Today is the first class in our new four class set. You need to complete the grammar exercises and answer the writing question. Please complete your HW in your notebook, take a picture, and send it to me. Please include interesting details in this week’s writing question. To help your goal of improving your listening I have included some listening practice for you.
NEW WRITING QUESTION- Think about your elementary school experience. Was there a teacher that you will remember? Tell me about an experience you had with that teacher.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Today, researchers in Switzerland unveiled a small drone that can outfly some of the best human competitors in the world. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports on how artificial intelligence powered the drone to victory.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: So real quick, here's where we're at with computers beating humans at their own games. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue bested Garry Kasparov at chess.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It detects - it finds the shortest cut to any weakness in your position.
BRUMFIEL: In 2016, Google built a program using artificial intelligence to beat the world's best player at the game of Go.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Big congratulations once again to the AlphaGo team.
BRUMFIEL: New AI programs have also beaten humans at poker and several video games. But every one of these competitions has taken place on a board or at a desk. The computers haven't been able to beat us in the real world until now.
(SOUNDBITE OF QUADCOPTER DRONE FLYING)
BRUMFIEL: That is the sound of a small quadcopter drone with an AI brain whipping its way around a racecourse. It flies through square fabric gates in a specific sequence, going up, flipping down and sliding through turns in just seconds. It can pretty regularly fly the course faster than some of the best human drone pilots in the world.
LEONARD BAUERSFELD: This AI drone race marks the very first time that an AI has actually beaten human in a human sport, in a physical competition.
BRUMFIEL: Leonard Bauersfeld is a Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He helped program the little drone. Actually, it kind of programmed itself. The team put it into a virtual version of the racecourse. It went around and around in virtual space for the equivalent of 23 days, practicing until it learned the best route.
BAUERSFELD: That means as fast as possible and also all gates in the correct sequence.
BRUMFIEL: The drone bested its human rivals about 60% of the time. The work appears in the journal Nature. OK, but is this really such a big deal? Beating humans at chess felt momentous. Drone racing, well, I didn't even really know it was a thing. Bauersfeld says this is a big step because for a computer flying through the air is much more unpredictable than moving pieces on a chessboard. There's shifts in lighting, gusts of wind...
BAUERSFELD: Differences between batteries, between propellers, between the drones - there are so many things that change out there in the real world.
BRUMFIEL: It was actually a mix of AI and some more conventional programming that made the drones successful, most of the time anyway. For example, things go wrong if it gets an accidental bump from its rival.
BAUERSFELD: If that happens, it has no idea how to handle that and crashes.
BRUMFIEL: And it only works for the course it's been trained on. Put it in a new environment, and it wouldn't have a clue what to do. Bauersfeld says that's part of the reason this kind of technology can't be easily fashioned into a killer military drone. So don't worry, at least not yet. Still, the little drone does show that AI is beginning to make that jump from the virtual world into the real one, regardless of whether its human opponents are ready or not. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF BADBADNOTGOOD AND GHOSTFACE KILLAH SONG, "GUNSHOWERS")