AI and Totalitarianism

The BBC reported Google’s DeepMind has been defeating world-champion human competitors in Go and Chess – all without knowing the rules of play prior to the engagement. In 2016, we introduced AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence (AI) program to defeat humans at the ancient game of Go. Two years later, its successor – AlphaZero – learned from scratchContinue reading “AI and Totalitarianism”

James Hornfischer

My [second] cousin Jim Hornfischer died this month. Far too early: he was just three years older than I am. We were not very close. His family shared the occasional Christmas at Windywalls and he was Dungeon Master in a few well-run campaigns I played in as a teenager. He had an accomplished career asContinue reading “James Hornfischer”