On August 18th, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 16 captured four different storms churning in the skies above North America.
The satellite captured aerial views of hurricanes Grace and Linda, along with tropical storms Fred and Henri. The satellite image also showed swirling billows of smoke streaming across the western U.S. from several major fires in California.
North America is surrounded by 4 storms and wildfire smoke in this satellite view
It was like a lyric from that Rolling Stones song Jumpin’ Jack Flash about being born in a “crossfire hurricane.”
However, I also was thinking of a biblical scripture in Revelation that says:
“And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.”
“You can’t take a picture of reality or freedom , you can’t hold it in your hands, you can’t smell it or taste it –it is something that you have to live through, and understand it psychologically.
It is like love — you know it when you feel it and sometimes it takes work to maintain it. Same goes for empathy –something that is in short supply today and something that we must nurture in order to survive into the future.
For most people, for most practical purposes freedom should be… well, our reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs and observations.
Freedom isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but it is something which we use, strategically, to contain tyranny.
Freedom does not determine reality — but our reality must include freedom.
Freedom has become nothing more than a magic word rather than something put into practice– because many countries in the world believe that they are free not just Americans.
Canadian citizens have been told they are free. The Japanese think they are too. The very country that we escaped from to get our freedom, the U.K. things that they have freedom. So does France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia.
They all celebrate their freedom –there sometime in history they all declared independence form someone or something.
There are 207 sovereign states in the world, 180 of them all claim to be free.”
Back when Ground Zero was in its infancy there was a man I knew named Richard Rounds. I first got to know him as a persistent caller and then after getting to know him, I realized that he had such a remarkable imagination. A lot of his madness was based on how well-read he was.
One night back in the 1990s, I was talking about how creepy I thought Cabbage Patch Dolls were and we got to talking about how these babies looked like mutants from a nuclear facility. We were talking about how they were still everywhere and wondering when the fad was going to wear off and we exchanged a theory that perhaps these dolls were being made by the government in order to prepare young girls for motherhood in the nuclear age.
We were frightened at the idea that these dolls were being made to desensitize us into accepting mutant children as the norm because some 20 or 30 years into the future babies will be born and they would look like cabbage patch kids and they would be exceptionally intelligent.
Well 25 years later there are no mothers forced to raise mutant babies but there was another theory that Richard floated on my show that gave me the creeps.
He once called in and said that he knew fits hand about an underground facility that was hidden in the Rocky Mountains. He said that the whole area is heavily secured in order to protect what was inside.
He said that the facility would be able to withstand any nuclear attack and that in it were important artifacts that were kept hidden away lie what was seen in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There was also a library of microfiche and history records that were kept in rooms that were temperature-controlled and that the personnel there were forbidden to touch them with human hands.
But he added that not only were artifacts stored there but that were also various rooms that he said were like jail cells. They were well furnished but small.
His story then got even weirder when he said that the rooms were set aside for what he called chrononauts – people who would travel between dimensions, many of them were well-known figures of history.
Not just of the past but of the future as well.
He then spoke in the speculative by saying – what if I told you that a future president, Pope, Messiah, and antichrist were held there and that the antichrist and the messiah were playing a strange game of chess by knocking on the walls in code to each other.
He added – what if I told you that both were being held there and that in 25 to 30 years they would be released from the underground facility which would throw the entire world into a kind of paradox?
The thing about writing a blog is that one never knows what an email will bring. After spending an inordinate amount of time in front of Toby, the ‘puter, yesterday learning how to insert diagrams, and then putting together the post in order to have something in which to insert them, I determined that today I would spend time with the Daniel Gormally book, Insanity, passion and addiction: a year inside the chess world, while playing over Chess games on an actual board with pieces one can feel, and possibly “working” on the openings intended for the Senior Championship of the Great State of South Carolina, which is only ten days away, by going to the CBDB and 365Chess. Wrong, Ke-mo sah-bee! An email from my friend Mulfish arrived at 11:42 am, upsetting the Bacon cart…
“Looking forward to the AWs take on AlphaZeros stunning win over Stockfish,” was the message. “What’s this?” I thought, wondering if Mike was referring to the TCEC Computer Chess Championship that is in the final stretch. “But Stockfish is not participating in the Super Final,” I thought. I therefore fired off an immediate response: “To what, exactly, are you referring?” His reply was, “Look in the all things Chess forum.”
Although there are not as many incoming as there were before taking a long break from blogging, I have received several emails directing my attention here and there, and they are greatly appreciated. Checking the AW stats today showed many people in countries other than the USA reading the AW. In particular I noticed that today, as every day, there is one, and only one, reader in the Maldives. Thank you, whoever you are, and feel free to send an email, as I am curious by nature.
Keep ’em coming: xpertchesslessons@yahoo.com
This is the post found on the USCF forum that prompted Mulfish to fire a salvo at the AW:
Postby billbrock on Wed Dec 06, 2017 9:16 am #321974
“AlphaZero learned to play chess by playing against itself. After just FOUR HOURS of self-learning, it was able to decisely (sic) defeat Stockfish 8.0! (EDIT: this statement is slightly misleading. See downthread.) (100 games match: +28 =72 -0)
What’s really impressive: Stockfish was calculating far more deeply than AlphaZero (at least in terms of nodes per second). AlphaZero is just “smarter.”
After reading only this I thought, “Whoa! This will change not only my day, but possibly the future course of history!” The more I read the more convinced was I of the latter.
Bill Brock provided a link to a PDF paper, Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf) which I read immediately, blowing my mind…
Every morning I read while drinking my first cuppa coffee, and today was no exception. Toby is not fired-up until time to sit down and eat breakfast. I check my email, then the quotes of the day, followed by the poem of the day, which was The Writer’s Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, but it has been discontinued, so I’ve moved on to Poem-a-Day (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem-day) & The Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/). Next I click on the Drudge Report in order to understand what the enemy is thinking, and doing. Then it is the newspapers in digital form, the NYT, WaPo, and AJC. For you readers outside the USA, that would be the New York Times, the Washinton Post, and the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. Then I check out the word of the day (https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day), before heading to check what was on the nightly radio programs broadcast while I am sleeping, Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis (http://www.groundzeromedia.org/), and the Granddaddy of them all, Coast to Coast AM (https://www.coasttocoastam.com/). You may think that Chess comes next, but you would be mistaken. I check out The Hardball Times at Fangraphs (https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/). Then I check out what’s happening in the world of Go (http://www.usgo.org/).
Then it is time for Chess! My routine is to check in at Chess24 (https://chess24.com/en) first in order to learn if there is a new article I will want to return to after checking out Chessbase (https://en.chessbase.com/), where there is usually something interesting to peruse. (Today is no exception because the lead article is, How XiangQi can improve your chess, which will be read. https://en.chessbase.com/). During the TCEC Championships it is then on to Chessdom (http://www.chessdom.com/), where I click onto TCEC (http://tcec.chessdom.com/). And then it is on to the Chess Granddaddy of them all website, TWIC, aka The Week In Chess (http://theweekinchess.com/), which is Mark Crowther’s wonderful website which contains a Daily Chess Puzzle, which I attempt to solve, in hopes it will keep my mind sharp. Why was I writing all this?…Just kidding!
The point is that I read so long this morning (Why Bob Dylan Matters, by Richard F. Thomas; Cover Me: The stories behind the GREATEST COVER SONGS of all time, by Ray Padgett, who has a wonderful website (http://www.covermesongs.com/); and Murder on the Death Star: The assassination of Kennedy and its relevance to the Trump era, by Pelle Neroth) in order to finish the latter. The point being that by the time I got to the email by Mulfish I would ordinarily have already seen the momentous news.
The excellent article by Colin McGourty begins: “20 years after DeepBlue defeated Garry Kasparov in a match, chess players have awoken to a new revolution. The AlphaZero algorithm developed by Google and DeepMind took just four hours of playing against itself to synthesise the chess knowledge of one and a half millennium and reach a level where it not only surpassed humans but crushed the reigning World Computer Champion Stockfish 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. All the brilliant stratagems and refinements that human programmers used to build chess engines have been outdone, and like Go players we can only marvel at a wholly new approach to the game.”
Colin ends with: “And where do traditional chess programmers go from here? Will they have to give up the refinements of human-tuned evaluation functions and all the existing techniques, or will the neural networks still require processing power and equipment not easily available? Will they be able to follow in DeepMind’s footsteps, or are there proprietary techniques involved that can’t easily be mastered?
There’s a lot to ponder, but for now the chess world has been shaken!”
“Shaken?” More like ROCKED TO ITS FOUNDATION!
If games people play are to survive they will be something like that described in the novel I consider the best I have read, Das Glasperlenspiel, or Magister Ludi, aka, The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse. (http://www.glassbeadgame.com/)
Or maybe a book, The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks, which is not only one of my favorite Sci-Fi books, but also one of my favorite book about games.
The stunning news also caused me to reflect on a Canadian Sci-Fi television program I watched, Continuum, in which mega-corporations dominate the world in the future as time-travelers fight one of the largest corporatocratic entities, SadTech, which sounds an awful lot like Google. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954347/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_6)
The Brave New World is here. The Science Fiction books I read as a youngster are no longer fiction.
Armchair Warrior 