09-18-2015, 10:44 PM
While Deep Blue was searching some 200 million positions per second, Kasparov was probably searching no more than five a second. And yet he played at essentially the same level. Clearly, humans have a trick up their sleeve that computers have yet to master. This trick is in evaluating chess positions and narrowing down the most profitable avenues of search. That dramatically simplifies the computational task because it prunes the tree of all possible moves to just a few branches. Computers have never been good at this, but today that changes thanks to the work of Matthew Lai at Imperial College London. Lai has created an artificial intelligence machine called Giraffe that has taught itself to play chess by evaluating positions much more like humans and in an entirely different way to conventional chess engines.
The financial crisis occurred because banks involved in trading had become massive, concentrated and interconnected in response to the repeal of Glass-Steagall’s separation. It makes no difference that Bear Stearns and Lehman were not actually universal banks (meaning both commercial and investment). The point was that they were enormous and completely tied into the other big banks.
Owning the Consequences: Clinton and the Repeal of Glass-Steagall | Demos
Some perpetual bonds are more eternal than others. Yale University will receive 136.20 euros ($153) in interest on a perpetual bond issued in 1648 from Dutch water authority de Stichtse Rijnlanden.
Yale to Be Paid Interest on Dutch Water Authority Bond From 1648 - Bloomberg Business
The average house price for the UK was £282,000 in July according to the Office for National Statistics, which, if you live in London, sounds like nothing – the average house price there nudged £525,000 this month. But the average UK earner, who takes home £24,648 gross, including bonuses, can only afford a house worth around £110,000, if you imagine them taking out a mortgage worth 4.5 times their salary. To find a job paying that much and a house that costs that little isn’t easy – saving for a deposit while paying market rents is even harder.
Cash has already been flowing out of emerging markets, with investors pulling a net $8.7 billion out of emerging market stocks in August, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF), the largest outflow since the mid-2013 "taper tantrum".