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2017 began with an AI named "Libratus" defeating four of the world's best poker players. Now the AI's creators reveal how exactly they did it. An anonymous reader quotes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: First, the AI made the game easier to understand. There are 10**161 potential outcomes in the game of poker -- that's a one followed by 161 zeros, potential outcomes in a game of poker. Libratus grouped similar hands, like a King-high flush and a Queen-high flush, and similar bet sizes to cut down that number. Libratus then created a detailed strategy for how it would play the early rounds of the game and a less-refined strategy for the final rounds. As the game nears the end, Libratus refined the second strategy based on how the game had gone.

A third strategy was at work as well. In real-time, Libratus created another model based on how its play stacked up against the play of the humans. If the humans did something unexpected to Libratus, the AI accounted for it and built it into the strategy. Instead of trying to exploit weaknesses in the play of the human, Libratus focused on improving its play.
The AI was created by a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and his Ph.D. student, who argue in a new paper that "The techniques that we developed are largely domain independent and can thus be applied to other strategic imperfect-information interactions, including non-recreational applications."

"Due to the ubiquity of hidden information in real-world strategic interactions, we believe the paradigm introduced in Libratus will be critical to the future growth and widespread application of AI."

HughPickens.com writes AP reports that Montana lawmakers are drafting bills that would raise the daytime speed limit on Montana interstate highways from 75 to 80 and possibly as high as 85 mph. "I just think our roads are engineered well, and technology is such we can drive those roads safely," says Art Wittich. He notes that Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho have raised their speed limits above 75, and they haven't had any problems. Drivers on German autobahns average about 84 mph. State Senator Scott Sales says he spent seven months working in the Bakken oil patch, driving back and forth to Bozeman regularly. "If I could drive 85 mph on the interstate, it would save an hour," says Sales. "Eighty-five would be fine with me." A few years ago Texas opened a 40 mile stretch on part of a toll road called the Pickle Parkway between Austin and San Antonio. The tolled bypass was supposed to help relieve the bottleneck around Austin but the highway was built so far to the east that practically nobody used it. In desperation, the state raised the toll road speed limit to 85 mph, the fastest in the nation. "The idea was that drivers could drop the top, drop the hammer, crank the music and fly right past Austin," says Wade Goodyn. "It's a beautiful, wide-open highway — but it's empty, and the builders are nearly bankrupt."

theodp (442580) writes "Google's "flash-funding" of teachers' projects via DonorsChoose continues to draw kudos from grateful mayors of the nation's largest cities. The latest comes from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (fresh from a Google-paid stay at the Google Zeitgeist resort), who joined Google officials at Taylor Allderdice HS, where Google announced it was 'flash funding' all Pittsburgh area teachers' crowd-funding campaigns on DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose reports that Google spent $64,657 to fund projects for 10,924 Pittsburgh kids. While the not-quite-$6-a-student is nice, it does pale by comparison to the $56,742 Google is ponying up to send one L.A. teacher's 34 students to London and Paris and the $35,858 it's spending to take another L.A. teacher's 52 kids to NYC, Gettysburg, and DC. So, is Google's non-tax based public school funding — which includes gender-based funding as well as "begfunding" — cause for celebration?"

Hugh Pickens writes "Jennifer Davis writes that while summer holds a special place in our hearts: lazy afternoons, camping at the lake, warm evenings gazing at the moon, languid summers can be educationally detrimental, with most youth losing about two months of grade-level equivalency in math computational skills over the summer and students from low-income families falling even further behind. A consensus is building that the traditional nine-month school year might be a relic of the 20th century that has no place in an increasingly competitive global work force and an analysis of charter schools in New York reveals that students are most likely to outperform peers if they attend schools that are open at least 10 days more than the conventional year. What of the idea that summer should be a time of respite from the stresses of school? There are two wrong notions wrapped up in this perspective. The first is that somehow summer is automatically a magical time for children but as one fifth-grader, happy to be back at school in August, declared, 'Sometimes summer is really boring. We just sit there and watch TV.' The second mis-perception is that school is automatically bereft of the excitement and joy of learning. On the contrary, as the National Center on Time and Learning describes in its studies of schools that operate with significantly more time, educators use the longer days and years to enhance the content and methods of the classroom. 'We should expect our schools to furnish today's students with the education they will need to excel in our global society,' says Davis. 'But we must also be willing to provide schools the tools they need to ensure this outcome, including the flexibility to turn the lazy days of summer into the season of learning.'"

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