Intersection in culture and law

Honestly, there isn't much intersection between computational complexity and culture or law as of now, but there will be much more in the future. With the speeds at which technology is improving, increasing the computer's ability make complex decisions, smart artificial intelligence isn't so far-fetched after all. CGP Grey, a producer on YouTube, made an excellent video explaining the things to come.

Computers are slowly taking over jobs that humans used to do years ago. Self driving cars aren't the future, they're here now. It won't be long before taxis, trucks, or buses will soon be replaced by robots. The first autonomous trucks are already been driven around on highways in United States. It would not be a surprise if these changes are met with resistance. Perhaps laws will be passed restricting the use of automation in favor of actual people. As computers take over the job market, millions of people will be out of jobs with no place to work at. The lives of those in the future will certainly be different from world we live in now.

If the collapse of the economic system isn't bad enough, Bill Gates and Elon Musk along with hundreds of other computer scientists signed an open letter warning about the rise of super intelligent robots which pose a threat to the existence of humanity sometime in the future. However, all of this is just a speculation of the things to come and not everything will be as bleak as this. The things we find hard to solve now will be almost trivial to the technology we will have in the future. The rise of automation is inevitable and it's our job to make the best use of these things to come. If we are able to overcome these hurdles, the future will certainly be bright for us.

References

Coming Soon To A Highway Near You: A Semi Truck With A Brain. (2015, May 10). Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/05/10/405598189/coming-soon-to-a-highway-near-you-a-semi-truck-with-a-brain

Readhead, H. (2015, January 29). Bill Gates joins Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk in warning of A.I. dangers. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://metro.co.uk/2015/01/29/bill-gates-joins-stephen-hawking-and-elon-musk-in-artificial-intelligence-warning-5041966/

Solving heads-up limit hold’em poker

A game of Texas hold 'em. Image from Wikipedia.

From one of my previous posts, I talked about the poker playing computer Claudico as it played against human opponents for nearly two weeks. The results came in with the four human players winning $732,713 over the computer out of $170 million that was bet during play. However, the number is very insignificant compared to the $170 million played so the scientists behind Claudico is considering that this might be a tie. Humans are still better at imperfect information games than computers but not by much. It may only take a little longer for computers to master it.

On January 9th, 2015, "Heads-up limit hold’em poker is solved" was published in the Science journal as the first article to prove that a "nontrivial imperfect-information game played competitively by humans" can be beaten by a computer (Bowling, Burch, Johanson, & Tammelin, 2015). The difference between Claudico and research done here is the type of poker been played. Claudico is programmed to deal with heads-up no limit hold’em poker where bets and raises have no limit. This means Claudico has to deal with 10¹⁶¹ information sets, or possible outcomes. Heads-up limit hold’em poker limits how much can be bet and reduces the amount of possible outcomes down to 3.19 × 10¹⁴. Even though this amount seems trivial compared to Claudico, it's a first step into solving the world of imperfect games.

The paper uses a method called Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR). It approximates the Nash Equilibrium, the best strategy of winning the game, by using two regret-minimizing algorithms. The program plays itself and calculates the detrimental effects of not picking the best option. It tries to minimize the negative effects, regrets, in order to find the best deterministic strategy. The problem was storing the regret values of all the possible outcomes. To do so requires 262 TB of storage. To fix this problem, Bowling et al. truncated the decimals into integers and implemented compression methods to bring down the required storage down to a workable 17 TB.

References

Bowling, M., Burch, N., Johanson, M., & Tammelin, O. (2015). Heads-up limit hold'em poker is solved. Science, 347(6218), 145-149. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1259433
 
Maynard, J. (2015, May 10). CMU AI Claudico Is Good At Poker But Not Good Enough For World's Best Human Players. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://www.techtimes.com/articles/51946/20150510/cmu-ai-claudico-good-poker-enough-worlds-best-human-players.htm

Walters, K., & Watts, E. (2015, April 24). Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/april/computer-faces-poker-pros.htm

Stephen Cook, one of the forefathers of computational complexity theory

Professor Stephen Cook is a major contributor in the field of computational complexity. Currently, he's working as a professor at the University of Toronto, in both Department of Computer Science and Mathematics. Cook started with a Bachelor's degree at University of Michigan in 1961 and received his Masters and PhD from Harvard just fives years later. He has being working at the University of Toronto since 1970.

Over the course of 50 years he published numerous papers regarding computational complexity. Most notably, "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures" in 1971 proving the existence of the NP-Complete class and coming up with the method of Polynomial-time reduction. Cook proved the existence of NP-Completeness by showing the Boolean satisfiability problem is NP-Complete. The work he has done on Polynomial-time reduction is also notable. Polynomial-time reduction method compares two similar problems, if a polynomial solution can be found from one of them; a solution exists for the other. Other work he has done include contributions to programming languages and logic, parallel computation, and artificial intelligence.

In 1982, Cook was awarded the ACM Turing Award for his contributions to the computational community. The Turing Award is the most prestigious award given to recognize the highest contributions in the field of computer science. By laying the foundations of NP-Complete, Cook had opened the gates to the most actively researched computer science topic to date, the P vs NP problem. The question whether or not P = NP still remains unsolved and the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) has offered up to $1 million for anyone who can come up with a solution. More information is available on P vs NP in my first blog.

References

Cook, S. (n.d.). Stephen A. Cook. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sacook/

Cook, S. (1983). An overview of computational complexity. Communications of the ACM, 400-408.

Dblp: Computer science bibliography. (n.d.). Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/c/Cook:Stephen_A=.html

P vs NP Problem. (n.d.). Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://www.claymath.org/millenium-problems/p-vs-np-problem