Science, Technology & Health: September 2004 Archives

Poker? I don't even know 'er!

Anyway, no existing artificial intelligence could understand that joke. Likewise, I think Scott Chaffin at The Fat Guy is right in thinking that no existing AI could beat a human poker master. However, I think he's hasty in dismissing speculation that people are writing bots to play online poker and are raking in the dough from unsuspecting internet players.

Are poker ‘bots’ raking online pots?: after "these online sites are RIGGED!" and "I'm calling tech support about collusion!", bots are probably the biggest source of idle chit-chat and/or creeping Nixon-like paranoia on the interweb. As this article explains, it's highly unlikely that you're sliding pixelated chips to software programs. There's talk of one up in that Canada, called Vex something-or-other, that is rated a "master" at 2-handed games. Well, a) big whoop: only a dumbass plays two-handed unless they're squaring off against someone they know (we're talking regular ring games here, not tournies), and b) "master"? What the heck is that? By my reckoning, the only masters of this game are walking around Vegas with rolls of $1000 bills that would choke a horse and getting on the teevee on a semi-regular basis (cf., Doyle Brunson, TJ Cloutier, Daniel Negreanu, etc., etc., etc.) All that is to say I don't spend a lot of time worrying about robots. If someone wants to give their judgement over to a piece of software when they're playing for real money...well, let's just say I've written software, and poker ain't completely logical.

I've written software too -- and am getting a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence -- and I'm positive that it wouldn't be hard to write an AI that could beat average to good poker players in an online format. "Vex something-or-other" probably refers to Vexbot, a component of Poki's Artificial Intelligence, a project led by Darse Billings from the University of Alberta.

According to the Poki FAQ:

Q: How good is Poki?

A: The older version of Poki that plays in full 10-player games is better than a typical low-limit casino player, and wins consistently against average opponents; but it is not as good as most expert players. The newer programs being developed for the 2-player game are quite a bit better, and we believe they will eventually surpass all human players, perhaps within a few years, or less.

Sounds reasonable to me. If Poki ever can beat human poker masters then that means that bluffing and "tells" are unnecessary to winning the game. Poki probably does "bluff", but only based on statistics, not intuition, and that seems like a very different thing to me. Imagine how effective an AI could be that could read human facial expressions in addition to crunching numbers?

Thanks to Asparagirl for the pointer to this background page on Anousheh Ansari, the woman who's primarily responsible for the establishment and funding of the Ansari X-Prize. I didn't know much about her before, but her story and history are quite fascinating. As Asparagirl points out:

Burt Rutan and Paul Allen have been getting a lot of the credit for their roles in the recent attempt at the prize, and rightly so. But most of the actual prize money, and the prize's name, comes from tech entrepreneur and self-made millionaire Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American woman who immigrated to the US at 16--because the hardline Islamicists back in Tehran would not have let her study such unsuitable and unfeminine subjects as math and science.

Iran's loss is the world's gain; Ansari (and her brother-in-law, who also donated some of the prize money) is helping make commercial space travel a real possibility in our lifetimes--heck, a real possibility in just the next 15 years. And as if that weren't enough, she's also a living, breathing, geeky rebuke to the narrow-minded, anti-female, anti-science, anti-progress world of the fundamentalists and ayatollahs.

Is it really a surprise that parents in New Zealand want to know when their underage daughters get abortions? I mean, kids can't go on field trips without parental consent, they can't borrow money, they can't sign contracts, they can't pose nude, they can't buy cigarettes or drink, they can't join the army, they can't... and so forth. But abortions? No problem! Why in the world should a parent be involved in something so trivial?

An opinion poll in New Zealand has found substantial support for parents' right to know if their underage daughter wants to have an abortion. The poll sends a strong signal to a liberal government that critics accuse of pursuing a politically-correct agenda.

A proposed piece of legislation called the Care of Children Bill entrenches an existing situation that allows girls of any age to have an abortion without their parents' knowledge or consent.

Opposition politicians are pressing for the provision to be changed, pointing out that parents are required to give their consent for their children to undergo any non-urgent medical procedure - apart from an abortion.

Many parents are horrified at the notion of school staff whisking their under-16 year old daughters off for an abortion during school hours, leaving parents out of the loop in what is likely to be the most traumatic decision their child has ever made.

No, seriously? Those parents are just prudes.

The pro-life Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child points out that schools are obliged to inform parents if even mild medications are given to children while away from home, yet abortions are exempt from this policy.

Now if only abortions could cure headaches....

So what do pro-abortion folks think of a proposal to require parental notification (not even parental premission!)?

Top medical bodies including the New Zealand Medical Association (NZMA) are against her proposal, saying it could prompt girls to have illegal or "back street" abortions, putting themselves at risk of harm.

"This proposal is a backward step and sends a dangerous message to young girls, who may be confused, desperate and vulnerable," said NZMA chairwoman Dr Tricia Briscoe.

Hm... if a young girl is feeling "confused, desperate and vulnerable" isn't that exactly when it's most necessary for her parents to be involved? No, what nonsense! That's when the government should step in and encourage the girl to "make her own decisions" without being burdened by a couple of old folks who just happen to share some genes with her.

Orin Kerr has written an article about "Digital Evidence and the New Criminal Procedure" and has asked for comments. In general I think the article is excellent, but I think Professor Kerr is missing an important facet of the issue. I sent him the following email (slightly edited).

Professor Kerr,

I'm not a lawyer, so I hope that I didn't miss anything in your article that already addresses this issue: namely that in many cases it will be impossible to recognize digital evidence even when you see it, particularly when encryption is in play. (I did a search in your article for "crypt", just to make sure, and didn't find a mention.)

Essentially, any digital file is just a sequence of ones and zeros, and any evidence a file may contain depends heavily on how those bits are interpreted. The same file could theoretically be a grocery list when loaded into a text editor and a diagram of a bomb when loaded into an image viewer. Further, when a file is properly encypted it is essentially indistinguishable from random noise. Even if a judge were to issue a warrant for the decryption key, there's no way for anyone to prove that the file actually is encrypted and not just a bunch of random numbers.

In general though, I like your paper a lot. As everyone in society gets more tech-savvy I expect law enforcement will be able to work more precisely as well.

No, seriously, it's true: men and women are different.

These discoveries are part of a quiet but revolutionary change infiltrating U.S. medicine as a growing number of scientists realize there's more to women's health than just the anatomy that makes them female, and that the same diseases often affect men and women in different ways.

"Women are different than men, not only psychologically (but) physiologically, and I think we need to understand those differences," says Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And here I thought men and women were identical, and that any perceived differences could be chalked up to discrimination! What a fool I was. But still, even though men and women are psychologically and physiologically different, we should treat them exactly the same, right?

A friend pointed me to an article in The Scientist about a controversy surrounding the publication of a paper about intelligent design in a peer reviewed biology journal.

The publication in a peer-reviewed biology journal of an article which sounds themes often heard in discussions of "intelligent design"–a theory one critic calls "the old creationist arguments in fancy clothes"–has drawn criticism from the members of the society that publishes the journal, and from others.

In an article entitled "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," which was made available online on August 28 by the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Stephen Meyer concludes: "what natural selection lacks, intelligent selection–purposive or goal-directed design–provides." Meyer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which, according to its Web site "supports research by scientists and other scholars developing the scientific theory known as intelligent design." ...

Richard Sternberg, a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information who was an editor of the Proceedings at the time, told The Scientist via E-mail that the three peer reviewers of the paper "all hold faculty positions in biological disciplines at prominent universities and research institutions, one at an Ivy League university, one at a major US public university, and another at a major overseas research institute."

"The reviewers did not necessarily agree with Dr. Meyer's arguments but all found the paper meritorious, warranting publication," Sternberg said.

I haven't read the paper yet, but I probably will when I find time. I'm much more interested in the information theory aspect than in the biology itself.

Is it true that marijuana in the 1960s was much weaker than it is today?

Charles gives us an update on Jim Wightman and his artificially intelligent ChatNanny software.

Remember all the fuss about those claims by Chatnannies? And how Jim Wightman, the person behind it, said he’d win the Loebner Prize (a Turing Test) this year? (It’s in the first link.)

Well, guess what. The list of this year’s entrants to the Loebner Prize is up. And… no Jim Wightman.

I wonder what the excuse will be this time?

See also my many posts on the fraud.

Here's a little math problem for you.

Say I want to create a page containing every 7-digit phone number (ignore the fact that some combinations of numbers aren't allowed, like "555" in the prefix). What's the minimum number of characters that can be used to create the page? It's not 7*10^7, because the string "12345678" contains two 7-digit numbers: "1234567" and "2345678". The real question then is, what algorithm can be used to generate a single long sequence of numbers that contains every 7-digit combination with as few repeats as possible? How long will that sequence be?

Here's a story about a useful application of artificial intelligence to the problem of searching the internet.

Dr Brill's question-answering system does something similar. Many question-and-answer pairs exist on the web, in the form of “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) pages. Dr Brill trained his system using a million such pairs, to create a model that, given a question, can work out various structures that the answer could take. These structures are then used to generate search queries, and the matching documents found on the web are scanned for things that look like answers.

The current prototype provides appropriate answers about 40% of the time. Not brilliant, but not bad. And it should improve as the web grows. Rather than relying on a traditional “artificial intelligence” approach of parsing sentences and trying to work out what a question actually means, this quick-and-dirty method draws instead on the collective, ever-growing intelligence of the web itself.

Note that such a system does not attempt to be "strong" in the AI sense -- that is, it doesn't accomplish its task in a way we'd consider to be similar to how a human would do it, and there's no consideration that the question-answering engine may actually be "alive". However, I think such research will probably lead to many more useful results than will "traditional" AI.

Computers do this sort of "quick-and-dirty" analysis very well, but they "think" -- in the human sense -- very poorly; in contrast, humans think very well and do aggregate analysis very poorly. Rather than trying to make a computer into a human substitute, we may do better to focus on the strengths of computers and how they can compensate for human weakness.

Still, of course, creating a computer than can think like a human is a fascinating endeavor and worthy of exploration in its own right.

(HT: GeekPress.)