Somebody sent me a link to an article about Computer Go, appeared in the “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. It’s quite unbelievable that the author (who was involved in the Deep Blue development) wrote this overall article about the subject, mostly focusing the solution in brute-force… “Brute-force computation has eclipsed humans in chess, and it could soon do the same in this ancient Asian game”. He is saying something like… “just wait 10 years”. He shows no idea about the real state-of-art of Computer Go, the new approaches, or the ways to almost avoid brute-force. While he waits for faster hardware, other people research in interesting ways to solve or simplify the problem, in a more real AI focus. Did I tell you he works for Microsoft? 😉
Even I totally disagree with the article, I thought for a moment about joining IEEE, just to receive this magazine. But when I was in the process of registering, after a silly survey, I suddenly read this:
We see you are using Firefox … Our site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows. We recommend you download now.
What? Are you telling me I can’t use Firefox? And you are recommending me an old browser… I can’t take these people seriously. They’ve spent some time developing a browser detector, instead of developing a cross-browser website. I’m not in… I’ll not join.