The Bluestocking, Vol XXI: Playing Go, winning at Twitter and building a girl

Happy Friday everyone! There will be no newsletter next week, for reasons that will be explained later *swirls cape*.

Helen

Showdown

Deep learning requires two things: plenty of processing grunt and plenty of data to learn from. DeepMind trained its machine on a sample of 30m Go positions culled from online servers where amateurs and professionals gather to play. And by having AlphaGo play against another, slightly tweaked version of itself, more training data can be generated quickly.

There's been lots of coverage of AlphaGo, the "deep learning" software that just beat a human at the traditional Chinese game of Go. That's significant because AI experts thought it would take much longer for a computer to become that sophisticated. (They've already beaten us at chess, draughts and Jeopardy! No word yet on Bullseye.) If the excitement has passed you by, the Economist wrote a good introduction to what happened, and why it matters.

The journalist and the troll

“Howdy! Ni Hao! Hello! I am Benjamin Wey—your old friend. You know me well so let’s get to the point. I am an independent investigative reporter and I like TheBlot Magazine (www.theblot.com)—Voice for the Voiceless, millions of readers a year. Investigative reporters are evaluating publishing new stories about you, your peculiar money entanglements with illegal stock short sellers (Roddy Boyd, Jon Carnes etc) as their bribed mouthpiece, your alleged extramarital affairs with a man calling himself ‘niu bi’—‘a cattle’s d---’—in Chinese on your own Twitter page, as well as your racist attitude towards the Chinese people. Because you just reached out to me again after two years of peace, you just did yourself a favor by reviving our interest in you. ..."

Still trying to nail down the suggestion that crime figures are falling because crime has moved online. But antisocial behaviour certainly has, and it's hella hard to police. As in this horrifying case.


Michelle Obama's social media game

Meanwhile, the country has its eyes locked on six would-be Commanders-in-Chief, each with their own social media strategy: Hillary Clinton has arguably the strongest Instagram account of any of the contenders; Bernie Sanders supporters are feeling the Bern on Tumblr; Ted Cruz trolls Donald Trump on Snapchat; and Trump himself has created a movement partly through his powerful and unparalleled use of Twitter.

Not going to lie, this story had me at the turnip dance.

Learn to build a girl

Pretend you are your own baby. You would never cut that baby, or starve it, or overfeed it until it cried in pain, or tell it it was worthless. Sometimes, girls have to be mothers to themselves. Your body wants to live – that’s all and everything it was born to do. Let it do that, in the safety you provide it. Protect it. That is your biggest job. To protect your skin, and heart.

Caitlin Moran's letter to teenage girls is sad, and happy, and true.

The colour of the year, 2016:

Didn't understand three words of this together, but I did like looking at the pretty colours and wondering if I can be bothered to get worried by the "colour industrial complex".


Quick links: should we publicly shame johns on the internet? Do men and women write differently? The woman who could hear her own eyeballs moving in her head. "Even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic"; Ta-Nehisi Coates goes beyond the usual babble about stuff being "problematic" to explain why casting Zoe Saldana as Simon rankles. "A country's GDP drops when a man marries his maid": the Economist's defence of feminist economics.

Podcast recommendations: The gang-rapists offered an unusual choice by a judge: 30 years in jail ... or surgical castration? (My thanks to any readers who can tell me if they are talking full meat and veg loss, or merely sack).

Guest gif: saucy Clippy.

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