STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

Tyrion Lannister’s Trial Gets the Animated Spoof It Deserves

Spoiler alert: Spoilers for the most recent episodes of Game of Thrones follow in the text and video above.

Those keeping up with Game of Thrones (aka you, your mom, and everyone else you know) are awaiting Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the death of King Joffrey Baratheon. Things aren’t looking good for the Imp: he’s been unjustly accused by his sister Cersei, and no one seems prepared to step up and defend him. If you haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s books, you won’t know the outcome of the trial until Sunday’s episode, but this animated spoof by Leigh Lahav gets at the absurdity of poor Tyrion’s circumstances in short order—with a cameo from none other than Ser Pounce. This is the Internet, after all; there’s gotta be a cat.

[Pedro2486]

NYC Will Turn 7000 Old Payphones Into A Huge, Free Wi-Fi Network

In 2013, Mayor Bloomberg asked designers to reimagine the city’s decrepit pay phones as internet-flinging, ad-spitting future machines. The winners were simply design concepts, never truly destined for reality. Now, the city is moving forward with the plan to retrofit its pay phones, after all.

Now, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has put out a brand-new request for proposals. This time, it’s not for pie-in-the-sky designs — it’s for real budgets and designs to create a “citywide Wi-Fi network and state-of-the-art information hubs.”

There are roughly 11,000 pay phones scattered across the city, and this plan would retrofit up to 10,000 of them with new hardware that would broadcast free Wi-Fi, financed by ad revenue, within 85 feet of the station. Here’s how de Blasio describes the project in a statement:

For years, the question was, ‘What to do with payphones?’ and now we have an answer. By using a historic part of New York’s street fabric, we can significantly enhance public availability of increasingly-vital broadband access, invite new and innovative digital services, and increase revenue to the city — all at absolutely no cost to taxpayers.

The idea, says one city spokesperson to the New York Times, is to “level the playing field” for New Yorkers who can’t afford broadband. It’s doubtless also to figure out a way to make street-level advertising more lucrative, guaranteeing at least $US17.5 million in annual ad revenue for the city.

But there’s also a more vital purpose, as the DoITT explains. “While public payphone usage has decreased in recent years, the phones served a critical role during power outages following Hurricane Sandy, as public payphones receive electricity via the phone line and not external power sources,” the office explains. These new stations would provide the city with Wi-Fi and access to 911, even if another superstorm takes out our electricity.

This RFP invites anyone to submit a proposal for the project — they’re due on June 30, so you’d better get cracking if you’ve got a plan

What a clever idea. Better that than here, where a pay phone is an almost extinct animal.

Loving this thread MIKA. Cheers mate

[JoeyGunz]

We already have this in London, in can be pretty handy if your 3G/4G decide to run slow.

[sheppsea]

We already have this in London, in can be pretty handy if your 3G/4G decide to run slow.

I didn't know that! I'll have to look into that

[MIKA27]

The Antarctic Ice Sheet Has Started To Collapse And Nothing Can Stop It

http://youtu.be/uZ3mxy8G978

For years, scientists have feared the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet — a vast swath of ice that could unleash a slow but unstoppable 3m rise in sea levels if it melted. So here is today’s terrible news: we now know the ice sheet is melting. And there’s pretty much nothing we can do to about it.

The accelerating collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is reported by two different teams of scientists, in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters. Its collapse has been predicted for decades, most prominently by glaciologist John Mercer, but this is the first tangible evidence that it’s actually now happening. Warmer waters are most likely responsible for the melting.

The New York Times explains why the position of the ice sheet makes it especially vulnerable to runway melting:

The basic problem is that much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits below sea level in a kind of bowl-shaped depression [in] the earth. As Dr. Mercer outlined in 1978, once the part of the ice sheet sitting on the rim of the bowl melts and the ice retreats into deeper water, it becomes unstable and highly vulnerable to further melting

This is no longer just speculation or the plot of a blockbuster film. “This is really happening,” NASA’s Thomas P. Wagner emphasised to the New York Times. “There’s nothing to stop it now.”

The relative good news is that the melting will take place over a few hundred years — so take a breath — but it means an inevitable 3m rise in sea level. That’s enough to engulf large tracts of coast all over the world. Plan accordingly, people.

[MIKA27]

Bilgola Sinkhole In Sydney's Northern Beaches Just Tipped A Fire Truck

Briefly: A sinkhole in Bilgola, a suburb in Sydney’s northern beaches district, has caused a landslide that has damaged a couple of houses. A fire truck responding to the incident, driving down the street, has been caught out — the road gave way and the truck is now tipped at a pretty precarious angle.

ABC News reports a burst water main is apparently the culprit of the sinkhole, which is on The Serpentine near Barrenjoey Rd. Fire crews are on the scene — obviously — and a Fire & Rescue NSW urban search and rescue team is on its way to check out how damaged the truck itself is.

Sinkholes are pretty dangerous things. A few months ago, a massive sinkhole inside the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky, USA swallowed eight cars, including the millionth Corvette ever produced. Recovery work is still ongoing. In Guatemala City in 2010, an even larger sinkhole swallowed a three-story factory.

The Bilgolga pumper, which looks like a Varley Commander, weighs over 14,000kg with capacity for 1800 litres of water — that’s a lot of mass to be sitting on top of unsafe terrain. Hopefully it’s retrieved soon without further incident.

[MIKA27]

A Design Flaw Is Turning The London Shard Hotel Into A Voyeur's Dream

You’d think staying in the tallest skyscraper in London would afford you some privacy. But visitors at the newly opened hotel inside of the Shard are being creeped out by the bizarre effects of a simple design flaw — which reflects the view inside of certain rooms directly onto the windows of nearby guests at night.

According to The Guardian, a mistake in architect Renzo Piano’s detailing means that visitors to the Shangri-La Hotel are getting a perfect view into other rooms. And this isn’t your average Rear Window-type of situation you might find at hotels like the Standard in Manhattan, where guests knowingly show off inside of their glass-walled rooms. Because, in this case, visitors don’t realise they’re on display.

You see, the edges of Piano’s Shard jut out past the flat planes of the building’s facade — it’s a formal flourish that gives the building its crystalline appearance. But when the lights are on in any given room, the projecting glass edges act as mirrors beaming a reflection of one room’s interior onto the windows of another.

The hotel’s manager, presumably in a state of extreme panic, had the following to say about the little issue: “In some rooms, due to the unique shape of the Shard, guests may be able to glimpse into a neighbour’s room. For this, blinds are available for guest privacy.” That’s a sadly earnest comment — after all, here in New York, hotels actually use exhibitionism as a sales pitch.

[MIKA27]

The UN Will Debate The Ethics Of Killer Robots This Week

This week, the United Nations will debate the role of so-called “killer robots” on the battlefield — so called, because robots are currently killing humans on the battlefield, and the next steps in their robo-evolution will have serious consequences for the future of war.

The meeting is taking place as part of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a group within the United Nations that tries to single out particularly heinous methods of warfare and restrict their use. Since 1980 the convention has denounced the use of booby traps, landmines and laser weapons that blind an enemy, as well as bombs that deliver fragments that can’t be detected in the body by X-ray examination. Autonomous robot killers (or at least particular versions of them) may be next on their list.

The UN won’t be debating the remote-controlled drones that have become a staple of modern American warfare, simply because they still have human operators “in the loop.” This week they’re only tackling the near-future reality of weaponised autonomous robots and how they might be used ethically.

Professors Ronald Arkin and Noel Sharkey will be the primary instigators of the debate, with opposing viewpoints on what the role of robots on the battlefield should be in the years to come.

Professor Arkin is a roboticist from the Georgia Institute of Technology who has studied the ethics of war-bots for the US Department of Defense. Arkin does not support a ban on the use of unmanned war machines.

Professor Sharkey is an activist with a particular interested in artificial intelligence and robots. Sharkey founded the Campaign Against Killer Robots and, as you can imagine, supports a ban on killer robots.

“Autonomous weapons systems cannot be guaranteed to predictably comply with international law,” Prof Sharkey said to the BBC. “Nations aren’t talking to each other about this, which poses a big risk to humanity.”

The debate will take place this week but the UN won’t issue a full report until November. Let’s hope Skynet doesn’t become aware by then.

[MIKA27]

The Most Radioactive Place In New York City Is This Garage

Like so many NYC businesses, Primo Flat Fix occupies a nearly 100-year-old building. But this Queens, garage sits on a very peculiar piece of dirt: The former site of Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, a rare-earth supplier that furnished the Atomic Energy Commission with radioactive thorium — when it wasn’t dumping the toxic material in the sewer.

That makes Alberto Rodriguez’s shop the most radioactive place in NYC — and nobody’s really sure what to do next. The New Yorker has an engrossing video and interactive feature dedicated to the story.Make sure to head over to the site for some fantastic infographics explaining the strange history and uncertain future of the shop.

Primo’s mechanics receive an estimated three times the maximum recommended dose of radiation over the course of a year — the equivalent of thirty chest Xrays. The Department of Energy first notified NYC officials about contamination at the site in 1987, though testing only revealed that radiation levels were above regulatory limits in 2007. The EPA installed steel-encased lead shielding over hot spots of radioactivity in 2013.

In December, the EPA proposed adding the former Wolff-Alport site to the Superfund list. If approved, it would become only the third Superfund site in New York City. But what would that mean for Alberto Rodriguez and his neighbouring business owners? How would it disrupt life in this typical neighbourhood with a strange radioactive past? Nobody knows — the decision will come later this month. Until then, we can only look into the fascinating history of one of New York City’s strangest pieces of real estate.

[MIKA27]

1980s Architects Wanted A Restaurant On Top Of NY's Williamsburg Bridge

The Williamsburg Bridge has spanned the East River since 1903, connecting what’s now Brooklyn’s most notoriously hipster neighbourhood to Manhattan. In the 1980s, the bridge was in serious disrepair — and architects wanted to replace it with a mirror-finish masterpiece topped with a restaurant. Imagine the view!

DRC Consultants Inc., Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas Inc. and Der Scutt, architects, teamed up to create the design. It envisioned a bridge with towers wrapped in reflective panels, “giving the appearance of a warm, cinnamon-coloured reflective jewel in the East River, bringing a new elegance and new life to the surrounding areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.” Inverted triangle structures atop the bridge’s 456-foot towers would house a two-story restaurant on the Brooklyn side, and a bridge museum on the Manhattan side.

The plan was never realised: rather than replacing the bridge, city leaders decided to refurbish it in a series of construction projects that continue to this day. But it’s fascinating to imagine what it would have been like to have lunch on top of the Williamsburg Bridge.

I bet the folks living in Williamsburg would love it. I’m told they’re crazy about stuff from the 80s.

[MIKA27]

The Power And Perfection Of A Crocodile In One Slow-motion Jump

Video: It’s hard to believe how effortlessly and elegantly this crocodile goes out of the water. It looks like he’s actually swimming vertically into the air, as if he weren’t aware of the laws of physics and the differences of density between liquid and gas. Impressive animal that also freaks the hell out of me.

[MIKA27]

Godspeed, Bill Dana, Legendary Test Pilot And Aerospace Pioneer

The guy in the white flight suit is Bill Dana — a true American hero. Bill Dana was a legendary test pilot, a historic pioneer, a man whose fearless work made the aeroplanes and spaceships we fly today possible — one of those very few guys made of the right stuff from an era that is now completely gone. He died at age 83 last Wednesday.

I believe that there’s no men like Bill Dana anymore. Yes, there are test pilots and many people who risk their lives all around the world every day, just like he did. Soldiers, firefighters, policemen, doctors and nurses in conflict areas working in extreme conditions… all those people who put their lives on the line so others could live. Heroes. All of them.

Dana and some of his colleagues. From left to right: Einar Enevoldson, John Manke, Francis R. Scobee, Tom McMurtry, Bill Dana and Mike Love.

Bill started to make history from the very first day he started to work at NASA, on October 1, 1958, the day the space agency became operational. He worked there for 40 years, flying anything they would tell him to fly. He flew the most beautiful and the most awesome and the most horrible and the most useless machines. He gathered information and gave engineers crucial data that shaped the way all our aeroplanes and spacecraft are today.

He was the right man at the right place and at the right time, an era of experimentation on the edge of disaster like no other in the history of humankind. And then, when that era finished, he retired and kept working for NASA with no salary. They couldn’t pay him due to “budget reductions” but he thought it was his duty to keep working till the end:

His long and illustrious career at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center did not end when he retired. He returned to Armstrong seven months later as a contractor with Analytical Services and Materials, Inc., to write histories of various programs and to evaluate lessons learned. During a period of budget reductions, this man of integrity and accomplishment gave up his salary and continued to work as a volunteer with the History Office. Over the course of his career, Dana logged more than 8,000 hours in over 60 different aircraft from helicopters and sailplanes to the hypersonic X-15. Several of the aeroplanes he flew are displayed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Here you can see him with some of the aircraft he tested:

North American X-15

The X-15 rocket aeroplane — here you can see him with his ride — flying “to the edge of space in the X-15, attaining a maximum speed of Mach 5.53 (3,897 mph) and a maximum altitude of 306,900 feet (nearly 59 miles).”

Northrop M2-F3

Martin Marietta X-24B

Northrop YF-17

NASA/McDonnell Douglas F-18 High Alpha Research Vehicle

This was “the first aircraft to use multi-axis thrust vectoring for vehicle control.” What a trip that must have been for him.

In addition to all this, “he flew hundreds of research flights in advanced jet fighters, including the F-14, F-15, and the F-16″ and he evaluated the legendary X-29.

Godspeed, Bill Dana. You were one hell of a guy.

[MIKA27]

Should We Keep Smallpox Alive?

Next Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) will decide whether or not todestroy the last remaining samples of the variola virus that causes smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases in human history. If they decide to destroy the samples, the consequences may be terrible. If they decide not to destroy the samples, the consequences may be terrible.

TED-Ed tells the story of how we fought—and ultimately defeated—smallpox:

As far as we know, the smallpox virus only exists in two WHO-controlled laboratories—one in the United States, and one in Russia. Both nations have expressed a reluctance to destroy the remaining samples. And the arguments against destroying it are fairly strong: the vaccines scientists have created to combat it can be improved, either laboratory may claim to destroy its samples while actually hiding them elsewhere, and so forth. And as previously seen with pithovirus siberium, it’s very plausible that live smallpox virus samples still exist elsewhere anyway—frozen, perhaps, in the graves of some of its victims. (There is already some evidence to suggest that the virus may be able to survive indefinitely in a frozen state.) And if the virus ever escapes, it could easily kill millions; having live samples, on which to test possible treatments, may save time and countless lives.

But what if these really are the only live samples of the smallpox virus in the world, and we really can guarantee their eradication?

We would be able to make certain that these samples are never weaponized or otherwise spread. Our decision to destroy these viruses would be an act of biological disarmament, comparable (perhaps on an even larger human scale) to the dismantling of nuclear warheads.

No matter which decision researchers make, they will have doubts—and they will have to live with the possibility that their decision may come with an immeasurably high human cost. I don’t envy their decision, and I’m not inclined to second-guess it—not when the stakes are so high, and the certainties so few.

[polarbear]

The Power And Perfection Of A Crocodile In One Slow-motion Jump

Video: It’s hard to believe how effortlessly and elegantly this crocodile goes out of the water. It looks like he’s actually swimming vertically into the air, as if he weren’t aware of the laws of physics and the differences of density between liquid and gas. Impressive animal that also freaks the hell out of me.

Would you believe this place is situated in the centre of Darwin CBD Between two nightclubs?

[MIKA27]

The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win

Remi Coulom (left) and his computer program, Crazy Stone, take on grandmaster Norimoto Yoda in the game of Go.

TOKYO, JAPAN — Rémi Coulom is sitting in a rolling desk chair, hunched over a battered Macbook laptop, hoping it will do something no machine has ever done.

That may take another ten years or so, but the long push starts here, at Japan’s University of Electro-Communications. The venue is far from glamorous — a dingy conference room with faux-wood paneling and garish fluorescent lights — but there’s still a buzz about the place. Spectators are gathered in front of an old projector screen in the corner, and a ragged camera crew is preparing to broadcast the tournament via online TV, complete with live analysis from two professional commentators.

Coulom is wearing the same turtleneck sweater and delicate rimless glasses he wore at last year’s competition, and he’s seated next to his latest opponent, an ex-pat named Simon Viennot who’s like a younger version of himself — French, shy, and self-effacing. They aren’t looking at each other. They’re focused on the two computers in front of them. Coulom’s is running a piece of software called Crazy Stone — the work of over seven years — and the other runs Nomitan, coded by Viennot and his Japanese partner, Kokolo Ikeda.

Crazy Stone and Nomitan are locked in a game of Go, the Eastern version of chess. On each screen, you can see a Go board — a grid of 19 lines by 19 lines — filling up with black and white playing pieces, each placed at the intersection of two lines. If Crazy Stone can win and advance to the finals, it will earn the right play one of the best human Go players in Japan. No machine has ever beaten a top human Go player — at least not without a huge head-start. Even if it does advance to the man-machine match, Crazy Stone has no chance of changing this, but Coulom wants to see how far his creation has come.

The challenge is daunting. In 1994, machines took the checkers crown, when a program called Chinook beat the top human. Then, three years later, they topped the chess world, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer besting world champion Garry Kasparov. Now, computers match or surpass top humans in a wide variety of games: Othello, Scrabble, backgammon, poker, even Jeopardy. But not Go. It’s the one classic game where wetware still dominates hardware.

Invented over 2500 years ago in China, Go is a pastime beloved by emperors and generals, intellectuals and child prodigies. Like chess, it’s a perfect information game — a game without built-in elements of chance, such as dice. And like chess, it’s a two-person war game. Play begins with an empty board, where players alternate the placement of black and white stones, attempting to surround territory while avoiding capture by the enemy. That may seem simpler than chess, but it’s not. When Deep Blue was busy beating Kasparov, the best Go programs couldn’t even challenge a decent amateur. And despite huge computing advances in the years since — Kasparov would probably lose to your home computer — the automation of expert-level Go remains one of AI’s greatest unsolved riddles.

Rémi Coulum is part of a small community of computer scientists hoping to solve this riddle. Every March, the world’s most dedicated Go programmers gather at the University of Electro-Communications to compete in the UEC Cup, a computer Go tournament that, uniquely, rewards two finalists with matches against a “Go sage,” the equivalent of a chess grandmaster. Organizers dub these machine-versus-man matches the Densei-sen, or “Electric Sage Battle.”

At this year’s UEC Cup, Coulom’s Crazy Stone is the favorite. On the first day of the competition, the software program went undefeated, which earned it top seed in today’s 16-member single-elimination bracket and a bye in the first round. Now, it’s the second round, and Viennot, a relative newcomer to the computer Go scene, tells me he’ll be happy if his program just puts up a good fight. “Nomitan uses many of Rémi’s tricks, but I don’t think it will be enough,” he says. “Crazy Stone is a much stronger program.”

The computer screens in front of Coulom and Viennot display statistics that show the relative confidence of each program. Although the match has just begun, Crazy Stone is already 58 percent sure it will prevail. Oddly, Nomitan’s confidence level is about the same. When I point this out to Coulom and Viennot, they both laugh. “You can’t trust these algorithms completely,” explains Viennot. “They are always a little over-confident.”

The official commentary doesn’t start until the final match, but as the second round progresses, a small crowd forms around commentator Michael Redmond to hear his thoughts. The charismatic Redmond, an American, is one of very few non-Asian Go celebrities. He began playing professionally in Japan at the age of 18, and remains the only Westerner to ever reach 9-dan, the game’s highest rank. “I don’t know the black player,” he says, referring to Nomitan, “but it has a flashy style, flashier than Crazy Stone. Very good tesuji. With humans, tesuji are a fairly accurate gauge of strength, and now, I’m seeing computers do them more.”

Tesuji means something like “clever play,” and Nomitan’s tesuji are giving Crazy Stone serious trouble. With the game nearly halfway done, Crazy Stone is only 55 percent confident, which means it’s even money. After a few more turns, another professional named O Meien pronounces Nomitan the leader. As other games in the room finish, the crowd in front of the projector screen grows larger and louder. From the sound of it, Crazy Stone’s prospects are increasingly bleak.

Most people in the room take the pros like O Meien at their word. We have to, since games of Go are often so complex that only extremely high-level players can understand how they’re progressing. Even for Coulom — a good but not great Go player himself — Crazy Stone’s moves can be incomprehensible. But Coulom identifies as a programmer more than a player, which allows him to remain calm in the face of professional skepticism. He trusts the confidence level Crazy Stone shows him. “Maybe O Meien is thinking about which side looks better,” he says, with a lilting French accent. “But I know Crazy Stone is much stronger than Nomitan. So I just think at some point Nomitan will probably mess up.”

And so it does. Crazy Stone makes a number of moves that prompt murmurs of approval from the crowd. Despite those initial tesuji, Nomitan squanders its advantage. Soon, Crazy Stone’s confidence levels are in the high 80s, and Nomitan resigns.

The other matches leading up to the final are uneventful, with the exception of one semi-final contest. Zen, Crazy Stone’s biggest rival and last year’s runner-up, nearly loses to a program called Aya. The game begins with a complicated local battle in the upper right corner, each side trying to keep their stones alive. At first, Zen plays with excellent kiai, or fighting spirit. The area looks settled. Then, without warning, Zen makes an obvious mistake, eliciting a collective gasp from the room. Zen’s co-programmer, a Japanese man with long graying hair named Hideki Kato, keeps his eyes on the confidence levels streaming across his laptop screen, and eventually, Zen manages to eke out a lead, before Aya resigns. The final is decided, a rematch of last year’s match: Crazy Stone vs. Zen.

The Mystery of Go

Even in the West, Go has long been a favorite game of mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists. Einstein played Go during his time at Princeton, as did mathematician John Nash. Seminal computer scientist Alan Turing was a Go aficionado, and while working as a World War II code-breaker, he introduced the game to fellow cryptologist I.J. Good. Now known for contributing the idea of an “intelligence exposition” to singularity theories — predictions of how machines will become smarter than people — Good gave the game a huge boost in Europe with a 1965 article for New Scientist entitled “The Mystery of Go.”

Good opens the article by suggesting that Go is inherently superior to all other strategy games, an opinion shared by pretty much every Go player I’ve met. “There is chess in the western world, but Go is incomparably more subtle and intellectual,” says South Korean Lee Sedol, perhaps the greatest living Go player and one of a handful who make over seven figures a year in prize money. Subtlety, of course, is subjective. But the fact is that of all the world’s perfect information games — tic-tac-toe, chess, checkers, Othello, xiangqi, shogi — Go is the only one in which computers don’t stand a chance against humans.

This is not for lack of trying on the part of programmers, who have worked on Go alongside chess for the last fifty years, with substantially less success. The first chess programs were written in the early fifties, one by Turing himself. By the 1970s, they were quite good. But as late as 1962, despite the game’s popularity among programmers, only two people had succeeded at publishing Go programs, neither of which was implemented or tested against humans.

Finally, in 1968, computer game theory genius Alfred Zobrist authored the first Go program capable of beating an absolute beginner. It was a promising first step, but notwithstanding enormous amounts of time, effort, brilliance, and quantum leaps in processing power, programs remained incapable of beating accomplished amateurs for the next four decades.

To understand this, think about Go in relation to chess. At the beginning of a chess game, White has twenty possible moves. After that, Black also has twenty possible moves. Once both sides have played, there are 400 possible board positions. Go, by contrast, begins with an empty board, where Black has 361 possible opening moves, one at every intersection of the 19 by 19 grid. White can follow with 360 moves. That makes for 129,960 possible board positions after just the first round of moves.

The rate at which possible positions increase is directly related to a game’s “branching factor,” or the average number of moves available on any given turn. Chess’s branching factor is 35. Go’s is 250. Games with high branching factors make classic search algorithms like minimax extremely costly. Minimax creates a search tree that evaluates possible moves by simulating all possible games that might follow, and then it chooses the move that minimizes the opponent’s best-case scenario. Improvements on the algorithm — such as alpha-beta search and null-move — can prune the chess game tree, identifying which moves deserve more attention and facilitating faster and deeper searches. But what works for chess — and checkers and Othello — does not work for Go.

The trouble is that identifying Go moves that deserve attention is often a mysterious process. “You’ll be looking at the board and just know,” Redmond told me, as we stood in front of the projector screen watching Crazy Stone take back Nomitan’s initial lead. “It’s something subconscious, that you train through years and years of playing. I’ll see a move and be sure it’s the right one, but won’t be able to tell you exactly how I know. I just see it.”

Similarly inscrutable is the process of evaluating a particular board configuration. In chess, there are some obvious rules. If, ten moves down the line, one side is missing a knight and the other isn’t, generally it’s clear who’s ahead. Not so in Go, where there’s no easy way to prove why Black’s moyo is large but vulnerable, and White has bad aji. Such things may be obvious to an expert player, but without a good way to quantify them, they will be invisible to computers. And if there’s no good way to evaluate intermediate game positions, an alpha-beta algorithm that engages in global board searches has no way of deciding which move leads to the best outcome.

Not that it matters: Go’s impossibly high branching factor and state space (the number of possible board configurations) render full-board alpha-beta searches all but useless, even after implementing clever refinements. Factor in the average length of a game — chess is around 40 turns, Go is 200 — and computer Go starts to look like a fool’s errand.

Nonetheless, after Zobrist, Go programmers persisted in their efforts and managed to make incremental progress. But it wasn’t until 1979 that a five-year project by computer scientist Bruce Wilcox produced a program capable of beating low-level amateurs. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Wilcox and his advisor collected detailed protocols from games played against James Kerwin, who soon after would leave for Japan to become the second-ever Western professional Go player.

Unlike successful chess programmers, Wilcox focused almost entirely on modeling expert intelligence, collecting a vast database of stone relationships from Kerwin’s games. His program divided the board into smaller, more manageable zones, and then used the database to generate possible moves, applying a hierarchal function to choose the best among them. Forward-looking searches like alpha-beta, long the cornerstone of AI gaming, were entirely absent from the program’s first incarnation

During the development process, Wilcox became a very strong amateur player, an indispensable asset for early Go programmers, given that programs depended so much on a nuanced understanding of the game. Mark Boon (Goliath), David Fotland (Many Faces of Go), Chen Zhixing (Handtalk and Goemate) — the winners of computer Go competitions throughout the 80s and 90s — were all excellent players, and it was their combined prowess as players and programmers that facilitated steady improvements through the 90s. Then, somewhat abruptly, progress stalled. The programs had encountered an obstacle that also gives human players trouble.

“A lot of people peak out at a certain level of amateur and never get any stronger,” David Fotland explains. Fotland, an early computer Go innovator, also worked as chief engineer of Hewlett Packard’s PA-RISC processor in the 70s, and tested the system with his Go program. “There’s some kind of mental leap that has to happen to get you past that block, and the programs ran into the same issue. The issue is being able to look at the whole board, not the just the local fights.”

Fotland and others tried to figure out how to modify their programs to integrate full-board searches. They met with some limited success, but by 2004, progress stalled again, and available options seemed exhausted. Increased processing power was moot. To run searches even one move deeper would require an impossibly fast machine. The most difficult game looked as if it couldn’t be won.

Enter Rémi Coulom, whose Crazy Stone would inaugurate a new era of computer Go. Coulom’s father was a programmer, and in 1983, he gave his son a Videopac computer for Christmas. Coulom was nine, around the time most Go prodigies leave home to begin intensive study at an academy. After less than a year, he had programmed Mastermind. In four years, he had created an AI that could play Connect Four. Othello followed shortly thereafter, and by 18, Coulom had written his first chess program.

The program, Crazy Bishop, was awful. Without access to the internet, Coulom had to invent everything from scratch. But a year later, he started engineering school, where university computers allowed him to swap algorithms and strategies in online chess programming communities. Crazy Bishop improved quickly. In 1997, the year Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, Coulom attended the world computer chess championship in Paris, where he made a decent showing and met members of his online community in person. The event inspired him to continue graduate study as a programmer, not an engineer. Following a stint in the military and a masters in cognitive science, Coulom earned a PhD for work on how neural networks and reinforcement learning can be used to train simulated robots to swim.

Although he’d encountered Go at the 2002 Computer Olympiad, Coulom didn’t give it much thought until 2005, when, after landing a job at the University of Lille 3, he began advising Guillaume Chaslot, a masters student who wanted to write a computer Go program as his thesis. Chaslot soon left to start his PhD, but Coulom was hooked, and Go became a full-time obsession.

The Monte Carlo Bet

It wasn’t long before he made his breakthrough. Coulom had exchanged ideas with a fellow academic named Bruno Bouzy, who believed that the secret to computer Go might lie in a search algorithm known as Monte Carlo. Developed in 1950 to model nuclear explosions, Monte Carlo replaces an exhaustive search with a statistical sampling of fewer possibilities. The approach made sense for Go. Rather than having to search every branch of the game tree, Monte Carlo would play out a series of random games from each possible move, and then deduce the value of the move from an analysis of the results.

Bouzy couldn’t make it work. But Coulom hit upon a novel way of combining the virtues of tree search with the efficiency of Monte Carlo. He christened the new algorithm Monte Carlo Tree Search, or MCTS, and in January of 2006, Crazy Stone won its first tournament. After he published his findings, other programmers quickly integrated MCTS into their Go programs, and for the next two years, Coulom vied for dominance with another French program, Mogo, that ran a refined version of the algorithm.

Although Crazy Stone ended up winning the UEC Cup in 2007 and 2008, Mogo’s team used man-machine matches to win the publicity war. Coulom felt the lack of attention acutely. When neither the public nor his university gave him the recognition he deserved, he lost motivation and stopped working on Go for nearly two years.

Coulom might have given up forever had it not been for a 2010 email from Ikeda Osamu, the CEO of Unbalance, a Japanese computer game company. Ikeda wanted to know if he’d be willing to license Crazy Stone. Unbalance controlled about a third of the million-dollar global market in computer Go, but Zen’s commercial version had begun to increase its market share. Ikeda needed Coulom to give his company’s software a boost.

The first commercial version of Crazy Stone hit the market in spring of 2011. In March of 2013, Coulom’s creation returned to the UEC Cup, beating Zen in the finals and — given a four-stone head-start — winning the first Densei-sen against Japanese professional Yoshio “The Computer” Ishida. The victories were huge for Coulom, both emotionally and financially. You can see their significance in the gift shop of the Japan Go Association, where a newspaper clipping, taped to the wall behind display copies of Crazy Stone, shows the pro grimly succumbing to Coulom’s creation.

Extremely Human

During the break before this year’s UEC final, the TV crew springs into action, setting up cameras and adjusting boom mikes. Redmond, microphone in hand, positions himself at the front of the room next to the magnetic board. On the other side is Narumi Osawa, a pixieish 4-dan professional who, in standard Japanese fashion, will act as an obsequious female foil — “What was that? Oh, wow, I see! Hai! Hai!” — for Redmond’s in-game analysis.

Once everything is in place, Kato and Coulom are called to the front of the room for nigiri, to determine who plays first. Since he is the favorite, Coulom reaches into one of two polished wooden goke and grabs a fistful of white stones. Kato places one black stone on the board, indicating his guess that Coulom holds an odd number of stones. The white stones are counted. Kato guessed correctly. He will be Black, and the game is underway.

It takes only three turns before the room explodes with excitement. After claiming two star points in the corners — a standard opening — Zen has placed its third stone right near the center of the board. The move is utterly bizarre, and even Kato is somewhat baffled. “An inhuman decision,” Viennot whispers to me. “But Zen likes to make moyo in the middle of the board, like Takemiya. Maybe this is a new style.”

Kato and Coulom are sitting next to each other, eyes fixed on their laptops, occasionally exchanging confidence levels. An interesting struggle develops in the upper left corner, where Crazy Stone has invaded and Zen is trying to strengthen its position. The crowd mutters when Redmond pronounces one of Zen’s moves “extremely human.” (“Hai! Hai!”) Black and white stones continue to fill the board, beautiful as always, forming what is technically known as a percolated fractal.

Suddenly, Coulom tenses up. Crazy Stone’s confidence levels are rising quickly, too quickly, and soon, they are far too high, up in the sixties. It appears the program has misjudged a semeai, or capturing race, and believes a group of stones in the upper right corner is safe, when in fact it is not. Since Crazy Stone’s move choices depend on an accurate assessment of the overall board position, the misjudged group proves fatal. On its 186th move, Crazy Stone resigns, and Zen becomes the new UEC Cup champion.

Later that evening, at the celebratory banquet, Coulom says he doesn’t feel too bad, but I suspect he’s extremely disappointed. Still, there’s a chance for redemption. As a finalist, Crazy Stone gets to compete in the Densei-sen.

The Electric Sage Battle

Coulom plays down the Electric Sage Battle. “The real competition is program against program,” he told me during one early phone interview. “When my opponent is a programmer, we are doing the same thing. We can talk to each other. But when I play against a professional and he explains the moves to me, it is too high level. I can’t understand, and he can’t understand what I am doing. The Densei-sen — it is good for publicity. I am not so interested in that.”

But when we meet at the Densei-sen, he seems excited. The building is humming with activity. Last weekend’s conference room is reserved for press and university dignitaries, and a new, private room has been equipped for the matches. Only the referee and timekeepers will be allowed in the room, and cameras have been set up to capture the action for the rest of us. The professional commentators are now in the building’s main auditorium, where at least a hundred people and three TV crews are ready to watch Crazy Stone and Zen take on a real pro.

In 2013, the Electric Sage Battle starred Ishida “The Computer” Yoshio, so-called because of his extraordinary counting and endgame abilities. This year, the pro is Norimoto Yoda, known for leading the Japanese team to a historic victory over Korea in the 2006 Nongshim Cup, and for shattering Go stones when he slams them down on the hardwood goban. After an introductory ceremony, Coulom and Yoda enter the private room, bow, and take their seats. In his typical style, Yoda has come dressed in an olive green kimono. His left hand holds a folded fan. Coulom, in his typical style, is wearing a blue turtleneck sweater. On the wooden goban between them sit two gokes filled with stones — Black for Coulom, White for Yoda.

This time, there is no nigiri. Crazy Stone receives a massive handicap, starting with four black stones placed advantageously on the corner star points (the 4 by 4 intersections on a Go board’s 19 by 19 grid). Yoda has no choice but to adopt an aggressive style of play, invading Crazy Stone’s territory in hopes of neutralizing his initial disadvantage. But Crazy Stone responds skillfully to every threat, and Yoda’s squarish face starts to harden. The fan snaps open and shut, open and shut.

In the press room, we can’t hear the auditorium commentary. Instead, I watch as Muramatsu Murakasu, a main organizer of the event, plays the game out on his own board with O Meien. The two take turns trying to predict where Yoda and Crazy Stone will move next, and as the game progresses, both agree that Crazy Stone is doing an excellent job maintaining its lead.

Meanwhile, Coulom is looking at the board, his laptop, the timekeepers, anywhere but the increasingly frustrated Yoda. After Coulom places one particular stone, Yoda’s eyes narrow perceptibly. He grunts and fans himself furiously. “That was an excellent move,” says O Meien. “Yoda-san must be upset.”

Crazy Stone continues to play brilliant Go, and all of Yoda’s incursions prove fruitless. It is only as the end approaches that Crazy Stone reveals its true identity. With a lead of eleven points, any decent human in Crazy Stone’s position would play a few obvious moves and then pass, allowing Yoda resign. But Crazy Stone’s algorithm is structured to care only about winning — not by how much. Coulom winces as Crazy Stone makes a wasted move in its own territory, and then another. The game drags on as Crazy Stone sacrifices points, until mercifully it decides to pass, and the machine is finally declared the winner.

Coulom leaves the fuming Yoda as quickly as possible and joins us in the press room. He’s both ecstatic and mortified. “I am proud of Crazy Stone,” he says. “Very proud. But the first thing I will do at home is work on the endgame, so it does not make such embarrassing moves.” Then things get better. Yoda manages to beat Zen in the second Densei-sen match, and just like that, the glory of the Electric Sage Battle belongs to Coulom, whose program has now bested two professionals after a four-stone handicap.

When AI Is Not AI

After the match, I ask Coulom when a machine will win without a handicap. “I think maybe ten years,” he says. “But I do not like to make predictions.” His caveat is a wise one. In 2007, Deep Blue’s chief engineer, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, said much the same thing. Hsu also favored alpha-beta search over Monte Carlo techniques in Go programs, speculating that the latter “won’t play a significant role in creating a machine that can top the best human players.”

Even with Monte Carlo, another ten years may prove too optimistic. And while programmers are virtually unanimous in saying computers will eventually top the humans, many in the Go community are skeptical. “The question of whether they’ll get there is an open one,” says Will Lockhart, director of the Go documentary The Surrounding Game. “Those who are familiar with just how strong professionals really are, they’re not so sure.”

According to University of Sydney cognitive scientist and complex systems theorist Michael Harré, professional Go players behave in ways that are incredibly hard to predict. In a recent study, Harré analyzed Go players of various strengths, focusing on the predictability of their moves given a specific local configuration of stones. “The result was totally unexpected,” he says. “Moves became steadily more predictable until players reached near-professional level. But at that point, moves started getting less predictable, and we don’t know why. Our best guess is that information from the rest of the board started influencing decision-making in a unique way.”

This could mean that computer programs will eventually hit another wall. It may turn out that the lack of progress experienced by Go programs in the last year is evidence of yet another qualitative division, the same one that divides amateurs from professionals. Should that be the case, another breakthrough on the level of the Monte Carlo Tree Search could be necessary before programs can challenge pros.

I was surprised to hear from programmers that the eventual success of these programs will have little to do with increased processing power. It is still the case that a Go program’s performance depends almost entirely on the quality of its code. Processing power helps some, but it can only get you so far. Indeed, the UEC lets competitors use any kind of system, and although some opt for 2048-processor-core super-computers, Crazy Stone and Zen work their magic on commercially available 64-core hardware.

Even more surprising was that no programmers think of their creations as “intelligent.” “The game of Go is spectacularly challenging,” says Coulom, “but there is nothing to do with making a human intelligence.” In other words, Watson and Crazy Stone are not beings. They are solutions to specific problems. That’s why its inaccurate to say that IBM Watson will be used to fight cancer, unless playing Jeopardy helps reduce tumors. Developing Watson might have led to insights that help create an artificial diagnostician, but that diagnostician isn’t Watson, just as MCTS programs used in hospital planning are not Crazy Stone.

The public relations folks at IBM paint a different picture, and so does the press. Anthropomorphized algorithms make for a better story. Deep Blue and Watson can be pitted against humans in highly produced man-machine battles, and IBM becomes the gatekeeper of a new era in artificial intelligence. Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death, Ray Kurzweil and other futurists feed this mischaracterization by trumpeting the impending technological apotheosis of humanity, their breathless idiocy echoing through popular media. “The Brain’s Last Stand,” read the cover of Newsweek after Kasparov’s defeat. But in truth, these machines are nowhere close to mimicking the brain, and their creators admit as much.

Many Go players see the game as the final bastion of human dominance over computers. This view, which tacitly accepts the existence of a battle of intellects between humans and machines, is deeply misguided. In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe. Computer Go matches aren’t the brain’s last stand. Rather, they help show just how far machines have to go before achieving something akin to true human intelligence. Until that day comes, perhaps it’s best to view the Densei-sen as programmers do. “It is fun for me,” says Coulom, “but that’s all.”

[MIKA27]

Would you believe this place is situated in the centre of Darwin CBD Between two nightclubs?

Seriously!?

[MIKA27]

Brazil Drafts Guide to Surviving A Mugging at the World Cup

"Do not react, scream or argue," says a brochure Brazilian police intend to hand out to soccer fans at next month's FIFA World Cup tournament, a policy similar to the one South African authorities adopted ahead of the 2010 World Cup

Soccer fans the world over may want to file this under essential summer reading: A brochure, drafted by Brazilian police, on how to survive being mugged at the 2014 World Cup.

Brazilian newspaper Estadao de Sao Paulo reports that police plan to disseminate the brochure to incoming soccer fans at next month’s tournament. It will include tips on how to avoid being robbed, such as tucking valuable jewelry out of sight, and more importantly how to confront a mugger.

“Do not react, scream or argue,” the guide reportedly advises tourists, who may not understand the immediate danger of the situation. Brazil has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with 25 out of every 100,000 people killed or murdered, according to the U.N.

South African authorities issued similar warnings ahead of the 2010 World Cup, but crime actually fell precipitously during the tournament due to the heavy law enforcement presence. Brazil’s defense ministry is taking a page out of their book — deploying 30,000 troops along the country’s borders and around the grounds of the tournament, which will kick off in 12 cities starting June 12.

[MIKA27]

SS St Louis: The ship of Jewish refugees nobody wanted

Gerald Granston (right) on the deck of the St Louis

On 13 May 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Germany aboard a luxury cruise liner, the SS St Louis. They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US - but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.

"It was really something to be going on a luxury liner," says Gisela Feldman. "We didn't really know where we were heading, or how we would cope when we got there."

At the age of 90, Feldman still clearly remembers the raw and mixed emotions she felt as a 15-year-old girl boarding the St Louis at Hamburg docks with her mother and younger sister.

"I was always aware of how anxious my mother looked, embarking on such a long journey, on her own with two teenage daughters," she says.

In the years following the rise to power of Hitler's Nazi party, ordinary Jewish families like Feldman's had been left in no doubt about the increasing dangers they were facing.

15-year-old Gisela Feldman on the St Louis

Jewish properties had been confiscated, synagogues and businesses burned down. After Feldman's Polish father was arrested and deported to Poland her mother decided it was time to leave.

Feldman remembers her father pleading with her mother to wait for him to return but her mother was adamant and always replied: "I have to take the girls away to safety."

So, armed with visas for Cuba which she had bought in Berlin, 10 German marks in her purse and another 200 hidden in her underclothes, she headed for Hamburg and the St Louis.

"We were fortunate that my mother was so brave," says Feldman with a note of pride in her voice.

As the transatlantic ocean liner pulled away, Feldman remembers watching tearful relatives waving to them from the docks. "They knew we would never see each other again," she says softly. "We were the lucky ones - we managed to get out." She would never see her father or more than 30 other close family members again.

By early 1939, the Nazis had closed most of Germany's borders and many countries had imposed quotas limiting the number of Jewish refugees they would allow in.

Cuba was seen as a temporary transit point to get to America and officials at the Cuban embassy in Berlin were offering visas for about $200 or $300 each - $3,000 to $5,000 (£1,800 to £3,000) at today's prices.

When six-year-old Gerald Granston was told by his father that they were leaving their small town in southern Germany to take a ship to the other side of the world, he struggled to understand what that meant. "I'd never heard of Cuba and I couldn't imagine what was going to happen. I remember being scared all the time," he says, now aged 81.

For many of the young passengers and their parents however, the trepidation and anxiety soon faded as the St Louis began its two-week transatlantic voyage.

Feldman, who shared a cabin in the lower part of the ship with her sister Sonja, spent her time walking around the deck chatting with boys of her own age, or swimming in the ship's pool.

On board, there was a dance band in the evenings and even a cinema. There were regular meals with a variety of food that the passengers rarely saw back home.

Under orders from the ship's captain, Gustav Schroder, the waiters and crew members treated the passengers politely, in stark contrast to the open hostility Jewish families had become accustomed under the Nazis.

The captain allowed traditional Friday night prayers to be held, during which he gave permission for the portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging in the main dining room to be taken down.

Six-year-old Sol Messinger, who was travelling with his father and mother, recalls how happy everyone seemed. In fact, he says, the youngsters were constantly being told by the adults that they were now safe from harm: "We're going away," he heard people say again and again on that outward journey. "We don't have to look over our shoulders any more."

But as the luxury liner reached the coast of Havana on 27 May, that sense of optimism disappeared to be replaced by fear, then dread.

Granston was up on deck with his father and dozens of other families, their suitcases packed and ready to disembark, when the Cuban officials, all smiles, first came aboard.

It quickly became clear that the ship was not going to dock and that no-one was being allowed off. He kept hearing the words "manana, manana" - tomorrow, tomorrow. When the Cubans left and the ship's captain announced that people would have to wait, he could feel, even as a little boy, that something was wrong.

For the next seven days, Captain Schroder tried in vain to persuade the Cuban authorities to allow them in. In fact, the Cubans had already decided to revoke all but a handful of the visas - probably out of fear of being inundated with more refugees fleeing Europe.

The captain then steered the St Louis towards the Florida coast, but the US authorities also refused it the right to dock, despite direct appeals to President Franklin Roosevelt. Granston thinks he too was worried about the potential flood of migrants.

"That's Miami," Messinger's father pointed out as they stood up on deck one evening, holding hands and looking mournfully out at the lights on the distant shore. Feldman also remembers seeing the tall buildings of Florida in the distance.

By early June, Captain Schroder had no option but to turn the giant liner back towards Europe. "The joy had gone out of everything," Feldman recalls. "No-one was talking about what would happen now."

As the ship headed back across the Atlantic, six-year-old Granston kept asking his father whether they were going back to see their grandparents. His father just shook his head in silent despair.

By then, people were openly crying as they wandered the ship - one passenger even slit his wrists and threw himself overboard out of sheer desperation. "If I close my eyes, I can still hear his shrieks and see the blood," Granston says quietly.

In the end, the ship's passengers did not have to go back to Nazi Germany. Instead, Belgium, France, Holland and the UK agreed to take the refugees. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) posted a cash guarantee of $500,000 - or $8 million (£4.7m) in today's money - as part of an agreement to cover any associated costs.

Captain Schroder's letter thanking the JDC for arranging visas for the passengers

On 17 June, the liner docked at the Belgian port of Antwerp, more than a month after it had set sail from Hamburg. Feldman, her mother and sisters all went on to England, as did Granston and his father.

They both survived the war but between them they lost scores of relatives in the Holocaust, including Feldman's father who never managed to get out of Poland.

Messinger and his parents went to live in France but then had to flee the Nazis for a second time, leaving just six weeks before Hitler invaded.

Two-hundred-and-fifty-four other passengers from the St Louis were not so fortunate and were killed as the Nazis swept across Western Europe.

[MIKA27]

US twin baby sisters born holding hands

A pair of US twin sisters who were born holding hands were breathing on their own after being removed from a ventilator, their mother has said.

Jillian and Jenna Thistlethwaite shared an amniotic sac and placenta, a rare condition known as monoamniotic birth.

"They're already best friends," said their mother, Sarah Thistlethwaite.

They were born on Friday in the US state of Ohio, grasping each other's hands when doctors lifted them up for their parents to see after delivery.

Monoamniotic birth occurs in only one in 10,000 pregnancies.

Ms Thistlethwaite, 32, was monitored for weeks at Akron General Medical Center in Akron, as monoamniotic twins are at risk from becoming entangled in each other's umbilical cords.

She told the Akron Beacon Journal newspaper that holding her children was "the best Mother's Day present ever".

"I can't believe they were holding hands," she said. "That's amazing."

[MIKA27]

NORTH OF THE SUN CABIN IN NORWAY

To most people, the idea of roughing it for nine months in Norway, let alone nine months in a remote and uninhabited bay in the Lofoten Islands, sounds both silly and suicidal. To Norwegian surfers Inge Wegge and Jørn Ranum, it sounded like the makings of a movie.

Hell-bent on spending the better part of a year catching amazing waves while living like hermits, the daredevil duo have turned their adventure into a movie, North of the Sun, that’s available on Vimeo to rent for $5 or buy for $10. See how they survive in a shelter built from driftwood. Marvel at their resolve as they scrounge for food. And – brace yourself – feel their pain as they try to make it without a cell phone signal for 270 days.

[MIKA27]

TACTICAL SLEEVES | BY CARGO WORKS

We are loving these Tactical Sleeves by Cargo Works. Designed to carry both a MacBook Air and an iPad at the same time, the urban tactical style laptop sleeve features a padded neoprene lined zipper compartment for the Macbook Air, and a front flap pocket for an iPad. On the front, PALS webbing lets you carry other items such as pens and carabiners. Available for the 11” and 13” MacBook Air and in a choice of three colors.

[polarbear]

Seriously!?

Yep, right in the centre of Mitchel Street Across from an Irish bar

Next to a beer garden and above an Underground Nightclub

[MIKA27]

BISON AIRLIGHTER

When normal lighters, matches, and fire-starter sticks won't quite get the job done, you need something a little more powerful — something like the Bison Airlighter.

Capable of emitting a four-inch jet-powered flame, this lighter ignites charcoal and wood quickly, then blowing air rapidly over the fire to help it grow. Capable of igniting coals and wood without lighter fluid in just seconds, and producing a full-fledged fire in mere minutes, this lighter can have you ready to cook in only six minutes. Powered by batteries and butane, this lighter also features a USB charger port, a flashlight, a child-safety lock, and even a bottle opener.

MIKA: Cigars?

[MIKA27]

ARMADA ARMCHAIR

It might be called an armchair, but the Armada Armchair is as much a sculptural piece as it is seating. Surprisingly devoid of arm rests — you know, the things that make an armchair an armchair — this sleek seat features a bottom frame made from solid wood like American Walnut, Elm, Cherry, and Pear, and a seat that's a combination of thin steel covered by high-quality leather or fur. Feel like adding a pillow? Not to worry — the Armada's clean lines are safe thanks to a magnetic attachment system.

[polarbear]

BISON AIRLIGHTER

When normal lighters, matches, and fire-starter sticks won't quite get the job done, you need something a little more powerful — something like the Bison Airlighter.

Capable of emitting a four-inch jet-powered flame, this lighter ignites charcoal and wood quickly, then blowing air rapidly over the fire to help it grow. Capable of igniting coals and wood without lighter fluid in just seconds, and producing a full-fledged fire in mere minutes, this lighter can have you ready to cook in only six minutes. Powered by batteries and butane, this lighter also features a USB charger port, a flashlight, a child-safety lock, and even a bottle opener.

MIKA: Cigars?

Obviously designed to help the 80rg Cigar trend