Unless it surrenders at the last minute
The French government has sent Google a bill for back taxes of 1.6 billion euros.
The move follows a half-hearted attempt by the British government to get a similar amount which was negotiated down to a pathetic $181.18 million.
Google’s tax optimisation techniques have made the European tax authorities look like idiots. While ordinary people pay a big chunk of their earnings to the authorities, Google was paying a few cents.
A finance ministry source has said that as far as France is concerned, back taxes concerning this company amount to 1.6 billion euros. Google is saying nothing but is trotting out the same line that the company obeyed tax rules in all countries where it operated.
French tax authority usually issues at least one preliminary assessment before its final assessment, which can be challenged in court if not accepted, tax advisers say.
Earlier this month, Finance Minister Michel Sapin ruled out striking a deal with Google, like the roast beef eating British government, saying the sums at stake in France were "far greater" than those in Britain.
France, Britain and other countries have long complained at the way Google, Yahoo! and other digital giants generate huge profits in their countries but have their tax base in countries such as Ireland, where corporate tax rates are far lower.
But the complaints have made little legal headway because EU tax law protects companies against paying tax in a country where they do not have what is termed a "permanent establishment".
Google reportedly partners with Vizio to integrate Chromecast-like features into new TVs
Google's Chromecast was one of the surprise hits of 2013. The innovative device inspired a smattering of "me-too" HDMI streaming sticks but its affordable price point of just $35 has led to sustained sales and popularity among both tech enthusiasts and mainstream consumers.
Now, Google is looking to take the next step by integrating Chromecast-like functionality into new television sets according to multiple sources as reported by Variety.
The search giant has reportedly partnered with Vizio on an initiative that'll completely replace traditional smart TV applications. Sources say Vizio may also replace the standard TV remote with an Android-based tablet that functions as a dedicated remote. It'll also feature apps from a variety of media services that are compatible with Chromecast and could even include a programming guide.
This wouldn't be the first time Google has partnered with Vizio on a television project. As the publication reminds us, the two briefly joined forces on a Roku-like set-top box using the Google TV platform in 2012.
As of September 2015, Google had sold more than 20 million Chromecast units – an impressive feat that doesn't include sales of its second-generation dongle released at the end of that month. Google also launched a new dongle specifically for audio, fittingly called Chromecast Audio.
Chromecast-infused sets from Vizio could arrive as early as this spring and if sources are correct, the partnership may not be exclusive to the budget TV maker.
Google Docs voice typing now includes editing and formatting
As someone who writes quite a bit, the idea of dictating text to an agreeable smart device has always seemed rather appealing. Now Google Docs, the popular online office suite, has been updated to support not just voice typing style dictation but voice commands for document editing and formatting. The end result is that Google Docs (in Chrome) users can now "capture ideas, compose a letter, or even write the next great novel" all without touching a keyboard.
Voice typing was launched by Google, as an included option in the Google Docs tools menu back in September last year. However having to reach for a keyboard and pointing device to do those all-too-common edits, changes, corrections and so on meant you couldn't just use your distant computing device from the sofa completely hands-free, for example. With the newly announced editing and formatting commands Google Docs should now be a much more hands-off affair, if that's the way you like it.
As an extension of Voice Typing, the new functionality is invoked in the same way - simply by selecting 'Voice Typing' in the tools menu of Docs in Chrome. However users now have a bevy of editing and formatting commands at their disposal. There's a large list of available commands here. And you can check through a commands list if your natural instinctive guess at a particular command proves fruitless, by saying "Voice commands help," during a session.
The new functionality sounds very useful, and looks it, in the demonstrative video above. So perhaps it will work for you, and it's probably worth giving it a run.
As a footnote I have tested various speech to text technologies over the years, but none have tempted me away from my trusty mechanical keyboards and mouse. I think the main problem is that most of the tech news and articles on HEXUS are so littered with acronyms and other non-dictionary terms and phrases that dictating to machines doesn't, by the end of the task, save any time.
Screw using a phone book to track down Sarah Connor, the next Terminator will just scan a bunch of pictures using Google's new neural network. Based on your pupil dilation, skin temperature, and motor functions, I calculate an 83% probability that you will be located and killed because of your stupid geotagged Facebook photos.
The results make for interesting reading. To measure the accuracy of their machine, they fed it 2.3 million geotagged images from Flickr to see whether it could correctly determine their location. "PlaNet is able to localize 3.6 percent of the images at street-level accuracy and 10.1 percent at city-level accuracy," say Weyand and co. What’s more, the machine determines the country of origin in a further 28.4 percent of the photos and the continent in 48.0 percent of them.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) have become fairly common these days and are often thrown at outspoken news sites. However, Google wants to help protect against that and has released ‘Project Shield’ which is designed to prevent DDOS attacks from affecting your network by rerouting traffic through Google’s web infrastructure.
Project Shield is being offered as a free tool, which aims to tell the difference between genuine traffic and the malicious kind.
This isn’t a tool usable by just anyone though, Google is looking at applications from news sites in particular as well as those monitoring politics and human rights. This means that individual blogs, businesses and gaming services won’t be able to access Project Shield, Google also requires sites applying to use the tool to offer a look at the traffic they receive to allow them to effectively filter malicious traffic.
Christopher Poole, the creator of 4Chan, has joined Google. Poole didn't say what exactly he would be doing for Google but he sounded pretty excited about the opportunity:
Today I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Google. When meeting with current and former Googlers, I continually find myself drawn to their intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm — as well as a universal desire to share it with others. I’m also impressed by Google’s commitment to enabling these same talented people to tackle some of the world’s most interesting and important problems. I can’t wait to contribute my own experience from a dozen years of building online communities, and to begin the next chapter of my career at such an incredible company.
Google's AlphaGo AI To Fight World's Go Champion Tonight
YouTube will stream live the five games between Google’s AlphaGo AI and the world champion at Go, Lee Sedol. It has been said for decades that true AI will arrive when it can finally beat humans at Go, and Google’s AI may be able to achieve that soon. The first game will begin today at 11pm ET on YouTube. The next four will follow over the next few days.
Go is a 2,500 year old game, played mostly in Asia, and it requires a high level of intuition as well as discipline from the player. The intuition requirement has made creating a Go AI so challenging in the past because it’s one of the human capabilities that machines haven’t come close to replicating well enough yet.
Intuition is sort of a “shortcut” our brain uses to calculate many possibilities in a split second and then give us a “good enough answer” to a certain problem that needs to be solved quickly. Until recently, AIs hadn’t been built like that. Instead, they had to calculate all the possible moves for a certain number of steps into the game. Then the AI would pick the best move out of those.
This is how chess AI has worked, for instance, as when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. However, unlike chess, which can have 20-30 possible moves at any given time, Go players have about ten times as many options. This quickly makes Go a much more complex game for a machine, because all of those possibilities need to be multiplied at each step. This means that a Go AI can’t beat a human by trying to “bruteforce” all potential future moves and then picking the best one.
With AlphaGo, Google has “taught” the AI 30 million games of Go, from which the AI “learned” how to play well, much like a human would. This gave AlphaGo a 57 percent chance to predict a human move. However, this meant it could still be beaten by humans. To improve it further, Google matched AlphaGo against itself, each version trying to beat the other, and each learning from the other’s mistakes and successes, until it evolved much further.
Earlier this year, AlphaGo managed to beat the European champion at Go, in five matches out of five. However, the world Go champion is supposed to be a much better player because Go is very popular in China, so he's been training with great players since childhood.
Chances are that Google’s AlphaGo will still end up beating him, because it’s likely that the AI has already improved dramatically since he beat the European champion 5-0. That’s how computers work, and even if Lee Sedol manages to beat it now at least 3 times out of 5, it's probably only a matter of time before the AI catches up.
"Right to be forgotten" now applies to all of Google's domains
Geolocation fences will be deployed to avert unwanted local searchers
In 2014, the European Union’s highest court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), ruled that Internet search engines like Google must be required to erase all webpage links to an individual’s search results in which personally identifiable information is deemed “inadequate” or “irrelevant” to a larger context of search inquiry. At first, the court order was only applicable to Google’s European Union-based search sites (see: Google.co.uk, Google.fr and Google.de, etc).
As of last Friday, however, the court ruling now extends to all of Google’s search domains, including Google.com.
On the surface, it would seem that Google is now allowing any individual the right to remove “inadequate” or “irrelevant” search results containing personally identifiable information, such as private property records, personal loan statements, and even gruesome or unsightly images associated with a business location that was purchased from a previous landowner.
For the last twenty-two months since the ruling, an existing loophole allowed EU citizens to view censored or delisted “right to be forgotten” search results when they visited google.com instead of their local Google domain (for instance, Google.fr).
Image credit: Bidness Etc.
In a blog post dated March 4th, Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, explained how the new rules apply to all multinational Google domains. The rules can be summarized in three paragraphs:
“The right to be forgotten — or, more accurately, the “right to delist” — was established by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014. It allows Europeans to ask search engines to delist certain links from the set of search results generated by a search query for their name.
Starting next week, in addition to our existing practice, we will also use geolocation signals (like IP addresses) to restrict access to the delisted URL on all Google Search domains, including google.com, when accessed from the country of the person requesting the removal. We’ll apply the change retrospectively, to all delistings that we have already done under the European Court ruling.
So for example, let’s say we delist a URL as a result of a request from John Smith in the United Kingdom. Users in the UK would not see the URL in search results for queries containing [john smith] when searching on any Google Search domain, including google.com. Users outside of the UK could see the URL in search results when they search for [john smith] on any non-European Google Search domain.”
Whether Google’s use of geofences is the proper method of social justice for satisfying online privacy advocates remains a highly disputed topic of contention. Nevertheless, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office previously stated in May 2014 during the court ruling that “there is no absolute right [under the ruling] to have information removed.”
Evidently, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) voted firmly in favor of a “right to be forgotten,” while one of Google’s own spokesmen flatly rejected the ruling. “This is a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general,” a Google spokesman told ArsTechnica in May 2014. At the time, Google claimed that the delisting of indexed information amounted to Internet censorship, as the company controls over 90 percent of the European search market.
In that same month, Google named the following as confirmed members of its expert advisory committee: Frank La Rue (UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression), Peggy Valcke (Director, University of Leuven Law School), Jose Luis Piñar (former Spanish DPA, now an academic), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), and Luciano Floridi (information ethics philosopher at Oxford Internet Institute). More information on Google's Advisory Council, including new members, can be found here.
Meanwhile, Google continues to allow global censorship solely for its operations in the United States. As SearchEngineLand pointed out last June, the company has been censoring US search results as far back as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and has long complied with this well-established copyright law. However, the site brings up a valid point. Suppose that “Foreign Country A” disagrees with political censorship demands that “Foreign Country B” has brought Google to court for. If Google loses and is obligated to remove worldwide search indexes on all its domains, “Foreign Country A” will effectively lose control of its own censorship rights. This is where the idea of IP-based geolocation fences comes into play. Assuming a user isn’t using an Internet proxy or VPN (a big assumption), Google will determine whether or not a user is located in the search data’s country of origin and censor access accordingly.
There are many variables in Google’s complex exchange with the European Court of Justice and it is an burgeoning avenue of online privacy consideration that will evidently require the help of many hundreds of independent privacy coalitions worldwide. In the meantime, the company’s “Right to be forgotten” webform for Google users in all 28 EU member states can be found here.
Google's AlphaGo AI has beaten Go champion Lee Se-dol in the first of a scheduled five matches, once again making AI history.
Google's DeepMind-powered AlphaGo artificial intelligence has successfully defeated champion Lee Se-dol in the first of a scheduled five matches, marking the first time a computer has beaten a player of his level.
Google unveiled AlphaGo back in late January as a demonstration of the possibilities promised by its DeepMind platform. Go has been a mainstay of artificial intelligence research for years, thanks to its complexity: where chess, which has had computers beating grand masters for some time, has 10-to-the-power-of-120 games, Go has 10-to-the-power-of-761. The result: brute-force solutions are out of the question, leaving researchers having to find ways to imbue programs with intelligence.
To prove the program's prowess, Google asked European Go champion Fan Hui to test it out. The results astounded AI researchers the world over: AlphaGo won five matches to zero, a world first. Now the company is facing a tougher challenger: 9-dan champion Lee Se-dol in a series of five matches, and things aren't looking great for the human side of the table. In the first match, AlphaGo once again triumphed with Lee conceding to his electronic opponent with just under half an hour left on the game clock.
'I was very surprised,' The Verge reports Lee saying after the match. 'I didn't expect to lose. I didn't think AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner. I enjoyed this game and look forward to the next. I think I failed on the opening layout so if I do a better job on the opening aspect I think I will be able to increase my probability of winning.'
Lee will play another four matches, scheduled for late tonight, Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday, against AlphaGo, with a $1 million prize at stake for the overall winner.
Google's AlphaGo Beats 'Go' World Champion In Historical Moment For AI
Google’s DeepMind-based AlphaGo AI managed to beat Lee Sedol, the world’s premiere Go player and 18-time world championship, in what represents a historical moment in the progress of artificial intelligence. Granted, the victory came in just the first match of five; the remainder will be played out over the next few days, through until March 15.
Lee Sedol seemed to have the upper hand for most of the game, until the last 20 minutes when AlphaGo gained a bigger lead on him. This may have happened because it’s harder for the AI to figure out an overwhelmingly winning strategy in such a complex game as Go. It can’t calculate too many movements ahead of time due to the enormous processing power that would require.
However, towards the end of the game, fewer moves are possible, which could mean it became much easier for AlphaGo to determine the best move at any given moment. Therefore, any mistake from Lee Sedol, no matter how small, could then be turned in a bigger and bigger advantage for AlphaGo as the game approached its conclusion.
Still, AlphaGo managed to hold its own with the world’s best Go Player for more than three hours. Perhaps if Sedol had taken a larger lead early on, he may been able to fend off the AI bot.
Even if Sedol wins all of the other four matches, Google still achieved a historical breakthrough in artificial intelligence with last night's win. It would then likely be only a matter of months or a year at most before AlphaGo and its DeepMind core, as well as the hardware processing power behind it, would improve enough to become unbeatable by any human player.
Since Google announced that its DeepMind AI can play and finish games from the 1970’s only about a year ago, the AI has already gone to play games such as Go and the 1990’s Doom video game. The improvement rate has been quite astonishing. The DeepMind AI is likely not too far behind being able to play any modern game in the same way a human would - by learning everything about the game from scratch.
The next match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol will happen today at the same time, 11pm ET. It will be interesting to see whether Lee Sedol will use a different, perhaps more aggressive, strategy early on against AlphaGo, now that he learned how the AI plays, in order to get a larger advantage early on.
Match 1 - Google DeepMind Challenge Match: Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo
AlphaGo AI Defeats Sedol Again, With 'Near Perfect Game'
Google’s Go-playing version of DeepMind AI, AlphaGo, managed to score yet another win against Lee Sedol, the 18-time world champion, in the second match out of a total of five. AlphaGo’s Near Perfect Game
Yesterday, Lee Sedol believed that AlphaGo didn’t do so well in the beginning, but the AI managed to squeeze a win against him towards the end of the game. In the second game, it was also Lee Sedol’s opportunity to take advantage of AlphaGo’s potential weaknesses after learning a little bit about its style. However, to his surprise, AlphaGo played a “near perfect game” this time.
“Yesterday, I was surprised, but today I am quite speechless. I would have to say, if you look at the way it was played, I admit that it was a very clear loss on my part. From the very beginning of the game, there was not a moment in time where I thought that I was leading the game,” Lee Sedol said in the post-game conference.
“Yesterday, as I was playing the game, I felt that AlphaGo played some problematic positions, but today I really feel that AlphaGo had played a near perfect game. There was not a moment that I thought AlphaGo’s moves were unreasonable,” he added.
At the conference he was also asked if he found any weaknesses in AlphaGo’s game, but he said that he lost the game because he couldn’t find any.
Sedol also expects that the next games are only going to become more difficult, possibly because AlphaGo becomes ever so slightly better after each game it plays. Therefore, he added that he would need to focus even more for the next games. He would also need to try and get an edge in the early game, when AlphaGo could be at its weakest, even though AlphaGo’s weakest moves could still be too good to be easily exploited. A Stronger Challenger?
Chinese Go Grandmaster Ke Jie, who some believe that in the past few years has been a better player than Lee Sedol, said that at this point in time, he would have a 60 percent chance of beating AlphaGo.
Google would likely not give everyone who says they can beat AlphaGo a chance to play five matches against the AI, but it could be interesting to see additional matches against other world-class players. However, this would have to happen soon, as even Ke Jie said that it may be a matter of months, or at most years, until even he couldn’t beat the AI anymore.
Ke Jie only became a 9-dan (the highest level in Go) player last year, and since then he defeated Lee Sedol with a score of 3-2 earlier this year.
The next match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol will be played on March 11, 11pm ET (March 12, 1pm KST).
Match 2 - Google DeepMind Challenge Match: Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo
Google Expands Right to be Forgotten to All Domains
Ever since it’s introduction, the EU’s right to be forgotten has been controversial and misguided to say the least. Under the law, Google and other search providers are forced to delist links to new stories that are no longer considered relevant or in the public interest. As if censoring information in just the EU domains is not enough, it looks like pressure is on Google to expand the delisting. According to Google, European regulators have compelled Google to delist links on all Google search domains, not just the EU ones.
According to Google’s blog post, the new strategy is to delist links when a user exposes geolocation data from an EU location. This means EU users will no longer have the option of using Google.com for instance, to easily bypass the delisting. In order to gain access to an uncensored version of Google, users will have to use a non-EU VPN though that may not be safe if regulators have their way.
From Google’s perspective, this isn’t much different from what they do now as geo-location data is already collected when a user goes to Google. Instead of triggering the delisting based on which Google search domain is used, the delisting is triggered by geo-location data. The one benefit from this is that instead of deleting from all EU Google domains, the deleting only occurs if the searcher geolocation data is from the same country as the requestee of the delisting.
Google’s amazing Go-playing AI, AlphaGo, has convincingly beaten Lee Sedol in the Google DeepMind Challenge series, shutting out the reigning human champion in only the third match, bringing the score to 3-0. Just because AlphaGo has won doesn’t mean the series will end here, though, the remaining two matches will still be played out though the chance of Sedol winning even a single match is beginning to look slim.
AlphaGo previously beat Fan Hui, European Go champion and 2-dan master 5-0, yet despite this Sedol expected that he would be able to win the series 5-0 or 4-1 in his favour. This is the first time that such a high-ranked Go player had taken on an AI, so regardless of the winner, this would have been a historic event for AI. More importantly than the $1 million prize money, DeepMind’s AI claiming victory is a landmark event for AI development, with the complexity of Go making it impossible for a machine to play at such high tiers despite similar breakthroughs in Chess and other games.
Demis Hassabis @demishassabis #AlphaGo won game 3 and the match! Historic moment. In complete awe of Lee Sedol’s incredible genius, and proud of the amazing AlphaGo team!
Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO of DeepMind was left “stunned and speechless” by the AI’s performance in the final match and felt that Lee Sedol had stretched the AI to its limits in the last 3 matches. He also reminded people that it was about the bigger picture, with the aim of learning from Lee Sedol’s skill and ingenuity and seeing how AlphaGo would learn from him. In the press conference following the match, Sedol apologised for his poor performance and wished that he had been able to put on a stronger showing and stated that the pressure that AlphaGo was able to put on him in the final match was like none he had faced before. Sedol has far from given up on beating AlphaGo as while it plays a strong game, he believes it is still not on par with the “Divine Gods” of Go and is still intending to give his all to the final matches and urges fans to continue to watch with interest.
It is important to remember, that while AlphaGo’s claim to fame may be the game of Go, the methods used in its development are general purpose, meaning that similar AI could be applied to solving key problems for humanity and help to advance numerous scientific fields. The remaining two matches of the series will be played on Sunday and Tuesday, where we will see if AlphaGo will manage a repeat of its past performance or whether Sedol can find a weakness he can use to win the remaining games.
Google’s AlphaGo computer program has won a third and decisive encounter with a top-ranked player of the Chinese board game Go in a victory marking significant developments in artificial intelligence.
Lee Sedol, who is the world’s second best player of the strategy game, lost three games in a row in Seoul this week, with the latest AlphaGo victory on Saturday handing Google the best-of-five match.
“I’ve never played a game where I felt this amount of pressure, and I wasn’t able to overcome this pressure,” Lee said at a post-game press conference.
Go has simple rules, but is highly intuitive and complex in practice. Mastering it has been an exceptionally difficult task for even the world’s best IT designers.
“We came here to challenge Lee, to learn from him and see what AG was capable of,” said Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google’s artificial intelligence business, DeepMind, which created the program.
“AlphaGo controlled the momentum over more than four hours of gameplay, with Lee struggling to maintain territory against the program’s creative approach. Google DeepMind taught AlphaGo to recognise the optimal move in thousands of possible scenarios.”
AlphaGo’s dominance amounts to a significant, and much faster than previously expected, advance in artificial intelligence.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who was in Seoul to watch the third match, described Go as a beautiful game and said he was excited the company had been able to “instil that kind of beauty in our computers”.
Michael Redmond, one of the match’s commentators and a professional Go player, said some people initially doubted AlphaGo’s abilities. “After three matches and three straight victories, we are convinced,” he said.
AlphaGo won $1m in prize money, which Google DeepMind said would be donated to charities, including Unicef and Go organisations.
“AlphaGo controlled the game amazingly,” said Fan Hui, the European Go champion who was the first professional player to lose to the program when he played it in October.
Hui said the advances in artificial intelligence appeared to bode well for the future of the ancient game.
“We now have this new way of learning about Go. And look how many people are watching this now. More and more people are interested in Go now.”
Google Invites Users To Ride Shotgun In Mobile Research Labs, To Help Shape The Future Of Products
The amount of research that goes on inside of Google's walls (and out) at any given time is nothing short of amazing. You can be sure much of that research revolves around the mobile market, as its Android operating system didn't reach super stardom through sheer luck. With its latest move, however, Google is really taking its mobile research to heart. In fact, Google employees will soon be boarding a company van and taking a six-week trip across the United States in an attempt to lure folks in to provide their valuable insight and feedback on Google products.
On the side of this van is a simple message: "Shape the future of Google." During its travel, this van will pass through seven states, hitting high-traffic areas to get as much feedback as possible.
image: http://hothardware.com/ContentImages...Google-Van.jpg Credit: Associated Press Opting into this research study is not going to be for the feint of heart; a session could last anywhere between 15 and 90 minutes. Fortunately, Google will reward anyone who takes part with gift cards for Google's services, as well as a Google t-shirt. Google expects that about 500 people total will be requested to partake in this research, so if you have your chance, you're going to be part of a small group.
Perhaps more intriguing than a t-shirt is the fact that those who provide their feedback could be treated to examples of what Google has en route for Android, or the company's other products. Perhaps there will be a glimpse at Android N?
What could be most interesting about all of this is that Google still finds value in this old-school way of conducting research. With its online presence, it'd take little effort on the company's part to do this kind of research on the Web. But there's probably something to be said about the usefulness of being able to see how people react to certain things rather than try to interpret what they're thinking through text. Either way, this could prove to be an interesting experience for some 500 people. And who doesn't want a cool Google t-shirt?
Demis Hassabis @demishassabis
Lee Sedol wins game 4!!! Congratulations! He was too good for us today and pressured #AlphaGo into a mistake that it couldn’t recover from
According to Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, AlphaGo made a fatal mistake on move 79, which it only realised on move 87. By that point, however, it was too late, and Lee took advantage.
Hassibis went on to explain that AlphaGo uses an adaptive algorithm, allowing it to revise its strategy in real-time. That system, however, got AlphaGo into a bit of a muddle. “For us this loss is very valuable. We’re not sure what happened yet,” Hassabis said, according to The Verge.
After receiving a rapturous applause in the post-match press conference after the game, Lee remarked that “I’ve never been congratulated so much just because I won one game!” He added that, following his prediction before the series began that he would win 5-0, or 4-1 at worst, this win did mean a lot to him.
It looks as though Google will be amending its contracts with Russian smartphone manufacturers and paying a fine after losing this appeal. Are we taking bets on how big the fine will be?
The Moscow Arbitration court on Monday rejected an appeal from Google and upheld a ruling that the U.S. firm broke anti-monopoly laws by abusing its dominant position with its Android mobile platform, Russia's competition watchdog said. FAS, the watchdog, ruled last September that Google had broken the law by requiring pre-installation of certain applications on mobile devices running on Android, following a complaint by Russia's Yandex.
Lee Sedol Wins Fourth Match Against AlphaGo AI (Update: AlphaGo Beats Sedol 4-1)
Update, 3/15/16, 8:35am PT: AlphaGo won the fifth and final match against Lee Sedol, the 18-time world champion at Go. Yesterday, AlphaGo also received an honorary 9-dan rank, which is reserved for "divine players" such as Sedol. The fifth and final match was more intense than the other four, as AlphaGo made one major mistake during the game. However, it recovered and managed to catch up to, and then beat, Sedol. Although Sedol lost to an AI, the five matches between the two helped bring global attention to the game of Go. In that sense, it's a win for the Go community, as more people become interested in learning and playing Go. Ultimately, it's a win for humanity that we've created artificial intelligence that can learn as humans do and then beat them at Go, one of the hardest games for AI. This artificial intelligence can now be put to better use in healthcare or in other important areas, where it could solve major problems that humans can't or have been too slow to solve.
Match 5 - Google DeepMind Challenge Match: Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo
Original article:
Over the weekend, Lee Sedol played two more matches against Google’s AlphaGo AI, losing in the first one, but scoring a surprising and much needed win for Sedol’s and other Go players’ morale. AlphaGo Wins Best Three Out Of Five
On Saturday (South Korean time), AlphaGo scored the third successive win against Lee Sedol, which means the AI already has a majority of wins out of the five planned matches. Sedol has therefore also lost the $1 million prize.
For the third game, Sedol looked for weaknesses in AlphaGo’s play and tried to open in a more aggressive way to unbalance the AI. The game became more exciting, but eventually Sedol ran out of time way before AlphaGo did, and he had to resign. Fourth Match: Sedol Wins First Game
Sedol managed to win his fourth match., which was no doubt a relief to the many professional Go players watching the game and proved that AlphaGo did have weaknesses. Some attributed the win to a “genius move” on Sedol’s part (move 78). Others attributed it to a play error on AlphaGo’s part during the subsequent set of moves, which were deemed surprisingly weak by other professional Go commentators.
After almost four hours had past, AlphaGo was also running out of time, and it had already made too many mistakes after Sedol’s move 78. Its probability of winning had dropped considerably, and Google’s AlphaGo engineers programmed it to resign if its chances of winning dropped below 20 percent. This would be more in line to how human Go players resign after they feel their chance of success is too low, rather than continuing to drag the game out. AlphaGo then resigned, giving Sedol his sole win in the series.
Sedol said that this one win was very important to him, especially after losing three times consecutively to AlphaGo:
"If today I was, let's say, winning three consecutive games and if I had lost one single game it would have really hurt tremendously. But because I lost three matches and I was able to get one single win, I think this one win is so valuable I would not exchange this with anything in the world," Sedol said in the post-match conference.
Humans Can Still Win At Go (For Now)
The founder of DeepMind, the company that created the DeepMind AI behind AlphaGo, said in the post-match conference that AlphaGo’s defeat is valuable because now the team will get to see where the AI still has some weaknesses and improve it further.
In a bigger sense, this victory by Sedol could also mean that no matter how “smart” general artificial intelligence becomes, there may always be some weaknesses that can be exploited by humans, even if they would be increasingly harder to detect.
The final match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo will be streamed live on YouTube tonight at 12am ET (1pm KST, March 15).
The AlphaGo AI created by Google's DeepMind division yesterday lost its first Go match to world champion Lee Sedol in a five-game series. Commentator Song Taegon remarked that Sedol had developed a better understanding of his opponent, making for a highly anticipated game 5. Sedol was beaten again, although it seems to have been a much tighter game, with commentators going back and forth right until the end about who was on top.
"It was difficult to say at what point AlphaGo was ahead or behind," said Michael Redmond, 9-dan, American commentator. "A close game throughout. AlphaGo made what looked like a mistake with move 48, similar to the mistake in Game Four in the middle of the board. After that AlphaGo played very well in the middle of the board, and the game developed into a long, very difficult end game."
With victory in hand, Google DeepMind will donate $1 million to UNICEF, science, technology, engineering, and math charities, and Go organizations.
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YouTube will stream live the five games between Google’s AlphaGo AI and the world champion at Go, Lee Sedol. It has been said for decades that true AI will arrive when it can finally beat humans at Go, and Google’s AI may be able to achieve that soon. The first game will begin today at 11pm ET on YouTube. The next four will follow over the next few days.
Google's AlphaGo AI has beaten Go champion Lee Se-dol in the first of a scheduled five matches, once again making AI history.
Google’s DeepMind-based AlphaGo AI managed to beat Lee Sedol, the world’s premiere Go player and 18-time world championship, in what represents a historical moment in the progress of artificial intelligence. Granted, the victory came in just the first match of five; the remainder will be played out over the next few days, through until March 15.
Google’s Go-playing version of DeepMind AI, AlphaGo, managed to score yet another win against Lee Sedol, the 18-time world champion, in the second match out of a total of five.
Demis Hassabis @demishassabis 
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