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An enigma machine on display outside the Alan Turing Institute entrance inside the British Library, London.

Credit: Shutterstock/William Barton

Suppose someone asked you to devise the most powerful computer possible. Alan Turing, whose reputation as a central figure in computer science and artificial intelligence has only grown since his untimely death in 1954, applied his genius to problems such as this one in an age before computers as we know them existed. His theoretical work on this problem and others remains a foundation of computing, AI and modern cryptographic standards, including those NIST recommends.

The road from devising the most powerful computer possible to cryptographic standards has a few twists and turns, as does Turings brief life.

Alan Turing

Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London

In Turings time, mathematicians debated whether it was possible to build a single, all-purpose machine that could solve all problems that are computable. For example, we can compute a cars most energy-efficient route to a destination, and (in principle) the most likely way in which a string of amino acids will fold into a three-dimensional protein. Another example of a computable problem, important to modern encryption, is whether or not bigger numbers can be expressed as the product of two smaller numbers. For example, 6 can be expressed as the product of 2 and 3, but 7 cannot be factored into smaller integers and is therefore a prime number.

Some prominent mathematicians proposed elaborate designs for universal computers that would operate by following very complicated mathematical rules. It seemed overwhelmingly difficult to build such machines. It took the genius of Turing to show that a very simple machine could in fact compute all that is computable.

His hypothetical device is now known as a Turing machine. The centerpiece of the machine is a strip of tape, divided into individual boxes. Each box contains a symbol (such as A,C,T, G for the letters of genetic code) or a blank space. The strip of tape is analogous to todays hard drives that store bits of data. Initially, the string of symbols on the tape corresponds to the input, containing the data for the problem to be solved. The string also serves as the memory of the computer. The Turing machine writes onto the tape data that it needs to access later in the computation.

Credit: NIST

The device reads an individual symbol on the tape and follows instructions on whether to change the symbol or leave it alone before moving to another symbol. The instructions depend on the current state of the machine. For example, if the machine needs to decide whether the tape contains the text string TC it can scan the tape in the forward direction while switching among the states previous letter was T and previous letter was not C. If while in state previous letter was T it reads a C, it goes to a state found it and halts. If it encounters the blank symbol at the end of the input, it goes to the state did not find it and halts. Nowadays we would recognize the set of instructions as the machines program.

It took some time, but eventually it became clear to everyone that Turing was right: The Turing machine could indeed compute all that seemed computable. No number of additions or extensions to this machine could extend its computing capability.

To understand what can be computed it is helpful to identify what cannot be computed. Ina previous life as a university professor I had to teach programming a few times. Students often encounter the following problem: My program has been running for a long time; is it stuck? This is called the Halting Problem, and students often wondered why we simply couldnt detect infinite loops without actually getting stuck in them. It turns out a program to do this is an impossibility. Turing showed that there does not exist a machine that detects whether or not another machine halts. From this seminal result followed many other impossibility results. For example, logicians and philosophers had to abandon the dream of an automated way of detecting whether an assertion (such as whether there are infinitely many prime numbers) is true or false, as that is uncomputable. If you could do this, then you could solve the Halting Problem simply by asking whether the statement this machine halts is true or false.

Turing went on to make fundamental contributions to AI, theoretical biology and cryptography. His involvement with this last subject brought him honor and fame during World War II, when he played a very important role in adapting and extending cryptanalytic techniques invented by Polish mathematicians. This work broke the German Enigma machine encryption, making a significant contribution to the war effort.

Turing was gay. After the war, in 1952, the British government convicted him for having sex with a man. He stayed out of jail only by submitting to what is now called chemical castration. He died in 1954 at age 41 by cyanide poisoning, which was initially ruled a suicide but may have been an accident according to subsequent analysis. More than 50 years would pass before the British government apologized and pardoned him (after years of campaigning by scientists around the world). Today, the highest honor in computer sciences is called the Turing Award.

Turings computability work provided the foundation for modern complexity theory. This theory tries to answer the question Among those problems that can be solved by a computer, which ones can be solved efficiently? Here, efficiently means not in billions of years but in milliseconds, seconds, hours or days, depending on the computational problem.

For example, much of the cryptography that currently safeguards our data and communications relies on the belief that certain problems, such as decomposing an integer number into its prime factors, cannot be solved before the Sun turns into a red giant and consumes the Earth (currently forecast for 4 billion to 5 billion years). NIST is responsible for cryptographic standards that are used throughout the world. We could not do this work without complexity theory.

Technology sometimes throws us a curve, such as the discovery that if a sufficiently big and reliable quantum computer is built it would be able to factor integers, thus breaking some of our cryptography. In this situation, NIST scientists must rely on the worlds experts (many of them in-house) in order to update our standards. There are deep reasons to believe that quantum computers will not be able to break the cryptography that NIST is about to roll out. Among these reasons is that Turings machine can simulate quantum computers. This implies that complexity theory gives us limits on what a powerful quantum computer can do.

But that is a topic for another day. For now, we can celebrate how Turing provided the keys to much of todays computing technology and even gave us hints on how to solve looming technological problems.

Original post:
Alan Turing's Everlasting Contributions to Computing, AI and Cryptography - NIST

Tambon in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand

Chan Sen, also written as Chansen (Thai: , pronounced [tn.sn]) is a tambon (subdistrict) in Takhli District, Nakhon Sawan Province, upper central Thailand.

Chan Sen's history dates back more than 2,0003,000 years and is considered an ancient town in the late Iron Age and continued until the early Dvaravati period, contemporary with Funan in present-day Vietnam and Suphan Buri's U Thong. This is confirmed by the discovery of human skeletons, fragments of pottery, stone axes and iron tools on Khao Chong Khae Hill in the area and at Ban Mai Chaimongkol Village in its district as well as the neighbouring areas.

The condition of the ancient town of Chan Sen was first discovered from aerial photographs in 1966 by Thai architect and national artist Nij Hincheerana.[1]

In addition, Chan Sen used to be an important trading route in the Lop BuriPasak basin.[1]

It is a southern part of the district, about 28km (17.4mi) from downtown Takhli. The topography can be divided into two main parts: non-irrigated area, an upland; and irrigated area which is a lowland.

The area is bounded by other subdistricts (from the north clockwise): Huai Hom in its district, Lat Thippharot in its district and Sai Huai Kaeo with Phai Yai in Ban Mi District of Lop Buri Province, Thong En in In Buri District of Sing Buri Province, Soi Thong, Phrom Nimit, and Chong Khae in its district, respectively.

Chan Sen has a total area of 35,634 rai or approximately 64.178 km2.[2]

The entire area is governed by the Subdistrict Administrative Organization Chan Sen (SAO Chan Sen).

It was also divided into 10 muban (village)

Chan Sen has a total population of 6,259 in 1,627 households.[3]

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Chan Sen - Wikipedia

A good-enough story can withstand more or less any direction, and thats the extent of the artistic success that Baz Luhrmann achieves with Elvis. The rise of a Memphis truck driver to a generational hero and a world icon, under the thumb of his Mephistophelian manager, and his fall to the status of a mere self-destructive celebrity who became an object of nostalgia while still young is amazing enough, in its arc and its details, to hold attention even in the course of a garish and simplistic two hours and thirty-nine minutes. Elvis is a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article that owes little to its sense of style; its a film of substance, but of bare substance, a mere photographic replica of a script that both conveys and squanders the power of Presleys authentic tragedy.

Luhrmann squeezes his name into the credits more times and more quickly than any other director Ive seen, aided by the idiosyncrasies of contractual punctuation: its a Baz Luhrmann film, from a story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner and a screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner, and its directed by Baz Luhrmann. His style does more than leave smudgy fingerprints all over the material; its calculatedly obtrusive, as if to give viewers a thumb in the eye. But the key to Luhrmanns act of cinematic aggression is less its vain embellishment than its weird, misguided, yet deeply revealing premise: it thrusts Presleys predatory manager, Colonel Tom Parker, front and center.

The character of Colonel Tom is embodied by the movies one above-the-title-sized star, Tom Hanks, who plays the role with a slimy, serpentine monotony under transformative costumes and makeup (Parker was fat and bald) and a chewy, indistinct accent (Parker was born and raised in the Netherlands). Hanks is the films narrator as well as a main onscreen presence alongside Presley, whose life and art are related from Colonel Toms perspective. Indeed, the drama of Elvis is the musicians effort to become, in effect, the protagonist of his own life, to fulfill his own plans and dreams rather than the requirements of Elvis Presley the business, which was run by Parker. The movie is even framed as a flashback from Parkers collapse, just before his death in 1997; its drama is launched by a self-justifying and self-unaware monologue in which Colonel Tom denies any responsibility for Presleys death in 1977.

Colonel Tom takes credit for Elviss career (I made him), and adds that he and Elvis were partners, as the snowman and the showman. Parkers own career as an impresario started at travelling carnivals; he calls himself a snowman because hes capable of delivering a snow job on anyone for anything. Though he recognizes the originality of Elviss fusion of blues and country music, he sees Elvis not as an artist but as a showman, indeed as the greatest show on Eartha circus slogan, and the antithesis of earnest musicianship. But who was this miraculous hybrid? In come flashbacks to the backstory, of Elviss father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), incarcerated for passing a fraudulent check, and of the familys move to a Black neighborhood in Tupelo, Mississippi. There, in 1947, young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) makes Black friends and accompanies them to the areas two musical attractions: a roadhouse where Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup (Gary Clark, Jr.) plays electric blues, and a Pentecostal church where the revival service is filled with ecstatic gospel music and where Elvis, the only white person there, does more than listenhe plunges into the center of the service, dancing and flinging himself into the throng. Cut to Sun Records, where Elvis performs a cover of Crudups Thats All Right and the companys owner, Sam Phillips (Josh McConville), declares that the nineteen-year-old Elvis is playing Black music.

Throughout the film, Elviss bona fides in the Black community are emphasized, especially in his early and crucial friendship with B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and with other important characters in Elviss musical rise, including Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Little Richard (played by Shonka Dukureh, Yola, and Alton Mason, respectively). When Elvis passes through Black crowds in Memphiss Beale Street, they lovingly swarm him for autographs. But what makes Elvis an original, in the movies view, is more than his fusion of Black and white traditions; its the sexual frenzy that he whips up when he gets onstage, at an outdoor concert, with long hair and makeup that prompts a young white man (at a segregated show) to call him by a homophobic slur. At first hesitant at the mike, Elvis launches into a song, and his sinuous, thrusting moves conspicuously excite the young women in the crowd. His bassist, Bill Black (Adam Dunn), leans over and advises him to wiggle much more; when Elvis does, women scream in ecstasy and men are scandalized. Parker apostrophizes in voice-over, as he watches an excited woman, that shes having feelings she wasnt sure she should enjoythis unleashed Elvis is her forbidden fruit. He adds, It was the greatest carnival attraction Id ever seen.

Whatever pleasure Elvis manifestly feels in making music, his core motives are to make enough money for his parents to live in comfort; he promises his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson), a pink Cadillac when he makes it big. But Gladys sees the dangeror, rather, telegraphs the rest of the movie when she warns him about the dangers of pursuing wealth, and adds that she saw something in the reaction of his audience that could come between them. That thing, of course, is fame, the bond with the public that makes him a commander of hearts and minds but also the victim of his devotees. He is mobbed in the street; the Presley family property is invaded by fans; police have to hold the crowds back from the stage at his concerts. Elvis is a cautionary tale about the predatory power of modern media and the uncontrollable force of fandomthe cult of personality that neglects and devours the person concealed in the plain sight of the public image. (Elvis is one of two new releases that dramatize the toxicity of fandom and sudden celebrity, the other being Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.)

The overt sexuality that Elvis displays is a source of scandal, denunciation, and legal threats, and, for Colonel Tom, a possible financial liability. From trying to sanitize Elviss public image and create a new Elvis (the public responds the way it responded, three decades later, to New Coke) to turning him all-American when hes drafted into the Army, Colonel Tom interferes with Elviss art and life alike, putting showmanship, celebrity, and publicity ahead of the musicians imperatives. Colonel Tom has a criminal past in the Netherlands and deserted from the U.S. Army; he is, unbeknownst to Elvis, undocumented and imperilled. He maneuvers and manipulates Elvis with secret deals that keep him virtually entombed in Las Vegas, exhausting himself emotionally and musically to feed his audiences nightly frenzies, jolted onstage each night through the medical depredations of a doctor for hire (Tom Nixon). Unsurprisingly, Colonel Tom exonerates himself from Elviss death at the age of forty-two. He says that Elvis was indeed addictedto the love that he got from you, the audience. He sums up: Ill tell you what killed him: it was lovehis love for you. The onus is on the members of the audience and their deadly effect on their superstar.

Luhrmann depicts Elvis as a pre-modern figure, an artist whose public image is somewhere between a phenomenon independent of his artistry and a means of advertising created by his business team. Elviss movie career proves to be mostly a disaster, despite some commercial success: its inescapable uncoolness impinges on his musical career and is an artistic failure in Elviss own eyes. (He dreamed of following in the footsteps of James Dean as a dramatic actor.) Elvis places great emphasis on his return to musical purity in his 1968 television special, and sets it against the political turmoil of the time, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The movie aims to show that Elvis strove to keep up with his moment, including politically, and only Colonel Toms blanding-out, old-fashioned handling of him got in the way. When Elviss star is falling, his manager riffs on how its not the Colonels fault that the world has changed. Yet one of the key things that changed was media consciousness itself and its relation to the new rock mainstreammost obvious in the Beatless self-aware media politics, their recognition of the inseparability of their art from their image, their image from their life, and their postmodern deployment of their fame in A Hard Days Night.

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Elvis Is a Wikipedia Entry Directed by Baz Luhrmann - The New Yorker

All our campaigns are time based, depending on the country. For example, in the west, the Thanksgiving to Christmas period tends to be the giving period. So we'll put some campaigns then. So it depends on the country and is always time bound.

The easy answer to your question is no, this is not a fundraising campaign related to any shortfall or crisis, but I would say that since our mission is to provide free knowledge and information to every person on this planet, we will always need money to do that.

I think it's easy to look at a number like $120 million, that is our annual budget and say, "Wow, that's a big number. Why do they need money?"

Let me give you a couple of examples. Depending on the month, we are probably the fifth or sixth or seventh largest site in the world in terms of the number of visits. If you look at the top five or top six in front of us, it'll be Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Baidu.

Baidu said in their annual report that they have spent $4 billion just on research and development. Facebook said that they will spend between $29 and $34 billion just on Capital expenditure in 2022.

So here are organisations that are roughly in the same ballpark as we are, having to spend significant amounts to keep up with the infrastructure. And here is Wikimedia, completely nonprofit, doesn't take any money, no advertising.

We do some of the same big infrastructure work, to support 1.5 billion devices with data centers around the world, making sure that whenever you want information, it's available. I think those things cost a fair amount of money.

See the original post:
Raju Narisetti on Wikipedia & the Mission To Take Free Knowledge to Every Person - The Quint

In 2021, Nikhil Kamath, founder of Zerodha, defeated five-time world champion Vishwanathan Anand in chess with the help of computers (he confessed later on) at a celebrity fundraiser. The controversy sparked discussions around the use of AI in the game of chess.

As India is all set to host the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad in Mahabalipuram starting on July 28, lets look at how AI has impacted the game of chess.

The earliest mention of technology in chess can be traced back to the 18th century when Austrian empress Maria Theresa commissioned a chess-playing machine. Many players competed against the Mechanical Turk, thinking it was an automated machine. However, it turned out to be a scam. A human hidden inside the machine was operating it.

In the mid-1940s, British mathematician Alan Turing began theorising how a computer could play chess against a human. In 1949, Claude Shannon published a seminal paper describing a potential program to do exactly that. In 1950, Alan Turing created a program capable of playing chess. Soon after, the Dietrich Prinz and Bernstein chess program burst into the scene.

Computer chess appeared for the first time in the 1970s. MicroChess, the first commercial chess program for microcomputers, in 1976; Chess Challenger in 1977; and Sargon, which won the worlds first computer chess tournament for microcomputers, in 1978.

The robotic chess computers came about in the 1980s. Boris Handroid, Novag Robot Adversary and Milton Bradley Grandmaster are some examples. The most popular was Chessmaster 2000, which ruled the chess video and computer games industry for the next two decades.

As chess computers were gaining popularity in the 1980s, Gary Kasparov, the then world chess champion, claimed AI-driven chess engines could not defeat top-level chess grandmasters. However, in 1989 and 1996, Kasparov beat IBMs powerful chess engines, Deep Thought and Deep Blue.

Things started to change in the late 1990s. In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. A year later, Kasparov came up with the idea of Cyborg chess or centaur chess, in which human and computer skills are combined to up the level of the game. The first cyborg chess was held in 1998.

In 2017, AlphaZero, a computer program developed by DeepMind, defeated the worlds strongest chess engine Stockfish. AlphaZero used the reinforcement learning technique in which the algorithm mimicked humans learning process to train its neural networks.

In 2018, TalkChess.com released Leela Chess Zero, developed by Gary Linscott (who also developed Stockfish). Without having any chess-specific knowledge, Leela Chess Zero learned the game based on deep reinforcement learning using an open-source implementation of AlphaZero.

In 2019, DeepMind came up with another algorithm based on reinforcement learning called MuZero.

Chess players use AI-driven chess engines to analyse their and competitors games. As a result, AI has helped in improving the quality of games.

Post pandemic a lot of chess competitions were moved online. In the European Online Chess Championship, as many as 80 participants were disqualified for cheating. FIDE, the international chess body, has approved an artificial intelligence-driven behaviour-tracking module for the FIDE Online Arena games. Chess.com, an internet chess server, uses a cheat detection system to assess the probability of a human player matching the moves of a chess engine or surpassing the games of some of the greatest chess players with the help of a statistical model. DeepMind is also working to develop a new cheat detection software.

AI has also brought down the cost and effort of training and helped develop new chess strategies.

AI has indeed changed the dynamics of the game. However, using AI in chess has raised a few issues. Computer chess engines have significantly improved gameplay. However, people have also raised concerns that players of this age depend too much on machine-driven analysis.

Even when it comes to detecting cheating, AI poses a few issues. First, there is a possibility a player might be wrongly red-flagged by AI. For example, a Chess.com player and grandmaster, Akshat Chandra, was banned after a win against Hikaru as his moves supposedly matched Komodo, a strong positional chess engine. Though Chandra has been proved innocent, his reputation took a hit.

Chess engines and deep learning-based neural networks present enormous possibilities. Moreover, the complex nature and the strategic orientation of the game have provided a ground for assessing any progress in the field of artificial intelligence. They (games) are the perfect platform to develop and test ideas for AI algorithms. Its very efficient to use games for AI development, as you can run thousands of experiments in parallel on computers in the cloud and often faster than real-time, and generate as much training data as your systems need to learn from. Conveniently, games also normally have a clear objective or score, so it is easy to measure the progress of the algorithms to see if they are incrementally improving over time, and therefore if the research is going in the right direction, said DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis.

More here:
Chennai Chess Olympiad and AI - Analytics India Magazine