Caught a movie on my Netflix account earlier this week. It was a documentary made in 2017 that I wanted to watch for a while but I thought that it would be dry and boring. I was amazed that the built up suspense was very good and its implications were mind-blowing. AlphaGo was the AI (Artificial Intelligence) system that was created by a team of scientists to study the ancient game of Go.
https://www.netflix.com/sg/title/80190844
The first human opponent was the European Go Champion which the AI managed to beat quite easily. Then they proceeded to challenge the world champion who was initially very confident that he could beat the machine. After AlphaGo started to beat him in the first 3 games, he was shocked. Everyone was speechless that a machine could beat the world champion in a game that has more moves than there are molecules in the universe.
Anyway, the final score was 4 to 1 in favour of AlphaGo. On analyzing the games later, the humans realized that the AI has started to think differently from humans and hence they were not prepared for its unusual new strategies. In the end, the human champions were able to learn from the machine and gained newfound insights into how the game is played.
The follow up to AlphaGo’s success less than a year later was even more amazing, to say the least. A newer and better version of itself was created and named AlphaGo Zero. What was different this time was that the new AI learnt the game from scratch, playing against itself for millions of times. Previous AI systems analyze multiple human games to try to mimic them but this is the first time a machine had taught itself instead…
Subsequently, the team decided to pitch AlphaGo Zero against its predecessor AlphaGo. And the result? 100 games won out of 100, a perfect score!!! The AI has managed to become a new world champion in a matter of months, without the need to study human experience. With a neural network setup that is vastly superior to a human brain, the current AI technology can be taught to outperform all human beings.
This is the beginning of a new era of AI development and the possibilities are limitless and hard to imagine. If a machine can be taught to be the best in the world in anything within a matter of months, then theoretically, we can create a complete artificial intelligent being eventually – think Westworld/BladeRunner Android scenarios. Just need to add a realistic workable synthetic body to the AI mind.
On to the next topic that occupied me this week – SMS spamming. I started to receive a lot of stupid SMS messages offering loans that high-interest rates. I believe that they are illegal loan sharks preying on the desperate who have nowhere to go for funds. Initially, I tried to click UN to unsubscribe from these irritating SMSes as per their instructions to the mobile numbers attached but it didn’t seem to work.
Then I politely SMS them back on the highlighted mobile numbers to stop it or that I will report them to the police for spamming. The spammers upped the game and sent me more messages!!! I did a bit of research and found the email address to send to the relevant police department to log a complaint. I then sent screenshots to the police department before messaging the loan sharks to inform them of my actions (I included the police email address in the message for a strong effect) and indicate that their mobile numbers may be disabled soon.
It did not work and they bombarded me with more SMSes. I realized that I do not use SMS much nowadays, so I have pretty much a lot of spare capacity to use to fight them back. I decided to change my tactic again. This time, I congratulated them for sending the offending SMS to a police officer, that I will inform my colleagues to disable their phone numbers and ended the message with “have a good day”…
That last action was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I received an actual call and the guy on the other end was screaming vulgarities at me. I thank him again for giving me more evidence on a recorded line to persecute him and hung up. To complete the act, I sent him an SMS to say that he is in deep shit now and blocked the number from my phone.
I now only receive one or two such SMS a day. Did it finally worked or did they just got tired of fighting back from a persistent asshole? Who knows? Playing mind games to F#$K-up their brains was fun 🙂
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