massmedia
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When computation gets tough, researchers get game.
Posted by Michael on 28 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: news, massmedia, software
It’s old news, but in July, the Chinook team announced on Science Magazine that they improved their draughts playing software to the point it won’t lose a single game.
What does this mean? Well, basically it means that it’s mathematically proven that a game without mistakes can’t end in anything else than a draw.
It took 18 years, and a discrete amount of computation to get to this conclusion.
I picked up on the net and on the media a great deal of criticism about this news. It’s ok. People love to criticize. I do that A LOT ;)
The main complaint is “Couldn’t they spend 18 years doing something useful instead?“. I smile to this kind of objection.
What’s so special about games? Why people spend hours figuring out algorithms to solve efficiently the Hanoi Tower, or the Canadian Traveller Problem (”Problema del commesso viaggiatore” for the Italians).
A game is nothing else than a model. You crack the model, and you cracked the reality that maps to that model. “What’s the point in studying the best path in a connected graph”, someone could have asked 50 years ago. Then the Internet came around. And routing problems.
I must admit I was a bit disappointed reading the editorial of the August issue of “Newton“, an Italian scientific paper magazine (yes! I read on paper! :-) ). The director, Giorgio Rivieccio, judge the research “a waste” and “something to be archived, and forgotten in a closet forever”. He adds that the prospective of a “universe”, like the draught universe, where nothing is left to discover “depresses” him. And thanks that life is much more complex than a draughts game.
Maybe he just wanted to be poetic, with the comparison between life and a game. But the tone is not what I would expect in an editorial of a science magazine.
Stay tuned, more to come.
Italian newspaper with mixed up ideas about space
Posted by Michael on 28 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: massmedia, italy, space
I learn from my friend Alessandro (http://csidnc.altervista.org/blog.php?entry=entry070824-144120) that there is no end to the ridiculous.
On Friday the 24th, the local pages of La Stampa, a national available italian newspaper, had an interesting mini-article about a mysterious “Orbital Lunar Observatory“.
You can read the article below, of course in italian. But here’s a translation.
What the hell is the “Lunar Orbital Laboratory” for crying out loud?! How on earth is one supposed to think of the ISS after reading that title?
Plus, from a source that I’m not going to name, but I encourage to post a comment, even anonymous, I learnt that the…journalist (and I think I just found an improper use of the word ‘journalist’) found out about the iss lunar transit transit some weeks ago. The ISS has manouvered since then, and the transit (not all that rare) simply didn’t occur, at least not in the ground stripe descripted in the article.
And I’m not even going to comment about the errors in the writing(but you find them in the translation).
I’d like to know who’s behind the initials R.L. Is mr. (or miss, or mrs.) R.L. too shy? Or too ashamed? La Stampa readers deserve to know who are they wasting their money on!
This is one of many examples of how the space is presented (when is presented) on the italian mass media. Kinda makes one wonder about what do they tell us when they talk about politics, war, economy, medicine, you-name-it. E.g., when it comes to Computer Science, they often oversimplify and end up changing the meaning of the news or over-inflate problems to add drama, or bash on technology. This is the same.
Two clues make an evidence?What do you think? How do the mass media cover your area of expertise? Let me know in the comments!
Stay tuned, more to come.
Aug 28th - UPDATE: well, turns out that the author defends himself by saying that the titles aren’t decided by the authors but by the editors. And I believe him because it makes sense.
But the point remains, the charge aren’t dropped, they’re just moved from R.L. to someone else. The title is wrong, the article is not precise. This is no way of doing information. No way.
Stay tuned, more to come.
