Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo computer program beat 9-dan professional go player Lee Se-dol 4-1 in a five-game match. Lee has won 18 international titles and is widely regarded as one of the best Go players in the world. AlphaGo made a number of decisive moves that the human players found completely surprising and “beautiful”. The South Korean Go Association granted AlphaGo an honorary 9-dan ranking for its “sincere efforts” to master the game at a level approaching “divinity”. Before 2015, no Go program could compete with professional players. Go strategy is a particular challenge for computers, because the sheer number of possible moves makes the game resistant to the brute force analytic methods in which computers have an advantage over humans. In January, however, DeepMind researchers published a paper in Nature detailing how AlphaGo was able to beat European go champion Fan Hui 5-0 in a match last fall. AlphaGo used artificial neural networks to find patterns in 150,000 games played between strong human players. It then played thousands more games against different versions of itself to identify positions that were more likely to lead to a win, so that it could focus its tactical analysis on the most promising positions. DeepMind was able to use a similar reinforcement learning technique to train neural networks to play 49 classic Atari 2600 video games. Since the same technique could theoretically be used to teach computers to recognize patterns across different domains, AlphaGo’s success could be a major step in the development of a more general artificial intelligence (AI). After AlphaGo’s victory the South Korean government announced it would invest $1 trillion won ($840 million) by 2020 in the development of AI.
The British Ministry of Defense announced it is organizing a “Robo-Wars” exercise in the Minch Strait in October as part of NATO’s Joint Wars exercise. The exercise is being billed as a “large-scale demonstration in a tactically representative environment of maritime autonomous systems” featuring drones and autonomous seacraft. Russia announced it will field test a mobile robot designed to defend its strategic missile facilities. Russia said the robot is designed “for conducting field reconnaissance, for identification and elimination of stationary and mobile targets, for providing fire support for military units, and for patrolling and protecting sensitive facilities in combination with automated security systems”. Franz-Stefan Gady wrote in The Diplomat that the robot may be a variant of Russia’s Platform-M combat robot. Russia’s defense ministry has previously said that by 2025 30% of its military hardware will be robotic.
The UN Security Council unanimously adopted new sanctions in response to North Korea’s recent nuclear weapon and long-range rocket tests. The resolution was presented with the support of China, which has been reluctant to sanction North Korea in the past but which has repeatedly warned North Korea against continued nuclear tests. According to North Korea’s state-run media, Kim Jong Un responded by ordering his military to be ready to use nuclear weapons at any time. The official media quoted Kim as saying that “The only way for defending the sovereignty of our nation and its right to existence under the present extreme situation is to bolster up nuclear force, both in quality and quantity.” Days later, Kim posed with what appeared to be a nuclear bomb and reentry vehicles that could be used with long-range missiles.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearings in the Marshall Islands case against the UK, India, and Pakistan. The Marshall Islands, which were the site of 67 US atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, filed lawsuits in April 2014 against all nine nuclear powers for not fulfilling their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and under customary international law “with respect to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”. The UK, India, and Pakistan are required to participate in the case, since they previously agreed to accept the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction. The other nuclear powers declined or did not respond to the invitation to argue their case in court. In a 1996 non-binding advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, the ICJ said that states have an obligation “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control”.
World leaders attended the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. to discuss ways of securing nuclear material and preventing nuclear terrorism. The summit was hurt by the absence of Russia, which did not send a representative to the summit after accusing the US of “trying to assume the role of the main and privileged ‘player’” in nuclear security. The US announced that its own stockpile of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) has been reduced more than 20% since 1996, but The Federation of American Scientists noted that previous Department of Energy data shows that almost all of the reduction in the US stockpile took place before 2004. In a press conference at the end of the summit, President Obama praised the progress the world has made towards securing nuclear material. “We’ve now removed or secured all the highly enriched uranium and plutonium from more than 50 facilities in 30 countries—more than 3.8 tons, which is more than enough to create 150 nuclear weapons,” President Obama said. “That’s material that will never fall into the hands of terrorists.”
A new paper in Science mapped the structure of the Zika virus using cryo-electron microscopy. Zika’s structure is similar to other known flaviviruses, but it has a distinctive pattern of amino acids that surround glycosylation sites in the virus shell that help it attach to human cells. Researchers suggested in a statement that this structure may allow Zika to penetrate the blood-brain and placental barriers that protect the nervous system or a developing fetus. A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine found a strong link between infection with the Zika virus and fetal abnormalities in pregnant women in Rio de Janeiro. The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) aims to have a Zika vaccine in efficacy trials in early 2017. Richard Kuhn, one of the leaders of the research team, said that the work “shows potential regions of the virus that could be targeted by a therapeutic treatment, used to create an effective vaccine or to improve our ability to diagnose and distinguish Zika infection from that of other related viruses.”
Ebola reemerged in both Guinea and Liberia. Nine cases and seven deaths have been reported in the Guinea’s southern Nzerekore district. Health officials in Liberia are tracing contacts of a 30-year-old woman who tested positive for the virus after dying while on her way to a hospital in Monrovia. New research in Nature identified an antiviral compound that appears to block Ebola’s ability to replicate. In animal trials, six rhesus monkeys that were treated with the compound three days after infection with the virus survived. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared that Ebola is no longer a “public health emergency of international concern. WHO’s emergency committee said that “new clusters of Ebola cases continue to occur due to reintroductions of virus as it is cleared from the survivor population” but that “Ebola transmission in West Africa no longer constitutes an extraordinary event, that the risk of international spread is now low, and that countries currently have the capacity to respond rapidly to new virus emergences”.
A new study in Nature Geoscience found that humans are increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere faster than at any time in the last 66 million years. Humans are releasing carbon even faster than during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum roughly 55 million year ago, when global temperatures were 5°C (9°F) hotter than they are now. Because the increase in atmospheric carbon is unprecedented in recent geologic record, it may be difficult to project the ultimate impact of carbon emissions. Lead author Richard Zeebe said that because of the rate at which humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere ocean acidification may be more sever and ecosystems may be hit harder.
February 2016 was the warmest any month has been relative to its average by a large margin. January 2016 had been the most relatively warm month by a significantly smaller margin, but February was a significant 0.2°C (0.36°F) further above the average. It was the first month in recorded history to be 1.5°C (2.7°F) warmer than the pre-industrial average. It was also the first time in recorded history temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were more than 2°C (3.6°F) above the pre-industrial average. Eric Holthaus noted that “it took from the dawn of the industrial age until last October to reach the first 1.0 degree Celsius, and we’ve come as much as an extra 0.4 degrees further in just the last five months”. The warm temperatures coincided with a record low Arctic sea ice maximum, the longest coral die-off on record, and possibly the worst drought in the Middle East in 900 years. The rise in temperature is due in part to an unusually strong El Niño weather system, but may also indicate that heat from global warming stored in the oceans is now being transferred to the atmosphere.“The old assumptions about what was normal are being tossed out the window,” Peter Gleick, a climate scientist at the Pacific Institute, said. “The old normal is gone.”
A new model in Nature suggested that sea levels may rise much faster than previously thought. The model accounts for the possibility that the loss of floating ice shelves could accelerate the collapse of ice exposed to the sea. The model appears to explain sea levels in the Pliocene and in the last interglacial period better than other models. The researchers said that if carbon emissions remain high the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet could cause sea levels to rise more than a meter (3.3 ft) by 2100 and more than 15 meters (49.2 ft) by 2500. “Once the ocean warms up, that ice will not be able to recover until the oceans cool back down,” said Rob DeConto, one of the authors of the study. “It’s a really long-term commitment.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, Matthijs Maas, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary February 2016.
You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
Image credit: Jaro Larnnos
