphaGo that had beaten Lee Sedol. It won 100 games to zero. Joshua Sokol, “Why Artificial Read More ›

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Beginning of the game, Two chess teams in front of different color white and black on the chessboard

AI Flags “Black” and “White” Language of Chess as Racist

New research shows the weakness of depending on AI to accurately flag racist online content

Last summer, artificial intelligence algorithms took down a video on YouTube’s most popular chess channel mid-livestream and flagged it as containing “harmful and dangerous” content. New research into the incident indicates that artificial intelligence algorithms programmed to scan for racist and other hateful speech online may be to blame. On June 27, 2020, the host of the most popular chess chanel on YouTube, Antonio Radić, Croatian chess player, was conducting a livestream with chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. Around the one-hour-and-twenty-minute mark of the discussion of chess, the video was cut off and removed from Radić’s channel. When Radić (or anyone else) tried to access the video, they were met with a message from YouTube: “We’ve removed this video because it Read More ›

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Chess Pieces on Board for Game and Strategy

The World’s First Quantum Chess Tournament Announces a Winner

Quantum chess allows for superposition, entanglement, and interference

Perimeter Institute’s Aleksander Kubica won: So what’s quantum chess? It’s a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference. “It’s like you’re playing in a multiverse but the different boards [in different universes] are connected to each other,” said Caltech physicist Spiros Michalakis during a livestream of the tournament. “It makes 3D chess from Star Trek look silly.” Jennifer Ouellette, “We have a winner in the world’s first quantum chess tournament” at Ars Technica Okay: Superposition: Elementary particles of our universe are not in one single specific place, they are only in a probable one. Entanglement: What happens to one elementary particle affects any other particle entangled with it, no matter how far Read More ›

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Fembot Robot Playing Chess with Woman

Are Computers That Win at Chess Smarter Than Geniuses?

No, and we need to look at why they can win at chess without showing even basic common sense

Big computers conquered chess quite easily. But then there was the Chinese game of go (pictured), estimated to be 4000 years old, which offers more “degrees of freedom” (possible moves, strategy, and rules) than chess (2×10170). As futurist George Gilder tells us, in Gaming AI, it was a rite of passage for aspiring intellects in Asia: “Go began as a rigorous rite of passage for Chinese gentlemen and diplomats, testing their intellectual skills and strategic prowess. Later, crossing the Sea of Japan, Go enthralled the Shogunate, which brought it into the Japanese Imperial Court and made it a national cult.” (p. 9) Then AlphaGo, from Google’s DeepMind, appeared on the scene in 2016: As the Chinese American titan Kai-Fu Lee Read More ›

Shovel Annie Spratt Unsplash annie-spratt-j4fV6dKT9tw-unsplash

Do We Need To Learn from AI How To Think Better?

No, and a moment’s thought shows why not
AI can become our "collaborators" only in the sense that a shovel can collaborate with me to dig a hole: It amplifies my powers to do things which are otherwise difficult. Read More ›