For the first time, an AI has won six-player, no-limit Texas Hold ’Em, beating professional poker players who each have more than $1 million in winnings Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2209631-ai-beats-professionals-at-six-player-texas-hold-em-poker/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Tag: Texas
Artificial intelligence has now pretty much conquered poker
A new artificial intelligence called Pluribus is a real card shark at six-player no-limit Texas Hold’em. Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/artificial-intelligence-has-now-pretty-much-conquered-poker4…
Is the Random Transiter weirder than Tabby’s Star?
Move over, Tabby’s Star. The Random Transiter may now be the weirdest star in the galaxy. Kepler data revealed 28 transits in front of this star in 87 days. What caused them? Multiple planets? A disintegrating planet? Alien megastructures? Source: https://earthsky.org/space/random-transiter-hd-139139-kepler-tabbys-star…
How AI Helped Improve Crowd Counting in Hong Kong Protests
K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jin Wu and Lingdong Huang, writing for the Times: Crowd estimates for Hong Kong’s large pro-democracy protests have been a point of contention for years. The organizers and the police often release vastly divergent estimates. This year’s annual pro-democracy protest on Monday, July 1, was no different. Organizers announced 550,000 people attended; the police said 190,000 people were…
We love sunflowers! Your best photos
You can’t look at a sunflower and feel sad. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/sunflowers-photos-gallery…
Frontier Refuses To Waive Router Rental Fee For Customer Who Brought His Own
Ever since Frontier bought Verizon’s Texas network in 2016, the company has been charging some customers a $10-per-month router rental fee even if they’re using their own router. Rich Son of Texas purchased Verizon’s FiOS Quantum Gateway router for $200 in order to avoid monthly rental fees. He said: “[the router] worked well for me until the takeover happened with Frontier…
Senate Passes Cybersecurity Bill To Decrease Grid Digitization, Move Toward Manual Control
On June 27, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan cybersecurity bill that will study ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies to protect the country’s electric grid from hackers. Called The Securing Energy Infrastructure Act (SEIA), the bill establishes a two-year pilot program identifying new security vulnerabilities and researching and testing solutions, including “analog and nondigital control systems.” The U.S…
How To Evaluate Computers That Don’t Quite Exist
sciencehabit writes: To gauge the performance of a supercomputer, computer scientists turn to a standard tool: a set of algorithms called LINPACK that tests how fast the machine solves problems with huge numbers of variables. For quantum computers, which might one day solve certain problems that overwhelm conventional computers, no such benchmarking standard exists. One reason is that the computers, which…
US Government Announces Nationwide Crackdown on Robocallers
The US government announced a nationwide crackdown on illegal robocalls on Tuesday, targeting companies and individuals who have collectively placed over 1 billion unwanted calls for financial schemes and other services, according to the Federal Trade Commission. From a report: The crackdown involves nearly 100 cases, five of which are criminal enforcement actions. They were brought by the FTC, Justice Department,…
Texas Appeals Court Says Government Can’t Be Sued For Copyright Piracy
sandbagger writes: Photographer Jim Olive’s helicopter shot of Houston was used by the University of Houston on their website after they removed his watermark, a definite no-no particularly since the image was used for their school of business. The photographer then sent the university a bill for $41,000 — $16,000 for the usage and $25,000 for removing his copyright credit. After…