Metastable

Fracture mechanics theory in college was never my forte, whether that was because it was taught by a particularly dull professor who thought he had a loud voice or because it was just a dry subject. Rule 1: If a crack forms in a solid material, it’s because the material is stressed, and the crack will propagate in the direction that reduces that stress. Rule 2: Cracks will move towards each other. This sounds simple enough; it’s when you try to show simple things in math that they get both complicated and boring.

Now, what would happen when a material is stressed such that two collinear cracks form (with a small offset) and move towards each other? You’d expect the cracks to meet, form one even bigger crack and break the material in two if need be. That’s exactly what doesn’t happen: as the two cracks meet head-on or nearly head-on, they briefly repel each other – as if they were electric charges – move some distance away and then resume their attractive relationship.  Fracture mechanics theory doesn’t account for this behaviour, although it accounts for a lot otherwise, and it’s been an outstanding problem in mechanical engineering.

Physicists from France and Russia have found a potential way out in the form of scale-dependent interactions. They created computer simulations of cracks and then deployed finite element analysis – a technique that divvies up a material into really small constituents, individually measures the forces acting on each one of them and then integrates them all to generate the big picture. They found that the repulsive behaviour was a product of mechanical forces that depended on two numbers only: the length of the cracks before they entered the repulsive mode (called L) and the distance, or offset, between the cracks (called x and y for the respective axes).

The repulsive mode comes into play if the distance between the cracks as they approach each other becomes smaller than 1% of L. At this point, how much they repel each other by, represented by an angle θ, depends on x and y. Using their predictions, the physicists were able to model cracks with θ up to 18º – a good sign in case anyone was wondering whether the scale-dependent interactions they’d found actually worked, although independent experiments will have to verify it. Nonetheless, that fracture behaviour depends on the scale across which interactions occur and not on the overall size of the cracks is fascinating because one can now explain features both very large and very small using the same theory.

… our analysis could help in understanding why spreading centres observed in geological situations and involving hundreds of kilometres long ridges interacting on a scale of a few hundred meters, commonly exhibit a repulsive deviation of their trajectories before overlapping [9,30,31]. The ability to model at small scales the attraction-repulsion transition during propagation of en passant cracks is especially relevant for industrial applications that involve a control of cracking behaviour such as in mechanical sensors [28] or stretchable electronics [27].

The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters on June 20, 2018.

I could find this paper on arXiv, which doesn’t happen often, so thanks to Sci-Hub for getting me covered!

Physicists created a Bose-Einstein condensate of chromium atoms, ensured the atomic spins were each aligned 90º to the condensate’s plane, applied a magnetic field gradient and separated the atoms by a small but relatively significant distance, fired radio pulses at the condensate to get the atoms’ spins to rotate – and then measured the way the atoms were spinning. They found that instead of each atom having its own direction of spin, they all exhibited a collective spin that they tried to maintain!

This is fascinating because such behaviour has previously only been observed in solids in liquids, where atoms are more closely situated, and not in a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is more like a dilute gas. That it has been observed in the latter points to the presence of quantum mechanical phenomena that are reaching across atoms to influence them to behave collectively.

A Bose-Einstein condensate is a group of particles that has been cooled to such a low temperature that each particle behaves like just one kind of particle, the boson. In this state, all of the particles acquire the same quantum numbers and coexist to form a new phase of matter: the condensate.

There are four kinds of quantum numbers for every particle, and each particle can’t have the same set of four numbers as that of another particle in the same system. E.g. all the electrons in an atom have different values for each of these numbers. However, particles called bosons (such as the photon) flout this rule when cooled to a really low temperature, when they form a Bose-Einstein condensate: a system of particles that all have the same four quantum numbers, i.e. occupying the same lowest energy state.

In this state, all the particles in the condensate together behave like a liquid-like fluid while being more similar to a dilute gas. Physically this may sound boring but in quantum mechanics, a Bose-Einstein condensate is known to have unique properties that particles don’t otherwise exhibit.

In the experiment described above, physicists created a Bose-Einstein condensate by cooling approx. 40,000 chromium atoms to 400 nK and then confining them using an optical trap. While atoms aren’t exactly particles, and are instead imagined to be composed of them, the Stern-Gerlach experiment showed in 1922 that atomic-scale systems, including atoms, do exhibit quantum mechanical properties as a whole.

The chromium atoms’ spins – for simplicity’s sake imagined to be the atoms’ individual orientation – were aligned perpendicular to the axis of the rugby-ball-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate. Next, using a technique similar to the Stern-Gerlach experiment, the physicists applied a graded, i.e. uneven, magnetic field along the plane of the condensate. This caused each atom’s spin to become coupled with – or affected by – those of its neighbours such that all the atoms were encouraged to have the same alignment (keeping the condensate in its ground state). The graded magnetic field also caused the atoms to move apart slightly. Finally, radio pulses were fired at the atoms such that they produced a torque that caused the atoms to spin, i.e. change their orientation.

When the spins fall out of alignment, the spin coupling should also fall out of alignment, and the atoms would all become aligned differently. … at least this is what the physicists thought would happen. It didn’t. The atoms were found to be reorienting under the radio pulses’ assault in a spin wave. It was if each atom’s spin was holding the hands of the two spins on either side of it and refusing to let go, causing the atoms to move together.

In this video, looking upon the surface of the liquid is akin to looking upon a sea of atoms in the condensate. Imagine you were looking at the waterbody edge on. The ripples would be the atomic spins bobbing up and down because of the radio pulses, which would be the metaphorical stones thrown in the water. According to the physicists, when the magnetic field’s gradient is smaller, the shape of the bobbing motion – a.k.a. the spin wave – would more look like the graph below:

This is the first time such a phenomenon has been observed in a Bose-Einstein condensate and more so in a dilute gas. In their effort to understand what could be causing this so-called collective spin mode, the physicists also found some interesting connections. As they write in their preprint paper:

Although complex oscillatory behaviours are obtained when b [the magnetic field gradient] is large, at low gradients we observe a rather simple damped oscillatory behaviour for both the population dynamics and the separation [between atoms], … The amplitude of oscillation also depends on b, and vanishes for b → 0. … These observations indicate that the interaction with magnetic field gradients has excited a collective mode which couples the [condensate’s] spin degrees of freedom to [its] spatial degrees of freedom. (emphasis mine)

Even more interestingly, according to the physicists, the condensate under these specially engineered circumstances behaved like a ferrofluid, a type of fluid that, in the words of Physics World, “becomes strongly magnetised when placed in a magnetic field”. They realised this was the case because they found that they could predict the condensate’s behaviour using the rules of ferrofluid hydrodynamics.

The News Minute, July 6, 2018:

Terracotta handicrafts and vessels, bamboo trinkets, organic grains, herbs and pulses up for sale. Children running around playing with natural stick and wheel toys made using Palmyra palm leaves. An array of fresh and dried herbs displayed along with lemon and betel leaves on a table to welcome guests. Green flex boards made of cotton and paper welcoming guests and announcing the wedding set to take place. Logeswaran and Geetanjali Ritika’s wedding on Thursday in Tirupur came with a twist – it was 100% green, right from the decorations to the plates used and the gifts given to guests.

What does it mean to be green? In this couple’s wedding, lots of single-use products were replaced with those made of organic, presumably recyclable, materials. This is admirable because the substitution is bound to have cut down on a lot of waste without diminishing the wedding experience. However, was it ‘green’?

The ongoing geological period is actually the Holocene, but a portion encompassing the last seven or eight decades has been dubbed the Anthropocene for the drastic ways in which humankind has modified Earth’s surface, atmospheric and ecological characteristics. One major driver of this change has been in the form of a non-equitable consumption and distribution of resources, perpetrated equally by colonialism and capitalism.

In this world, weddings have come to signify an important form of status-signalling, especially in India. The bigger the wedding, the more the materials purchased and consumed, the higher the social status of its organisers. Perhaps the most gross display of such wealth was in 1995, when J. Jayalalithaa’s nephew V.N. Sudhakaran wedded Sivaji Ganesan’s granddaughter Satyavati.

The purportedly ‘green’ wedding described above is no exception either. While various paraphernalia were constructed with organic materials, there was still all of the consumerism on display. Going green doesn’t demand that we substitute non-recyclable synthetic assets with recyclable organic ones; instead, it demands that we cut down on our consumption.

Without doing so, ‘going green’ is simply a band-aid, a very near-term solution to a problem whose consequences will be playing out, as well as will be ameliorable, only on the geologic timescale. In fact, I doubt it is a solution at all because the cost of our actions as consumers must be calculated along the entire value chain instead of at specific points on it, and battling the effects of climate change certainly entails that we focus on and evaluate our impact in the long-term.

The good news is that such behaviour begins with the individual; the bad news is that it is never confined to the individual. For example, consider the following excerpt:

“We harvested rainwater to serve drinking water to guests and for the food prepared for the wedding. Over 10 varieties of vegetables – from carrots and onions to chillies – were used to make the wedding feast, all of which was cultivated organically in the houses of Vanathukul Tirupur members itself,” [the bride’s father] adds.

Kumar says that even the food that was prepared conformed to the organic theme of the wedding and a vast array of herbal teas, organic gravies and homemade traditional sweets were served.

“We ditched ice-creams and beedis (paan), and instead served herbal tea for dessert. The wedding menu included maize potato bonda, mini banana blossom vadai for starters and idly, horse gram sambhar rice, tomato sambhar and other preparations for mains. The dessert spread had palm sugar dry ginger milk, herbal tea, mint lemon juice, wild banana, betel nut and slaked lime,” Duraisamy adds.

All of these products must have been grown, diverted off the market, transported to the location, cooked and served. The value chain stretches from the growing to the serving, not simply to the serving. Fixating on the latter only produces spectacles, and gives us a false sense of accomplishment because what we have accomplished is not environmentally friendly. If it had to be, then a register marriage would have sufficed.

(Curiously, the bride’s father appears to have gifted the groom with a cow and a calf “instead of the usual luxury car or bike”. Ergo this patriarchic ritual is firmly in place, only that vehicles have been switched out with cattle. And we all know the patriarchy restricts our ability to adapt to a warmer world.)

Of course, the ritualisation and celebration of culture is a very important part of being human, and what the ‘green wedding’ described above has essentially done is played a balancing act between zero consumption and the adherence to one’s traditional values. This is why my complaint begins and ends with the labels. Do what you can to protect the environment but don’t call it green unless you’ve brought consumption down to zero because only that, eventually, is green.

The awareness that weddings and similar events are hubristic is laudable but it is also expected of all of us as we plod through the 21st century. We must move past expecting laurels for every little and/or fragmented act of such ‘green-signalling’ and we must move past valorising such acts unless they go all the way. Until then, the Anthropocene will only be the Narcisscene.

Good fantasy fiction – rather simply fantasy fiction – is defined not by a freewheeling re-imagination of reality but one that is re-imagined as much as contained in a self-consistent, coherent and substantive framework that is logical, cultural, political, aesthetic or a combination of some/all of them.

With that in mind, I’m going to take a look at the regulations in India concerning the construction and situation of helipads. This came up as a topic of conversation between two friends and myself yesterday morning over tea, after one of them wondered aloud about what it would be like to have his own helipad. The other person replied saying perhaps one could be constructed at the end of a boom extended from the top of a building, dangled on chains of steal.

If you read this in a fantasy fiction book that claims to be serious, would you believe it? The reason good fantasy has to be situated in some system of self-consistent, and preferably generalisable, rules is so that (a) the physical consequences of the world-building paradigm don’t distract from or conflict with the book’s principal narrative and (b) the aesthetic spirit of the world’s (natural and synthetic) infrastructure isn’t out of place vis a vis the tone and tenor of the book.

So what kind of world would it have to be where helipads and landing sites for VTOL aircraft in general are hung from overhanging structures on tall buildings? (I’ve always thought this is a useful perspective on world-building exercises: to ask yourself what you can tell about the zeitgeist of a fantasy world based on what it looks, smells and feels like. The most fruitful world-building exercises are those that axiomatically give away the story as well.)

In our real world, here are some of the more important rules that apply apropos helipads (quoted verbatim from here):

1. The site to be used for temporary helicopter operations should be a level piece of well-drained ground, either good grass or solid surface free from loose stones, debris.
2. Before undertaking any such flight, the helicopter operator and/ or his pilot must satisfy himself by his physical inspection on ground/ air and/ or obtaining required information from district authorities that surroundings are free from obstacles and the site suitable for operations of type of helicopter being operated and there is sufficient open space to force land, if necessary.
3. At least one 12 kg [dry chemical powder] fire extinguisher shall be available at the landing/ take-off area, clearly marked and situated so that it can be used quickly in case of fire. A first aid box shall be placed within easy reach and clearly marked. The box shall be maintained in accordance with the instructions and its contents shall be supplemented whenever used.
4. While manoeuvring the helicopter in a low hover, helicopter should be manoeuvred in such a manner that its centreline is not closer to any objects/building than 1.5 × rotor diameter or 30 metres, whichever is the greater.
5. Approach and departure shall be performed within sectors which as far as possible shall be in direct continuation of the take-off and landing directions, respectively. The sectors shall be without obstacles in the entire width and in a vertical distance of at least 35 ft from the approach and departure surfaces.
6. Approach and departure shall be performed in a way that forced landing can be carried out on a suitable emergency landing area at any time, unless a helicopter with one engine out of operation is capable of clearing any obstacle in the sector with a clearance of at least 35 feet.
7. The minimum dimensions of the TLOF [touch-down and lift-off area] shall be 2B × 2B, where B equals the wheel base or the side base of the helicopter whichever is more, of the helicopter used. A TLOF shall be capable of supporting the weight of the helicopter intended to be used.
8. TLOF shall be encompassed by a FATO [final approach and take-off area]. The minimum dimensions of the FATO shall be 1.5A × 1.5A, where A equals the maximum overall length of the helicopter used. This area shall be without obstructions. The surface shall be suitable for forced landings and free from loose objects, which may endanger the safe performance of the flight.

With these rules in mind, it would still be possible to go with the boom-borne helipad idea but it would be a remarkably silly-looking thing, installed that way either because… actually I can’t think of anything other than ‘because’. The mind that came up with that must be truly remarkable.

I’ve been in Delhi for three days, and for the last two of which I’ve been house-hunting and then buried in office work. While I was trawling through dozens of Facebook posts and items on Magicbricks and 99acres looking for advertisements of 1 or 2 BHK apartments fitting my budget, a voice in my head kept reminding me that I should prepare for a notorious weeks-long hunt.

Too many people have told me that house-hunting in Delhi can be particularly murderous. I remember when two of my colleagues were forced to back out from multiple offers when they were house-hunting last year – one because he didn’t belong to the right caste and the other because she was a journalist. What if I was going to find the perfect place only for an asshole of a landlord to enquire if I was a Brahmin or not? Alternatively, what if a landlord was going to okay my application because he had inferred my caste status from my name?

In light of these barriers, I asked various people for the cumulative number of houses they checked before finding one they liked as well as for which they were, somehow, “qualified”. Based on responses from seven people who’d been house-hunting in Delhi between 2012 and 2018, the average seemed to be eight houses.

But as fate would have it, my count is one: the first house I visited yesterday ticked all the boxes, including proximity to the house of a colleague with whom I can carpool to and from work. I have my fingers crossed that it works out and that I’m able to move in sans hassle by the month’s end.

I’ve made two mistakes – both concerning Orson Scott Card’s quadrology and both nominal – in today’s post, and which I have now rectified. I ask that you revisit/refresh that post to read the updated text. The book I first quoted was Children of the Mind, it was actually Xenocide; the two characters I’d made references to were Han Qing-jao and Si Wang-mu, they were supposed to be Han Fei-tzu and Han Qing-jao. Apologies and thanks.

I’ve missed writing my posts for three days straight. 🙈 I don’t know about you but I’ve certainly let myself down. I have a trove of excuses but I’m sure none of them qualify.

Today is Higgs Day. I’m not sure the name is fitting: the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on this day in 2012; the particle itself had been discovered in late 2011, while further experimental confirmation concluded in January 2013. Perhaps designating a single day as ‘Higgs Day’ serves to write and share popular articles about the goddamned particle, but it pays to remember that particles are not discovered on one day. In fact, one of the foundational premises of the Large Hadron Collider was to provide the long-overdue experimental data of the Higgs boson’s existence, and it took over a decade to plan and build the machine.

I asked @AboutTheSouffle yesterday whether anything had transpired in the last six years concerning this particle that was worth writing home about, or in fact in the last one year: for the five years before, there have been clockwork articles every 12 months about what physicists need to do next. The reason such an impetus exists is known semi-popularly as the nightmare scenario: wherein more elusive particles that physicists had expected the LHC to find haven’t shown up in the data. As a result, they have had to confront the theory of fundamental particles they have been working with for decades – the Standard Model – and look for deformities in its metaphorical façade.

Why is this a nightmare? Because the Model has been picture-perfect since the 1960s, or at least the physicists who built it and continuously use it have thought so. Imagine crafting a singularly awesome sculpture over a whole year and then, one day, becoming convinced that there is an imperfection somewhere that you must find… It can be maddening.

This state of affairs often reminds me of the opening scenes of Xenocide, the third book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game quadrology. They describe the life and penance of Han Qing-jao, who, under the tutelage of her father Han Fei-tzu, is tasked every day with following numerous linear markings that traverse the floor and walls of her room from start to finish, without losing track. If she does lose track, she must start over. Qing-jao does this over and over again over many, many days, with no end of the torment in sight.

In Card’s conception, Qing-jao and Fei-tzu are both members of a rigid caste system concerning the class of people known as the ‘godspoken’. These people possess great intelligence – whose provenance the inhabitants of the world of Path trace to gods – as well as an acute form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is later revealed that all the godspoken are the children of a devious government experiment that sought to create exceptional minds and then control them by programming any rebel tendencies to trigger debilitating OCD behaviour.

Like Qing-jao and Fei-tzu, some ‘godspoken’ (a term I use à la Card) physicists obsessively trace the sinews of the Standard Model, filament by filament and strand by strand, from start to finish in the hope that they will find that one blemish they are sure exists. Even others – in a tenuous parallel to Fei-tzu’s evolution – are not so obsessed with preserving an older system and have already set out on the path of alternative theories, some quite brilliant (although that’s not a comment on their plausibility). While Xenocide sets the stage for Card’s series to wind down in an explosion of happy endings (in Children of the Mind), it seems rather futile to hope that that will be the case in reality.

In the middle of a conversation this morning, my friend wondered aloud as to whether there were any advantages to teaching history forward in time (i.e. with causality) instead of backward. Neither of us being historians… rather, both of us being far too quantitative in our thinking to be able to reason like historians at a moment’s notice, there was some back and forth for a few minutes during which we dwelled mostly on the awareness of presentist biases, anchoring, etc.

The debate was eventually settled when I likened my principal contention – of being able to cognise and record dominant and non-dominant narratives alike – to the parsing of non-linear data structures in computer science. I was quite pleased with myself for having realised this metaphor so quickly. However, I describe it in some more detail below to invite my readers to point out any flaws in my argument and/or, more importantly, provide other arguments in favour my contention against my friend.

Linearly ordered data can be indexed as a straightforward series of values. But when it is ordered in non-linear fashion, there is more than one way to read the values. The simplest example of such a structure is the tree, and the process of indexing the values therein is called tree-traversal.

In other words, tree-traversal refers to the way you move through a tree, top-bottom or bottom-top, from branch to branch such that you traverse all branches sans jumping and in as few steps as possible. For example, in the tree shown below, you can move in the following ways:

• 1 2 3 4 7 5 6 8 9 10 11
• 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 3 9 10 11
• 1 2 3 4 7 9 5 6 8 10 11

… etc.

In these three instances, I’m imagining myself to be an algorithm switching through nodes from the bottom (roots) to the top (canopy), equating this orientation to the direction of time*. If I were to represent the algorithm as an ant moving along the tree, then the first sequence could be delineated thus: 1-2 2-1 1-3 3-1 1-2 2-4 4-2 2-7 7-2 2-4 4-5 5-4 4-6 6-4 4-2 2-7 7-8 8-7 7-2 2-1 1-3 3-9 9-10 10-9 9-11. In turn, it would comprise the following sequence of orientations (f for backward, b for backward): f b f b f f b f b f f b f b b f f b b b f f f b f.

Now, instead of an algorithm, if I were commanding a group of historians, would I be able to traverse all branches of this 1-11 tree by forcing them to either always move forward or always move backward (without jumping)? It’s obviously possible to do this if you started at the root with as many historians as the number of terminal nodes and always moved forward. At each fork, two historians would walk down the two branches. If one of them reached a terminus, she would call back and no other historian would walk down that branch. If one of them reached another fork, should would call back and another historian would come forward.

But if you tried to do this backwards – from canopy to roots – with as many historians as the number of canopy termini, then all of them will miss the unnumbered terminus off of node #3. The only way to get there would be, after recognising the presence of a fork, to send one historian forward along that branch, which act in turn will break the rule about always going backward.

The canopy termini, in my metaphor, stand for contemporary events tethered to historical narratives – the branches in the tree – that have survived intact or modified but nonetheless unbroken from a predecessor event. The unnumbered terminus is a narrative that has no present-day representation and therefore cannot be discovered or elucidated as such if one were to only work backwards in time from today.

In fact, the only ways such narratives would get unearthed were if historians (or get taught if teachers), including in the form of palaeontologists and archaeologists, came upon (or introduced) material or immaterial fragments of information that didn’t fit into any prevailing paradigms of the time. However, this means one has to rely on accidents or, worse, the beneficence of those tasked with interpreting (or unpacking) such information – which is always a bad proposition.

*And assuming that divergence increases with time.

I started writing this as today’s post but at some point it morphed into an article for The Wire, to be published tomorrow morning. Sharing it here in full nonetheless.

Earlier this week, a team of neural networking algorithms beat a team of five human players at a game called DotA 2. To appreciate the real advancement this bit of news represents, together with its specific limitations, you need to understand DotA. It’ll be worth it.

DotA stands for Defence of the Ancients, a multiplayer online battle arena developed in 2003. It is played by 10 players at a time, in two teams of five. Each player has over a hundred heroes, or characters, to choose from at the beginning of the game. Each hero has a unique set of abilities and characteristics that defines their role in the team, and all of which can be augmented using items purchased and recipes concocted in-game; the gold for all this comes from killing members of the other team.

All DotA games are played on a map divided diagonally into two halves, each half protected by one team. In the two corners are the team bases, to be protected at all costs. If they’re destroyed, the corresponding team loses. The map is rough terrain riven through with three corridors: one cutting across and the other two going along the edges. Each corridor is protected by four towers – two for each team – that fire bolts of power at offending players.

In each game of DotA, players work together to take down enemy towers while protecting their own, levelling up as they gain more experience, buying items and finishing recipes, and battling other players. The whole shebang lasts anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple hours.

DotA 2 was a standalone sequel to DotA developed and published by the Valve Corporation in 2013. According to one tracker, over 471,000 players have been online (on average) every day over the last 30 days.

Unlike in chess or at Go, each DotA hero can only see what their own teammates are up to; the enemy’s actions are out of view unless the two parties engage. There are no set number of pieces that can make a fixed number of moves. Depending on which heroes have been picked, each game can progress in millions of ways. And the set of all possible outcomes of all possible strategies in all possible games is ginormous. Finally, your success depends on your teammates’ success and the team’s success depends on yours.

So when we say neural networks have beaten a human team at a game like DotA, we’re talking about a very different kind of victory than what was achieved with chess and Go. And it’s accompanied with a different set of caveats, too, that only a gamer would be able to appreciate.

The neural networks that have accomplished this feat were designed by OpenAI, the nonprofit AI research company cofounded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. The networks’ team was called OpenAI Five (or just Five) and, according to its maker, it taught itself to win at the game by playing 180 years’ worth of gameplay against itself every day for two months.

The human opponents were semi-professionals. It’s doubtful if Five will be able to beat DotA professionals, a challenge OpenAI says it will take on in Vancouver in August this year at The International, an annual DotA 2 tournament, after further upgrades.

Beth Singler, a social anthropologist, wrote, “In computer science, games are frequently used as a benchmark for an algorithm’s ‘intelligence’.” To extend the connection, the Five’s victory is significant because problem-solving scenarios captured by DotA and other games like it closely resemble real-life problems, where long-term planning, coordination and making reactive decisions in line with the intended outcome are key.

If Five could win at DotA, then it has demonstrated an ability to tackle large and dynamic problems without having to be specifically coded for them – likely its biggest achievement in the current scenario.”There are many problems in the world that are far too complex to hand-code solutions for,” Altman wrote on his blog. “I expect this to be a large branch of machine learning, and an important step on the road towards general intelligence.”

It’s an important step indeed, but it’s also not as big as it’s being made out to be because the games Five has been winning at were limited in important ways. According to the OpenAI blog, it excels when the following rules are applied:

• Mirror match of Necrophos, Sniper, Viper, Crystal Maiden and Lich
• No warding
• No Roshan
• No invisibility (consumables and relevant items)
• No summons/illusions
• No Divine Rapier, Bottle, Quelling Blade, Boots of Travel, Tome of Knowledge, Infused Raindrop
• 5 invulnerable couriers, no exploiting them by scouting or tanking
• No Scan

(Quoted verbatim)

The first rule says that each team’s heroes have to be those five, no others. Warding is when players plant items called wards at various points in the map to expose invisible players in its vicinity, among other things, and to negate enemy wards. Roshan is a neutral creature in the map’s centre that players can gang up on and defeat in battle to acquire uniquely powerful enhancements. The Boots of Travel item allows players to teleport across the map, inflicting damage not possible in other ways. Scan is a tool to detect the presence of an enemy unit in a given area.

Because of these restrictions, the takeaways across the board are also limited. On August 11, 2017, an OpenAI neural network beat a human player – the first victory of its kind – at DotA 2 but in a 1v1 setting, rendering the game less complex than Go. Vlad Savov wrote at the time that the bot is “still only scratching the surface of the competitive complexity of this game”. What Five has demonstrated is an ability to scratch with five fingernails at the same time – but it’s still only scratching.

For a less jarring metaphor, I turned to a friend, an accomplished software engineer and a hardcore DotA player himself, who equated the feat to a child learning to drive: “Five is no longer riding a tricycle, it’s now on a bicycle with training wheels.” The last stop is a jet-ski. He also cautioned that while a DotA puritan might call the restrictions potentially debilitating, the resulting game was still complicated enough to have resulted in notable learnings – a view other DotA players also shared in person and on Reddit.

However, even others interpreted the gameplay limitations differently, drawing attention to the fact that Bill Gates had called Five’s victory “a big deal” and “a huge milestone in advancing artificial intelligence” on Twitter. User conquer69 countered, “The restrictions are there because otherwise, the human players would win against the AI. OpenAI always want their bots to win against humans. It’s what gives them free publicity.” Anuj Srivas, The Wire‘s tech and business editor, agrees.

Bots – intelligent or otherwise – are also good at clicking, and DotA is a game that relies heavily on clicking, and pressing keys, at the right time. The Five may have a few tricks up its sleeve but its impeccable timing was certainly part of the triumph, and such timing – to use Altman’s words – doesn’t ‘capture’ usefulness. User jstock23 wrote, “If [the Five] were artificially limited to a human’s reaction time, I think it would perform worse.” So winning at DotA might not translate completely into real-world success.

It all comes down to the show the Five will put up at The International – and even then, it will be worth exercising caution about what any of the victories actually stand for. For one, OpenAI has said that the ‘mirror match’ restriction will still apply. For another, DotA – despite enabling multiple strategic modes – is similar to chess and Go because each competing player or team moves towards a victory described by well-defined values of a finite number of state variables. What happens when nobody (or nothing) is able to identify a quantitative problem to solve for?

I’ll follow Singler’s idea and be actually excited when I can play Dungeons and Dragons with a machine-borne intelligence.

These days, I can’t remember either the good news or the bad news. When someone talks about the good news – likely a centrist or someone who hasn’t thought their political views through – I nod along, keen to counter them but just feeling so tired. When someone talks about the bad news – which is most people I know – I nod along, deeply familiar with everything they’re saying but every once in a while getting the feeling they’re cherry-picking all the bad stuff and just listing them together, making it sound like your reality is a dystopia short even of simple joys like a good morning tea. I’m too woke to function perhaps. But then I want to counter them too, point out something good that happened, but then for the life of me I’m unable to think of something. When I do think of something, it’s been a couple hours hence and those people have left.

The only thing I can remember well is what pervades my mind from its surface, through its bulk, right to the centre: stories I’ve commissioned, stories I’m editing, hiring this or that subeditor, scoring SciWi’s next exclusive, things happening inside the newsroom. I’ve never known what news means to a person outside journalism, and what it’s like to engage with the news when you’re not involved in producing it. To the journalist, news is absolutely important just the way nuclear power plants are essential for society from the POV of a nuclear engineer. But unlike the industry in this metaphor, journalism is a public institution (or so they say) and an important part of functional democracies, and I think many journalists are excluded from honest participation simply by their positioning in society.

In other words, how do you be honest to your profession if you’re also going to simultaneously determine the fate of the society in which it is situated? Does such an honesty, straddling journalism, democracy and society, even exist? (I’m getting very strong Gödel incompleteness theorem vibes here.) Heck, how do you even define morals in this setting?

When a non-journalist has views about what journalists should or shouldn’t do based on what the non-journalist thinks journalists should be responsible for in a democracy, I’ve got two ways to respond: balk or blank out completely because I’ve never had to think about an answer as a non-journalist. You’d think it was simply about shifting one’s POV and empathising with the ‘outsider’ – as we often supposedly do? – but it’s not. If I do do this and say something you don’t agree with, neither you nor I are going to be able to tell whether my argument is rooted in my ability to empathise or, in fact, my inability to empathise properly. So overall, I’ve become completely unable to separate the fourth estate from my understanding of what a democracy is and, more significantly, become blind to which way causality is aligned between them.