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Go Spotting: HBO's "Vice" and the Lane County Museum

Published on 6/7/2017

HBO's "Vice": The fifth season of HBO's newsmagazine documentary series Vice features go in its eleventh episode, writes Gordon Castanza. Produced by Bill Maher, Vice is a documentary TV series hosted by Shane Smith aiming to tackle global issues often overlooked by traditional media. The episode, titled Engineering Immortality & Robot Revolution, starts out on the topic of "Engineering Immortality", covering scientific advancements with potential to lead to an explosion in human longevity. The show then transitions to the "Robot Revolution", showing examples the unfolding revolution of creating systems intelligent enough to actually think for themselves. The show features an interview with the renowned Demis Hassabis in an interview covering the significance of game research. To see if DeepMind had "successfully built artificial human intuition", VICE travelled to South Korea to cover the match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol. Noting the result of the match, the documentary points out that AlphaGo's win "reinforced the idea that we may be on the brink of transformative artificial intelligence," warning of the potential consequences that artificial intelligence may bring. When questioned about the potential dangers of today's "Robot Revolution", Demis Hassabis replied that, "Most technologies are inherently neutral, but it depends on how society uses them and deploys them that ends up determining whether they end up being for good or for bad." The series currently airs Monday through Thursday at 7:30p ET on HBO.

Lane County Museum

Castanza also reports that he spotted a July 1942 photo of two Japanese men playing go at the Farm Security Administration farm workers' camp in Twin Falls, Idaho at the Lane County Museum in Eugene, Oregon.

General and I: The popular historical romance drama General and I has an entire episode featuring go, reports Crystal Lin. In episode 52 of the series, heroine Bai Ping Ting is challenged to a game of blind go against an unknown and unseen player. Little does she know, Bai Ping Ting's opponent is Chu Bei Jie - her lover and adversary, who believes Bai Ping Ting to be dead. Through a vivid portrayal of the match, the director illustrates the players' moves through a ninja-like battle on a simulated go board, as the players shout out their moves. In a dramatic climax of the scene, Bai Ping Ting realizes her opponent from his style of play. Click here for a summary of the episode, along with a video clip illustrating Bai Ping Ting and Chu Bei Jie's exciting match. - edited by Brian Kirby

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Go Spotting: HBO's "Vice" and the Lane County Museum

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