In 2016, a machine played a move no human would ever play. The world champion walked out of the room. What happened next changed Go forever.
Read on if you want the full story.
March 2016, Seoul. 200 million people are watching a board game.
On one side, Lee Sedol, an 18 time world champion at Go. On the other, AlphaGo, a Google DeepMind machine.
Go is so complex, there are more possible positions than atoms in the universe. For 2,500 years, humans thought no computer could ever master it.
In Game 2, AlphaGo plays Move 37. A stone in a place no human would ever play. The commentators think it is a mistake. Lee Sedol stands up and walks out of the room.
DeepMind later said a human had a 1 in 10,000 chance of playing that move. Lee himself called it beautiful. It was not a mistake. It was a move humans had missed for centuries. AlphaGo wins Game 2, then the match 4-1.
But here is the twist.
In Game 4, down 3-0, Lee answers with his own impossible move. Move 78, nicknamed God's Touch. Also a 1 in 10,000 move. AlphaGo's evaluation collapses. Lee wins. It is the only game a human ever won against AlphaGo.
The machine taught humans a new way to play. And pushed by the machine, a human played the best move of his life.
This is the story of how one man in a bedroom in London wiped $1 trillion off the US Stock market in minutes.
It was known as the 2010 Flash Crash.
Navinder Singh Sarao lived with his parents in Hounslow, west London. He traded from his bedroom, on an ordinary computer with three screens, and rode a moped. Nobody in his street knew what he did for a living.
Sarao traded E mini S&P 500 futures, contracts that track the US stock market. He built a program called NAVTrader. It placed huge sell orders, thousands at a time, to make it look like a flood of sellers was coming. Then it cancelled them before they could execute. The price fell. He bought cheap. Then he sold when it bounced back. The trick is called spoofing, and it is illegal.
On 6 May 2010, the market broke. In about five minutes, the Dow Jones fell almost 1,000 points and about $1 trillion in value vanished. It bounced back within 36 minutes, but for a while, blue chip stocks were trading for pennies. The US government later said Sarao helped trigger the Flash Crash. Experts still argue over how much of it was really him.
Sarao kept trading the same way for years. US regulators said he made about $40 million from spoofing between 2010 and 2014. He lived quietly, in the same house, in the same bedroom.
In April 2015, the FBI came to his door. He was arrested, extradited to the US, and in November 2016 he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and spoofing. Prosecutors asked the judge to go easy, pointing to his autism diagnosis and his help in other cases.
In January 2020, the judge sentenced him to one year of home detention. No prison. The place he had to stay? His parents house in Hounslow. The same bedroom where it all started. Was the punishment too lenient?
News headline tomorrow if Jensen remains as CEO of Nvidia after today’s board decision.
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