Mainstream Go Sightings

[EdLee]

Thanks. So much work.
We're so lucky someone found out about Go and hand-crafted it into the movie.
The Go set in the documentary [ 04:44 - 04:47 ]

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goes into his village and passes two old men playing Go.

Memory is a fascinating thing.

[Inkwolf]

funny how they have bowl and lid on the board …

One has to assume that the other go bowl was broken, and they use the lid in place of the black bowl.

[Bonobo]

[..]

goes into his village and passes two old men playing Go.

Memory is a fascinating thing.

Well, in this case it could be not a question of memory but perhaps of perspective, mh?

[fireproof]

goes into his village and passes two old men playing Go.

Memory is a fascinating thing.

Yes, I may be projecting a bit there...

[DJLLAP]

Wikipedia says Kubo & the 2 Strings is 3D stop motion -- does that mean claymation ? No CG, all done by hand (literally) ?!

Not claymation, but little 3-d puppets -- there's an interesting video here:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/plXmbLAUTRg[/youtube]

They have a great demonstration of how the puppets are made, or how motion works, at the end of each of their films (I'm thinking of Paranorman and Boxtrolls, and Coraline in particular).

When I saw this in the theatre, I assumed it was computer animated because of the incredible job they did with the detail of the art. After a while I started to notice that the frame rate was slower than standard, making the individual frames visible when there was quick motion on screen. Then I spent the rest of the movie marveling that it was stop-motion!

[crecy]

Two characters are playing Go in the main avengers Marvel comic (All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol 1 #13).

[Bonobo]

Two screenshots of a scene in the French movie “The Hedgehog” (Le Hérisson), currently running on German TV.

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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_H%C3%A9risson_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Eleganz_der_Madame_Michel

[EdLee]

AlphaGo mentioned at 06:00 ~ 06:30:

Feb 28, 2017 ( not sure which thread to put this )

[Joaz Banbeck]

On 'Billions', a Showtime series, the Brian Connerty character has a meeting of the local go club in his office after hours. He explains to his boss, Chuck Rhoades ( a thoroughly twisted character brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti ) that it was his turn to host but his apartment is too small.
Rhoades then offers unsolicited advice for Connerty's next play. ( "...block that monkey jump..." ) The camera hangs on the game long enough that we can see that it is indeed a reasonable game - not just some random placement of stones - and Rhoades' advice is probably correct.
For the serious go player, a few second's inspection of the board reveals that it is the only move, and that Rhoades is telling Connerty something that he already knows.

Upon reflection, there are several things that lead me to think that the producers are tossing in a gratuitous go game just to advance public knowledge of go.
1) The games does nothing to advance the plot. It does do some very, very minor character development - but the viewer already knows that Rhoades is an arrogant dick. That fact has been shown repeatedly in previous scenes. For the viewer who does not play go, the scene is a meaningless distraction.
2) Connerty claims that he doesn't have room in his apartment. But his office is crowded also. He is the #2 attorney in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which suggests a low 6-figure salary. He can afford an apartment with some room - even at New York prices.

[BlindGroup]

Upon reflection, there are several things that lead me to think that the producers are tossing in a gratuitous go game just to advance public knowledge of go.

I think one of the writers must play. Last season, the US Attorney referred to one of his strategic moves in the case as a "kakari". That allusion worked more effectively because (a.) the metaphor plausibly fit the situation and (b.) it make the US Attorney seem smart when the person on the other end of the conversation acknowledged that he had used the "esoteric" term correctly.

I guess it is possible that a little go research might have allowed someone with no knowledge of the game to write this. But it seems like a lot of trouble for something that had such limited use -- presumably they could have found another way to make him seem smart by mining another esoteric hobby that one of the writers was actually into.

Connerty claims that he doesn't have room in his apartment. But his office is crowded also. He is the #2 attorney in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which suggests a low 6-figure salary. He can afford an apartment with some room - even at New York prices.

The depends on where he lives. Here is the pay scale for AUSA's: https://www.justice.gov/usao/career-cen ... lan-charts. Top salary if I've got the right chart is 160k plus 30% for locality adjustment. That won't go very far house-wise if you want to live below 125th street in Manhattan. Don't get me wrong -- you can do it. I know plenty of people who make and live in very cramped apartments in "hot" neighborhoods.

[fireproof]

( a thoroughly twisted character brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti )

According to the British Go Association https://www.britgo.org/general/celeb/ Paul Giamatti plays go. Perhaps he has some influence over the scripts?

[moyoaji]

The YouTube channel Second Thought released a video today about AI, mentioning AlphaGo at the beginning and then talking about it more in depth later on. They don't go into any real detail about how to play go, but AlphaGo and Deep Mind are featured in the video from 4:27 to 5:56. https://youtu.be/M_8nAmvqC4Q?t=4m27s

[Bonobo]

The YouTube channel Second Thought released a video today about AI [..]

<sigh> What happened to reading? I just wish people would also provide transcripts to such videos …

I am 1) hard of hearing, 2) can read much faster than people can talk, and 3) English is not my native language … this way I alway get the impression that for it is more important for some people to hear themselves blabbering than to convey their assumedly important message


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[Solomon]

I just wish people would also provide transcripts to such videos …

I am 1) hard of hearing, 2) can read much faster than people can talk, and 3) English is not my native language … this way I alway get the impression that for it is more important for some people to hear themselves blabbering than to convey their assumedly important message

Here is the relevant part transcribed from the video:

..Then there are groups like DeepMind, now owned by Google, who developed AlphaGo, the AI that defeated Lee Sedol, the best Go player in the world. The revolutionary thing about this particular AI is that the ancient Chinese game we call Go is much, much more complicated than something like chess. Deep Blue, the IBM computer that defeated chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997, was groundbreaking at the time because until that point, no computer had ever bested a human at chess.

However, Deep Blue isn't really all that impressive. Due to the limited number of possible moves in chess, it was able to brute force its way through the calculations to pick the best moves. Go, on the other hand, has a staggering number of possible moves, as many as there are atoms in the entire universe. Because of this huge number of possibilities, AlphaGo had to take a different approach. In contrast to Deep Blue or Watson, AlphaGo is classified as a general artificial intelligence, meaning it's not restricted to performing a specific set of tasks.

Simply put, if you provide a general purpose AI with a task its never encountered before and allow it to run overnight for example, when you check on it the next morning it will have mastered the task. Of course, the time requirement varies with the complexity of the task, but in the case of AlphaGo, DeepMind did exactly that with the game Space Invaders. No experience with the game, then the best in the world the following morning. These general purpose AI learn from their mistakes in successes and build new and improved versions of themselves.

Self-improving AI like AlphaGo are the harbingers of stronger AI to come. And with the rate at which they've improved even in the last few years, many industry leaders expect to see exponential growth within the next decade. The potential next step for AI is what many people are afraid of, including high-profile scientists and innovators like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. The looming possibility that holds such appeal in science fiction is the potential development of what's called Advanced General Intelligence, or AGI. The distinguishing factor with AGI is that it's not only able to perform routine calculations and learn by trial-and-error, but also exhibit the use of biological cognitive functions such as planning, using common sense, and making complicated decisions under uncertainty.

Like any other artificial intelligence, an AGI would begin as software on a computer. As robotic technology improved, we would begin to see tests like the ones in the 2014 film Ex-Machina. This is where the all-too-common fear of a robot uprising comes from. In fact, Elon Musk is an investor in Google DeepMind, just to keep an eye on things. While there are a few high-profile people advocating caution, others such as Kurzweil maintain that there's really nothing to fear. He predicts that while yes, we will reach a point at which machines will outpace humans in intelligence, what we should expect to see first is a sort of synthesis of man and machine.

He is not necessarily talking about cyborgs, but rather advancements in medicine and nanotechnology that will dramatically extend and improve human life. Kurzweil isn't alone in thinking this way. Elon Musk is currently working closely with a non-profit called OpenAI, which has the goal of merging humanity with machines. Musk suspects that such measures will protect humanity from becoming irrelevant in the face of super-intelligent computers. It sounds like science fiction, but we've already made great strides in using technology to augment people suffering from Parkinson's disease.

The next step according to Kurzweil is to connect the human brain directly to the cloud, removing the smart device as a middle man to the aggregate of human knowledge. Such a plan may seem far-fetched, but Kurzweil is quick to point out that predictions thirty years ago were thought to be ridiculous. But now that they've happened, it seems unthinkable that there was ever a time without cell phones, search engines, and the World Wide Web, all of which he predicted.

The current goal is to create AI-driven nano-bots that could be implanted in the human brain and would function just like a wireless car for your neocortex, the region of the brain associated with intelligence, the higher motions, and creativity. In Ray Kurzweil's words, "We are going to add additional layers of abstraction and create more profound means of expression, so we are going to be more musical, we are going to be funnier, we are going to be sexier, and be better at expressing more loving sentiments."

So, before we can expect a robot uprising, we can hopefully look forward to disease-fighting nano-bots and a direct link to all human knowledge right from our own brains. Not exactly cyborgs, more like Humanity 2.0. While there will no doubt be strong opposition to putting any kind of technology in our heads, many people eagerly await the day they can upgrade and be on the cutting edge of this unparalleled new era of technology. Once we've reached THAT point, then we can start worrying about the potential legal, ethical, and societal ramifications of humanoid robots.

But that's a topic for another video.

[Bonobo]

Thanks a lot, Solomon!