Awash with Ideas

"I am not aware of any occasion in the four decades since OGE was established when the Senate held a confirmation hearing before the nominee had completed the ethics review process."

Mon Jan 09 2017 13:58:07 GMT-0600 (CST)

DeepStack becomes the first computer program to beat professional poker players in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em

"Artificial intelligence has seen a number of breakthroughs in recent years, with games often serving as significant milestones. A common feature of games with these successes is that they involve information symmetry among the players, where all players have identical information. This property of perfect information, though, is far more common in games than in real-world problems. Poker is the quintessential game of imperfect information, and it has been a longstanding challenge problem in artificial intelligence. In this paper we introduce DeepStack, a new algorithm for imperfect information settings such as poker. It combines recursive reasoning to handle information asymmetry, decomposition to focus computation on the relevant decision, and a form of intuition about arbitrary poker situations that is automatically learned from self-play games using deep learning. In a study involving dozens of participants and 44,000 hands of poker, DeepStack becomes the first computer program to beat professional poker players in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em. Furthermore, we show this approach dramatically reduces worst-case exploitability compared to the abstraction paradigm that has been favored for over a decade."

Mon Jan 09 2017 13:33:02 GMT-0600 (CST)

President-Elect Donald Trump Will Hold First Press Conference Since Before Election : NPR

"You know, each time that he promises to come forward with something, when you actually get to the point of disclosure it seems as though there's a lot less that was promised"

Mon Jan 09 2017 11:43:55 GMT-0600 (CST)

Good news: A potentially fatal blow against patent trolls | Computerworld

"art of the patent-troll economic model is based on lawyers taking a contingency fee, meaning that they take a percentage of whatever money is extracted from victims rather than being paid an hourly fee. This makes the lawyers more of a partner than a traditional contractor, which factored into the judge’s decision. "

Mon Jan 09 2017 09:13:42 GMT-0600 (CST)

These are the same people who were screaming during the election: ‘What’s the Big Deal?’ Ask Trump Voters on Russia Hacking Report

But, obviously, Trump supporters are completely morally bankrupt, hypocritical and dishonest.

"David Gubert, on possible Russian interference: “If that’s what it took, I’m glad they did it.”"

Sun Jan 08 2017 10:22:38 GMT-0600 (CST)