News on China's scientific and technological development.

Today at 4:12 PM
Today at 12:01 PM
later got curious, read both articles;

the data:
Clipboard586.jpg



the fit:
Clipboard585.jpg

(note on this very special occasion I don't say what values on the ordinate represent :-(


residuals of the fit (of course rounded to nearest, ehm, integer):
-34
-24
-1
123
26
-66
-193
145

make whatever conclusion you will
... and I'll leave it after this:

took the US numbers ('Deceased' in the third sheet in
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
document)

to get an analogous fit

Clipboard587.jpg


and residuals:
-34
-167
-33
94
118
88
-250
89

q.jpg
 
Last edited:

supercat

Major
Beijing orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software

Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft.

The directive is the first publicly known instruction with specific targets given to Chinese buyers to switch to domestic technology vendors, and echoes efforts by the Trump administration to curb the use of Chinese technology in the US and its allies.

The move is part of a broader campaign to increase China’s reliance on home-made technologies, and is likely to fuel concerns of “decoupling”, with supply chains between the US and China being severed.

Earlier this year, Washington banned US companies from doing business with Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei, and is looking at ways to help funnel money to its European rivals.

The US recently proposed that technology sales into the US from “foreign adversaries” would be vetted for national security reasons, and has been pressuring European allies to freeze Huawei out of 5G infrastructure projects.

Analysts at China Securities, a broker, estimate that 20m-30m pieces of hardware will need to be swapped out as a result of the Chinese directive, with large scale replacement beginning next year. They added the substitutions would take place at a pace of 30 per cent in 2020, 50 per cent in 2021, and 20 per cent the year after, earning the policy the nickname “3-5-2”.

The analysts noted that the order had come from the Chinese Communist party’s Central Office earlier this year.

Although Central Office policy documents are confidential, employees from two cyber security firms have told the Financial Times that their government clients have also described the policy. The employees asked to remain anonymous as the information was politically sensitive.

The 3-5-2 policy is part of a drive for China’s government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to use “secure and controllable” technology, as enshrined in the country’s Cyber Security Law passed in 2017.

But unlike previous pushes for self-sufficiency in technology, recent US sanctions have added urgency to the project, said Paul Triolo of consultancy Eurasia Group.

“China’s 3-5-2 programme is just the tip of the new spear,” said Mr Triolo. “The goal is clear: getting to a space largely free of the type of threats that ZTE, Huawei, Megvii, and Sugon now face,” he added, naming some of the Chinese companies that over the past two years have been blocked from buying from US suppliers.

Analysts at Jefferies estimate that US technology companies generate as much as $150bn a year in revenues from China, although much of that will come from private sector buyers.

The pace of replacement is ambitious. Government offices already tend to use Lenovo’s desktop computers, following the company’s acquisition of US giant IBM’s personal computer division.

But analysts say that it will be difficult to replace software with domestic alternatives, since most software vendors develop products for popular US-made operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s macOS.

Although Microsoft did produce a “Chinese Government Edition” of Windows 10 in 2017 with its Chinese joint venture, Chinese cyber security firms now say government clients must move to entirely Chinese-made operating systems.

China’s homemade operating systems, such as Kylin OS, have a much smaller ecosystem of developers producing compatible software.

Defining “domestically made” is also challenging. Even though Lenovo is a Chinese-owned company that assembles many products in China, its computer processor chips are made by Intel and its hard drives by Samsung.

The impact of the 3-5-2 policy could be significant since the government can control procurement for the agencies covered under the policy, another cyber security analyst said. When it comes to private companies, “let’s see what the government orders are — they will not proactively want to substitute, since the investment is high”

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
One thing that Tencent has in common with Facebook is that both companies are freaking out over Bytedance, and both their social media platforms are getting perceived being for old people. Yes, you know Boomers.

Tencent resurrects social media app Pengyou and adds coat of gloss, Instagram and Tinder on it.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Tencent’s resurrected social app is Facebook, Instagram and Tinder wrapped into one
The Chinese giant behind WeChat is quietly trialling a revamped version of Pengyou as it faces competition from ByteDance and others for teenage users
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
News of dubious technical achievement? I tend to think game beating AIs to be much like Formula One. They don't have direct benefits in pushing the envelope of automotive technology, but they represent a strong exercise for the engineers that will someday do.

Google has been trying to get Alpha Go to do something much more complex than Chess or Go, resulting in Deepmind creating Alpha Star to master the game Starcraft II which is an RTS game.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


With that in mind, MOBAs like Dota 2 could be next.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


And this is where Tencent, who already owns League of Legends, comes in, using its own MOBA in Asia and China, known as Honor of Kings, or Arena of Valor in international markets, available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store by the way.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Tencent details how its MOBA-playing AI system beats 99.81% of human opponents
 

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
News of dubious technical achievement? I tend to think game beating AIs to be much like Formula One. They don't have direct benefits in pushing the envelope of automotive technology, but they represent a strong exercise for the engineers that will someday do.

Google has been trying to get Alpha Go to do something much more complex than Chess or Go, resulting in Deepmind creating Alpha Star to master the game Starcraft II which is an RTS game.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


With that in mind, MOBAs like Dota 2 could be next.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


And this is where Tencent, who already owns League of Legends, comes in, using its own MOBA in Asia and China, known as Honor of Kings, or Arena of Valor in international markets, available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store by the way.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Tencent details how its MOBA-playing AI system beats 99.81% of human opponents

Chess is one thing for a learning algorithm to dominate in. Go is a totally different problem. With computer games, don't we already have bots that can absolutely dominate any human player for games like Starcraft? I'm not sure how the achievement measures up against a game like Go.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


The irony is "less American" means the US has less control therefore more freedom for the rest of the world. A lot of articles lately over the US fearing Chinese apps. Americans created apps to collect data so they're upset not because China is using the internet for some new crime. They're upset China is doing what they're doing. Remember when the US was bragging that they can spy on the President of China because his wife was seen carrying an iPhone. Now the US wants to world stop buying Chinese smartphones because they can be used as spying devices. Just look at the media where they look at themselves as the guardians of free speech. They hate the internet because they don't control the flow of information anymore which is also why they're getting killed by the internet. Notice how there use to be comment sections in most media outlets? Now they're rare. They don't want regular people daring to question what they put out there hence why comment section to news sites are disappearing. It use to be like before the era of electronic media, being an entertainer was universally seen a lowly profession. They had to be live there to face their audience and hecklers who could ruin you. They didn't make a lot of money. But then electronic media came along where the entertainer could separate from the audience and control the message without any hecklers. The media could tell you that Britney Spears was a fantastic singer and there were no one to say otherwise. That's why entertainers can make millions where they never could before. But now comes the internet. The heckler is reborn and now can have a say like they use to and the media doesn't like it. Less American means they aren't in control of the message anymore.
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
Chess is one thing for a learning algorithm to dominate in. Go is a totally different problem. With computer games, don't we already have bots that can absolutely dominate any human player for games like Starcraft? I'm not sure how the achievement measures up against a game like Go.

Commercial games need odds stacked up for bots such as having more units or more powerful units --- in effect they allow the bot to cheat -- to achieve a higher difficulty level for the player. But players still beat them and the bot is still supposed to be beaten or no one is going to play your game.

This time however its different, you are designing an AI to intentionally win over the best players with equal assets on both sides.

Variations possible on Starcraft might be well greater than Go. A full fledged MOBA may have even more variations than Starcraft. The reason for this is that a MOBA --- which has a service game model --- is continually evolving. More units are being added to the game, units are being balanced and rebalanced. Units have all sorts of different abilities.
 
Top