News

A Deep Dive into Monte Carlo Tree Search

The very first Go AIs used multiple modules to handle each aspect of playing Go – life and death, capturing races, opening theory, endgame theory, and so on. The idea was that by having experts program each module using heuristics, the AI would become an expert in all areas of the game. All that came to a grinding halt with the introduction of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) around 2008.

To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect

Estonia plans to become a free public transport nation

After a successful experiment with free public transport for all citizens in Tallinn, Estonia wants to become the world’s first free public transport nation. Allan Alaküla explains why this is a good idea. Tallinn, known for its digital government and successful tech startups, is often referred to as Europe’s innovation capital.

Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct

Making Radio Chips for Hell

Mixer IC works at 500 degrees Celsius, so it can take the heat on the surface of Venus, inside a natural gas turbine, or in the bowels of a 6-kilometer deep oil well. There are still some places the Internet of Things fears to tread. Researchers at the University of Arkansas and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden, are building a radio for those places.

An Interesting New Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression

Introducing Git protocol version 2

Today we announce Git protocol version 2, a major update of Git’s wire protocol (how clones, fetches and pushes are communicated between clients and servers). This update removes one of the most inefficient parts of the Git protocol and fixes an extensibility bottleneck, unblocking the path to more wire protocol improvements in the future. The main motivation for the new protocol was to enable server side filtering of references (branches and tags).

Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics

Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had damaging effects on the fertility of science. I also suggest that recent important empirical results, such as the detection of the Higgs particle and gravitational waves, and the failure to detect supersymmetry where many expected to find it, question the validity of certain philosophical assumptions common among theoretical physicists, inviting us to engage in a clearer philosophical reflection on scientific method.

NASA asks for Europa lander science experiments—and that’s a big deal

Introducing Thanos: Prometheus at Scale

Prometheus’s simple and reliable operational model is one of its major selling points. However, past a certain scale, we’ve identified a few shortcomings. To resolve those, we’re today officially announcing Thanos, an open source project by Improbable to seamlessly transform existing Prometheus deployments in clusters around the world into a unified monitoring system with unbounded historical data storage.