There is some excitement in the Go world, now that a
new bot has surfaced on Tygem go
server in the past days with the name Master(P) or Magist(P),
which seems to win consistently from all top professional players in games
using 20 or 30 seconds thinking time per ply. It is being discussed on
Reddit and Life in 19x19. Ke Jie,
who at the moment is considered to be the strongest player, remarks that
Master(P) is much stronger than Chinese Xing Tian bot that he believes
is now on the same level as AlphaGo when playing against Lee Sedol last March. Ke Jie is very impressed by the progam and it makes him make
statements like (translated): "the computer tells us that all human beings are
wrong, I do not think even a person touches the edge of the truth of Go." It
has not been revealed who is behind this program, but people are suggesting
that it might be AlphaGo or another program by Google DeepMind, maybe the
program that was developed without using a database of human games like the
one that was used to kickstart AlphaGo, as was announced by
Demis Hassabis.
The Japanees program Zen is
also becoming a stronger. It seems that the coming years there will be a
fierce competition between a number of Go playing programs, leaving human
players behind. It should be mentioned that human professionals also have
become stronger. Notably, Lee Sedol, became a stronger player after playing
against AlphaGo, because AlphaGo has challenged his ideas about how to play
the game. Often you need a stronger player in some field of expertize to point
out your weaknesses, as you are blind to them. For this reason the development
of strong Go playing programs is going to change how we as humans think about
the game.
This morning, there was a thin, non covering layer of snow outside. This is the first snow of this winter. At some places it
stayed due to the low temperature. It only snowed around here in the East and
in the far South-East.
I showed my Fractal
Jigsaw at TkkrLab. The man who on
November 8 brought the disc for the old
music playing box, came to talk with me. The music playing box is called
Petit Ariston and was produced by Fabrik Leipziger Musikwerke
between 1880 and 1910 (according to information on
a German wikipedia page). I showed him my result and he showed the
(Dutch) website draaiorgelweb.nl where on
the forum page about mechanical instruments without pipes he has several
items about his attempts to reconstruct and/or rebuild the Petit Ariston
and the music discs. He also showed me the fifteen PDF files with images of
the discs. After he left, I installed
the Poppler package, which
included the pdfimages
command-line utility to extract images from a PDF file, and I tested
the script I developed earlier on the image
of the first PDF file and emailed him the resulting SVG file. I also
reinstalled (the same version) of texworks because it was broken due to a
missing shared library. That is some of the pain that you suffer when working
with a rolling
release distribution like Arch Linux.
This afternoon, Demis Hassabis confirmed in a tweet that Master(P) is indeed a newer version of
AlphaGo.
All the games that were played can be found on the German go website:
This morning, there was an inch of snow outside as was
forecast yesterday. The forecast also said there was a big chance of black
ice together with an orange weather alarm. It seems that many people did take
notice of this warning, because it was unusual quiet on the road and in the
supermarket. I did bike to visit Li-Xia and did not encounter any slippery
pavement. When I arrived home in the afternoon, I was greated by a small snow
iglo near the entrance to our alley.
Today, the winter sale started at bookshop
Broekhuis with books offered at a discount of 50%. I wanted to be there
at opening time, but I arrived on eleven minutes later. I spend some time
going through all tbe books. At 10:21:48, I bought the book S.M.A.K. TRACK:
a contemporary city conversation edited by Kathleen Cagney, Lieze Eneman,
and Ann Hoste, written in English and Dutch, published by Roma Publications in
August 2012, ISBN:9789077459836, for € 14.50.
In the morning, I measured 9.5 cm (almost four inches) of snow on the table outside in the garden. This gives a good measurement of
the amount of snow that fell during the night. I already heard the dropping
sound of water all around, meaning that the snow was melting. Not all of it
melted away by the end of the day. During the morning, there were a few short
periods of snow.
Last Tuesday, I created the FractalJigsawPuzzle repository on GitHub for the program. Today, I
commited a new version of the program, which
has options for also generating a bottom with the svg command. It
also allows you to specify a width, a height and a margin, and places both
the puzzle and the bottom at an optimal size to fit within the specified
dimensions (substracting the margin). I already wrote this some weeks ago,
but last Tuesday, I also created a project page on the TkkrLab wiki
with a detailed description about how to use the program.
I worked on my animation for an Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB)
event at Tetem on February 3. It is
based on the eight by eightStreet Tile Patterns. A preview can be found here. I also enlisted myself stating that I would like to display it on
a small monitor instead of a beamer, because I think it better brings out the
colours.
At 11:09, I bought the book Basic Teachings of the
Buddha: A New Translation and Compilation, with a Guide to Reading the
Texts written by Glenn Wallis, written in English, published by Modern
Library in 2007,
ISBN:9780812975239, from thrift store Het Goed
for € 2.50.
This evening, at TkkrLab, we spend some time
packing stuff for our expected move to a new space. I found a part of a beamer
and was allowed to keep it. The part only contains the optics. We also unpacked
the Christmas package we received from Frack.
Two people made a recording of the unpacking, so expect some YouTube video's
to appear. The box contained an interestingly crafted Christmas card with a
LED light and a wooden peace cut with a laser-cutter. It also contained some
bitlair stickers. I took one. I also took
some other electronic components:
a Rev. 2.1 PCB for the
WeatherDuino and
a TMP68HC000P-16 processor chip.
When I biked to my office, I was met with some very thin snow. At some places it did cover the ground. But what is more
remarkable is the fact that a lot of snow from January
13 is still present, especially on the fields. Some of the snow that has
been piled up on the side of the roads, is almost rock hard due to thawing a
little and freezing again.
Early this afternoon, Andy and I went to the
book fair Boekenbeurs Glanerbrug with secondhand books. Andy looked
a children comics, while I looked at the art section. I bought the followin
books (and donated the change for a ten Euro bill that I used to buy the
books):
AKI Enschede Studiegids | Studyguide 2004/2005 edited by Peter
Sonderen, Monique Bosman, and Wouter Hooijmans, written in Dutch and
English, published by AKI in September 2003 for € 1.00.
AKI Enschede Studiegids | Studyguide 2005/2006 edited by Monique
Bosman, Wouter Hooijmans, and Peter Sonderen, written in Dutch and English,
published by AKI in August 2004 for € 1.00.
Paris Photo - Catalogue 2008 : 20 written in English and French,
published by Paris Photo in 2008
for € 1.50.
Ornament, Symbool & Teken written by René Smeets in
Dutch, published by Uitgeverij Cantecleer bv, de Bilt in 1973,
ISBN:9789021307305, for € 2.00. I only bought this book because
it has some reproductions of Komputerstrukturen 3a by Peter
Struycken.
Ketters van Duin written by Frank Herbert, published by Meulenhoff
in 1984, a translation by M.K. Stuyer SJ from the English Heretics of
Dune into Dutch,
ISBN:9789029018579, for € 2,00.
Duin Kapittel written by Frank Herbert, published by Meulenhoff
in 1987, a translation by M.K. Stuyer SJ from the English Chapterhouse
Dune into Dutch,
ISBN:9789029018579, for € 2,00.
Saturday, January 7, 2017