Science bits for Thanksgiving

Science Daily writes:
Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food, researchers report

The remains of a huge carp fish mark the earliest signs of cooking by prehistoric human to 780,000 years ago, predating the available data by some 600,000 years, according to researchers.
One can just imagine the festive prehistoric holiday conversation:

Wife: Gronk, go get big fish. Need cook big fish. Your family is coming for thanksgiving. 
Gronk: They are coming? Grunt, grunt. Not them again. They eat too much.
Wife: Stop complaining. Go get fish. 
Gronk whining: Aw jeez, I have to do all the work around here. Where's bambam? I teach him to get fish.



Festive black hole found near Earth
Astronomers have discovered the closest-known black hole to Earth. This is the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way. Its close proximity to Earth, a mere 1600 light-years away, offers an intriguing target of study to advance our understanding of the evolution of binary systems.

Jeez, that's really close! It's only 9,405,800,597,093,772 miles away. 

One can just imagine the festive modern holiday conversation:

Hubby screaming: Stella, did you recharge the car last night? I want to drive out to see the neighborhood black hole for thanksgiving.
Stella: You boob, of course I didn't recharge it. That's your job. 
Hubby: Aw jeez, I have to do all the work around here. Where's Phelony, that lazy bum son of ours? I'll teach him to recharge the car.
Stella: You're nuts. He's your son. Go out and buy a turkey and some beans and taters.

 

Let the machines do the diplomacy?
Meta researchers create AI that masters Diplomacy, tricking human players

On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it claims is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy. It's a notable achievement because the game requires deep interpersonal negotiation skills, which implies that Cicero has obtained a certain mastery of language necessary to win the game.

Even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, board games were a useful measure of AI achievement. In 2015, another barrier fell when AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. Both of those games follow a relatively clear set of analytical rules (although Go's rules are typically simplified for computer AI).

But with Diplomacy, a large portion of the gameplay involves social skills. Players must show empathy, use natural language, and build relationships to win—a difficult task for a computer player. With this in mind, Meta asked, "Can we build more effective and flexible agents that can use language to negotiate, persuade, and work with people to achieve strategic goals similar to the way humans do?"

According to Meta, the answer is yes. Cicero learned its skills by playing an online version of Diplomacy on webDiplomacy.net. Over time, it became a master at the game, reportedly achieving "more than double the average score" of human players and ranking in the top 10 percent of people who played more than one game.


By Germaine: The science nerdlet

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