Kim Eunji 2p’s AI cheating incident
Thirteen-year-old professional Go player Kim Eun-ji was suspended from competing for one year in late November after she admitted to using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance her gameplay in an online Go competition. The Korea Baduk Association took the punitive measure against Kim Eun-ji, a 2-dan professional Go player who had been considered a genius in the Korean Go scene and the youngest professional player, for violating the rules as a professional Go player and on ethics which stipulate that a player cannot receive outside advice in official competitions. Fellow Korean pro Yeonwoo Cho devoted one of her videos to the incident.
– Excerpted from a report in The Korea Times
Playing Go with Darwin
In Playing Go with Darwin (Nautilus 12/16/2020), David Krakauer writes that “Meditating on some subtleties of (Go’s) strategy can, I think, illuminate our understanding of the strategic character of evolution.” He adds that “Go today has become an epitaph on the tombstone in the cemetery of human defeat at the hands of algorithmic progress” and says “Charles Darwin was very likely the first person to have understood nature in terms of a game played across deep time. I have wondered how much further the Chess-playing naturalist might have taken this metaphor if, like Kawabata, he had studied Go.” It’s a fascinating article about how new research elevates evolution from a tactical process to one of strategic possibility. Thanks to Peter Freedman for passing it along.
Remembering John Conway
John Conway is one of Three Mathematicians We Lost in 2020 (The New Yorker 12/31/2020), and midway through the story there’s this:
At Princeton, he could usually be found not in his office—which resembled a mathematical apothecary shop hit by a tornado—but in the large and somewhat soulless common room of Fine Hall, the massive looming tower, on the edge of the Princeton campus, that is the home of the mathematics department. The common room would come to life only in the mid to late afternoon, just as things were revving up for the daily “tea,” a small box-cookie reception roughly marking the time when most classes had ended and a few seminars were about to start. Conway would often hold court there, hard to miss, a cross between Rasputin and a Middle Ages minstrel, loudly talking philosophy and mathematics, playing the board game Go, or engaging in some other kind of mathematical competition, surrounded by adoring and admiring students, faculty, and visitors.
