Friday 4 May 2018

The Parable of the Good Scousers

On one occasion, an expert in the law wrote on Twitter: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?”, an ethicist replied. “How do you read it?”

The lawyer answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, “Do what is in your neighbour's best interest.”

“You have answered correctly,” the ethicist replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked the ethicist, “What is in my neighbour's best interests?”

The ethicist answered, in a threaded tweet:

A child was attacked on the side of the road and beaten within an inch of his life. He was losing blood fast. He had spinal damage that would leave him quadriplegic. He probably had brain damage. He was gasping for breath. 1/n

A doctor walking past spotted the child. She saw the quality of life the child would have, and decided that the child would be better off dead. She left the child, and continued walking down the road. 2/n

A judge spotted the doctor as she walked away from the scene and hurried over. He asked the doctor why she left the child alone and the doctor explained - there's no hope of recovery, his quality of life will be appalling. He should be left to die. 3/n

The judge agreed, and walked off with the doctor. 4/n

Then a group came by - the child's parents. A journalist. A lawyer or two. Some were Catholics, some were atheists, some were protestants. Some were pro-life. Worst of all, some of them weren't even middle class. 5/n

They saw the child and hurried over. They tried to stop the bleeding. They made arrangements to take him to a hospital. 6/n

But the doctor and the judge noticed what was going on. They ordered the group to stop helping the child. They called the police, who came along immediately to stop him being taken to the hospital. 7/n

The group was stunned - some called friends to form a protest. Some called an ambulance to come and care for the child. Some made legal efforts to get the police to stand down, and to allow the ambulance through. 8/n

They prayed. 9/n

They tried everything they could to save the child. 10/n

But it was in vain. The harder they tried, the more the judge, doctor and police resisted. They said that they were only acting in the extraordinary little child's best interests. They suggested that the parents were purely acting out of uncontrollable grief, that the protesters were a mob and that the lawyers were publicity seekers. 11/n


(Divide and conquer.) 12/n

All this time, the child was surviving better than could possibly have been imagined. 13/n

I ask you, which of these acted in the child's best interest? 14/14

He that has ears to hear, let him hear.

Friday 30 March 2018

The fastest-improving chess player in the world?

Back in December, I woke up on a day off work, preparing to visit the London Chess Classic - my first time spectating at a super-GM chess tournament. I was expecting to see some top-level chess, but I wasn't ready for the news of a breakthrough in chess computing courtesy of Google: AlphaZero.

The Google-owned DeepMind team had put their absurdly powerful AI computing power onto the game of chess. And with that absurd computing power, had managed in a matter of hours to become the best chess player ever.

Lots of people didn't think that AI, neural networks would be very good at chess. We already had very powerful chess engines, powerful enough to beat any human with one second/move on a mobile phone. But they work by assessing millions of positions using human heuristics - counting up the point value of the pieces, the squares they're on etc. AlphaZero, on the other hand, was told only the rules of the game, and given a process to play millions of games against itself and figure out how to win by itself.

An impressive technological achievement but what was even more exciting were the example games given. Several of the games had beautiful, long-term positional sacrifices from AlphaZero. The kind of moves swashbuckling grandmasters used to play, before computer engines told them they didn't work.

There was only one drawback. No one got to play against AlphaZero. It was all hidden away in Google laboratories, only 20 games released, and there was no opportunity to have a go ourselves.

Enter Leela Chess Zero. Dedicated amateurs have recreated the kind of system that AlphaZero used - except free, open source, and reliant on solely on volunteers, their expertise and their computing power (and energy bills!).

You can play a version of it right now.

It's not as strong as AlphaZero yet. But estimates suggest that within a year or so, it could be competitive. In the little time since it has been launched, it's played about 1.5 million games against itself, all on people's computers. And it's already getting to around 2000 ELO strength - better than most amateur/club players.

This is a really exciting project and well worth dedicating a bit of computing power to, if you like chess or AI. You can find out how to contribute here and join the active discord channel here.