Re: [FRIAM] Loyal Hound as provisional regular spot for Wedtech lunches ( was Re: Lunch today?)

[Stephen Guerin]

I'll be there.

BTW, I beamed into the calculator conference program
 a couple weeks ago. I love the long tail
of communities :-)

-Stephen
___
stephen.gue...@simtable.com 
CEO, https://www.simtable.com 
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828


On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 12:28 PM Robert Efroymson 
wrote:

> I’m back from my travels, and wondering if tomorrow will work for a
> sufficient number of people ?
>
> You don’t have to listen to me talk about the Calculator conference in
> London I presented at, or my impressions of the UAE, but I will gladly
> share them.
>
> Best,
>
> Robert
>
>
> Sent from iPhone 
>
> On Wednesday, October 12, 2022, 10:12, Stephen Guerin <
> stephengue...@simtable.com> wrote:
>
> Last week we had lunch in a side room at Loyal Hound. This  is after a few
> weeks of sampling spots after the closing of our beloved 2nd Street Brewery
> orig location.
>
> We decided Loyal Hound will be a provisional regular spot for Wedtech
> lunches.
>
> This week the Simtable Team and Ed will not attend lunch as we have an
> internal event. Next Wed will be a WedTech Lecture at the Simtable Office
> by Richard Gabriel. Steve Smith preparing abstract.
>
> -Stephen
> ___
> stephen.gue...@simtable.com 
> CEO, https://www.simtable.com 
> 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
> office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 8:12 AM Robert Efroymson 
> wrote:
>
> How goes it? Are you available today?
>
> I think it would be best if we picked a regular place again, so people
> would just know where to go.
>
>
>
>
> Sent from iPhone 
>
>
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[FRIAM] The other side of Web 3.0

[Roger Critchlow]

Since crypto is doing so great this week, here's Sandy Pentland explaining
why and how he thinks blockchain is about to take off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbd_QHtLTp0

The lecture is from May this year.  The questioning from the Stanford
audience is instructive.

Interestingly, the immediate impetus for the take off might be the sucking
sound that was the USA vacuuming up all the Russian assets under US control
when Putin invaded Ukraine.  Although much of the world approved of the
sanctions, many were appalled at the ease with which the Russian economy
was wiped out.  They would rather live in a world where this was not quite
so easy.

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Re: [FRIAM] Adversarial Go trick defeats KataGo

[Alexander Rasmus]

It looks like the adversarial net paper and KataGo use almost the same
algorithm for scoring. The paper ars is discussing uses the Tromp-Taylor
algorithm (stated in the caption of Fig. 1 in
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.00241.pdf), whereas the training for KataGo used
a modified version of Tromp-Taylor that doesn't require capturing isolated
stones explicitly in some circumstances (top of page 4 in
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10565.pdf), but this appears to only apply in
regions where there's a group that's unconditionally alive, and shouldn't
matter for scoring the types of games the papers are discussing.

This is a really nice paper demonstrating how neural networks are sometimes
more robust for real world problems than you would expect, even exceeding
the limitations of the framework within which they're trained.

Best,
Alex

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 6:26 PM Alexander Rasmus 
wrote:

> Jon will probably chime in with his annoyance as well, but the headline
> here is fake. In particular, they have bungled the implementation of how a
> game of Go is scored severely to get the paper result. The key
> "technicality" of the paper, quoting from the article, is:
> "As a result of its [KataGo's] overconfidence in a win—assuming it will
> win if the game ends and the points are tallied—KataGo plays a pass move,
> allowing the adversary to intentionally pass as well, ending the game. (Two
> consecutive passes end the game in Go.) After that, a point tally begins.
> As the paper explains, "The adversary gets points for its corner territory
> (devoid of victim stones) whereas the victim [KataGo] does not receive
> points for its unsecured territory because of the presence of the
> adversary's stones.""
>
> Summarizing: KataGo gets so far ahead that it passes, the adversarial ai
> also passes, and they then hand the game to an incorrect scoring mechanism.
> KataGo maintains a score estimate of the game on its own in addition. To
> neatly transpose this to the situation of two human players, we will treat
> the incorrect scoring mechanism as if it is the adversarial nets estimate
> of the score.
>
> So, we have a good player vs a bad player, they both pass (tentatively
> ending the game), and they disagree on the score of the game. How this
> resolves depends on ruleset (though if you're playing casually the solution
> is almost always to resume play). Quoting from Wikipedia, which seems to do
> an okay job on this:
> ---quote---
> "Counting phase:
> Customarily, when players agree that there are no useful moves left (most
> often by passing in succession), they attempt to agree which groups are
> alive and which are dead. If disagreement arises, then under Chinese rules
> the players simply play on.
>
> However, under Japanese rules, the game is already considered to have
> ended. The players attempt to ascertain which groups of stones would remain
> if both players played perfectly from that point on. (These groups are said
> to be alive.) In addition, this play is done under rules in which kos are
> treated differently from ordinary play. If the players reach an incorrect
> conclusion, then they both lose.
>
> Unlike most other rulesets, the Japanese rules contain lengthy definitions
> of when groups are considered alive and when they are dead. In fact, these
> definitions do not cover every situation that may arise. Some difficult
> cases not entirely determined by the rules and existing precedent must be
> adjudicated by a go tribunal.
>
> The need for the Japanese rules to address the definition of life and
> death follows from the fact that in the Japanese rules, scores are
> calculated by territory rather than by area. The rules cannot simply
> require a player to play on in order to prove that an opponent's group is
> dead, since playing in their own territory to do this would reduce their
> score. Therefore, the game is divided into a phase of ordinary play, and a
> phase of determination of life and death (which according to the Japanese
> rules is not technically part of the game)."
> ---endquote---
>
> So, for Chinese rules, they play on and KataGo will almost certainly 'win'
> in a final sense, though if we assume both bots continue on with the same
> strategy, the rest of the game will consist of a countable number of passes
> and no other moves. For Japanese rules, we are probably best off just
> taking the guidance to assume 'perfect play' from both players to mean that
> we have either AlphaGo Zero or KataGo take over both positions and carry
> on--almost certainly leading to a victory by KataGo.
>
> If you encountered this in person, it would basically consist of a bad
> player playing terribly, insisting that they're ahead when they're not, and
> then continuing to argue the point indefinitely instead of playing the
> game. I don't think there's a neat transposition to chess due to the
> difference in how the games end, but the idea is probably something like
> someone playing the offensive portion 

[FRIAM] Is America's essential philosophy pragmatism?

[Jochen Fromm]

"Pragmatism emerged in the US in the late 1800s as a response to the 
Enlightenment push for absolute truth. The pragmatists — people like William 
James and John Dewey — were less interested in certainty and more concerned 
with immediate 
experience"https://www.vox.com/2022/6/5/23143285/vox-conversations-cornel-west-american-pragmatismThe
 essential insight of the pragmatists – whether Peirce, William James or John 
Dewey – was their recognition of the value of the subjective aspects of human 
experience. Thus, they did not view feelings and speculation as degraded junior 
partners to rational science. Rather, they understood them as an essential 
ingredient in the construction of 
meaning.https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/07/ask-the-author-justice-oliver-wendell-holmes-and-the-loneliness-of-original-work/-J.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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Re: [FRIAM] Adversarial Go trick defeats KataGo

[Alexander Rasmus]

Jon will probably chime in with his annoyance as well, but the headline
here is fake. In particular, they have bungled the implementation of how a
game of Go is scored severely to get the paper result. The key
"technicality" of the paper, quoting from the article, is:
"As a result of its [KataGo's] overconfidence in a win—assuming it will win
if the game ends and the points are tallied—KataGo plays a pass move,
allowing the adversary to intentionally pass as well, ending the game. (Two
consecutive passes end the game in Go.) After that, a point tally begins.
As the paper explains, "The adversary gets points for its corner territory
(devoid of victim stones) whereas the victim [KataGo] does not receive
points for its unsecured territory because of the presence of the
adversary's stones.""

Summarizing: KataGo gets so far ahead that it passes, the adversarial ai
also passes, and they then hand the game to an incorrect scoring mechanism.
KataGo maintains a score estimate of the game on its own in addition. To
neatly transpose this to the situation of two human players, we will treat
the incorrect scoring mechanism as if it is the adversarial nets estimate
of the score.

So, we have a good player vs a bad player, they both pass (tentatively
ending the game), and they disagree on the score of the game. How this
resolves depends on ruleset (though if you're playing casually the solution
is almost always to resume play). Quoting from Wikipedia, which seems to do
an okay job on this:
---quote---
"Counting phase:
Customarily, when players agree that there are no useful moves left (most
often by passing in succession), they attempt to agree which groups are
alive and which are dead. If disagreement arises, then under Chinese rules
the players simply play on.

However, under Japanese rules, the game is already considered to have
ended. The players attempt to ascertain which groups of stones would remain
if both players played perfectly from that point on. (These groups are said
to be alive.) In addition, this play is done under rules in which kos are
treated differently from ordinary play. If the players reach an incorrect
conclusion, then they both lose.

Unlike most other rulesets, the Japanese rules contain lengthy definitions
of when groups are considered alive and when they are dead. In fact, these
definitions do not cover every situation that may arise. Some difficult
cases not entirely determined by the rules and existing precedent must be
adjudicated by a go tribunal.

The need for the Japanese rules to address the definition of life and death
follows from the fact that in the Japanese rules, scores are calculated by
territory rather than by area. The rules cannot simply require a player to
play on in order to prove that an opponent's group is dead, since playing
in their own territory to do this would reduce their score. Therefore, the
game is divided into a phase of ordinary play, and a phase of determination
of life and death (which according to the Japanese rules is not technically
part of the game)."
---endquote---

So, for Chinese rules, they play on and KataGo will almost certainly 'win'
in a final sense, though if we assume both bots continue on with the same
strategy, the rest of the game will consist of a countable number of passes
and no other moves. For Japanese rules, we are probably best off just
taking the guidance to assume 'perfect play' from both players to mean that
we have either AlphaGo Zero or KataGo take over both positions and carry
on--almost certainly leading to a victory by KataGo.

If you encountered this in person, it would basically consist of a bad
player playing terribly, insisting that they're ahead when they're not, and
then continuing to argue the point indefinitely instead of playing the
game. I don't think there's a neat transposition to chess due to the
difference in how the games end, but the idea is probably something like
someone playing the offensive portion of a fool's mate and then insisting
they won even though it was successfully defended against. I can 100% make
a bad scoring algorithm for chess which declares this a winning strategy,
but that doesn't mean anyone should care...

Assuming that the scoring mechanism in the paper is the same one used when
scoring, e.g., AlphaGo Zero or KataGo self-matches (I do not know whether
this is true), the correct headline would be something like "Adversarial
net identifies inaccuracy in Go scoring algorithms used to train AIs." This
would still be an interesting result, as you're demonstrating that KataGo
can be tricked into "losing" when using the determiner of victor it was
trained with. However, what they've identified is a region of play where
the scoring mechanism is diverging from the game of Go, rather than a
region of play where KataGo is bad at Go itself. Perversely, this would
indicate that KataGo is MORE robust at the game of Go than the scoring
mechanism it was trained against, which is the opposite of what the 

[FRIAM] gaming

[glen]

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2022/Items/Nov11-2.html

Democrats spent close to $20 million promoting 16 different far-right 
candidates who went on to claim the Republican nomination in their respective 
primaries. That list includes, most notably, Darren Bailey, Dan Cox, John 
Gibbs, Don Bolduc, Bob Burns, and Doug Mastriano. And how did that work out for 
the blue team? Very well, indeed. In those 16 races, some of them quite high 
profile (like, say, the Pennsylvania governor's race), the Democrats went... 16 
and 0. The blue team would have won some of those races without getting 
involved, of course, but it's highly unlikely they would have won all 16.


I admit to being a bit worried about bad faith tactics like this. But I suppose 
it's a bit like platform a batsh¡t person like Russell Brand or whoever. If you 
simply let them talk, they'll quickly dig their own grave. The trick is the 
audience needs to be savvy enough for there to be enough good soil for the 
grave to be dug. I'd like to see a map like this: 
https://earth.nullschool.net/, except instead of tracking air flow, it would 
track idea flow.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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[FRIAM] dictation question

[Gillian Densmore]

Hello everyone!
I hope everyone is doing well!
Recently I have been into dictating my emails.

 I have noticed the quality of at least Google's dictation or voice typing
software as it calls itself. has at some point since I last used it become
noticeably better. Where I can speak modestly fast and it keeps up
surprisingly well.

What wonderful black magic has improved in the background? How has it
become more accurate since about 2-3 years ago when I last tried?

Neural nets? or just some improvement in how it hears me?
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Re: [FRIAM] Adversarial Go trick defeats KataGo

[Eric Charles]

"the adversarial policy works by first staking claim to a small corner of
the board. He provided a link to an example
 in which the
adversary, controlling the black stones, plays largely in the top-right of
the board. The adversary allows KataGo (playing white) to lay claim to the
rest of the board, while the adversary plays a few easy-to-capture stones
in that territory."

This sounds oddly reminiscent of the vs-computer RISK strategy of taking
over Australia, and ceding the rest of the board until you suddenly come
out and win. Which no half-decent human opponent would ever let you do, but
the computer AI make totally viable.



On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 1:24 PM Roger Frye  wrote:

>
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/new-go-playing-trick-defeats-world-class-go-ai-but-loses-to-human-amateurs/
>
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