the U.S. Meanwhile, separately, members of the U.S. team in the International Mathematical Olympiad (http://www.
ams.org/news?_id=4446) are almost
always entirely Asian-Americans. And
second, and perhaps more important
from an ethical point of view, U.S. hiring of foreign tech workers can amount
to a form of “colonial brain drain” from
other countries that need their own IT
professionals at home.
A broad call to U.S. students to
pursue STEM or CS careers is not the
answer. American companies do not
need workers who are poorly prepared, do not love what they do, or do
not care about the moral dimensions
of their work. Tech companies, as well
as computer science and engineering
generally, need people called to IT as
a profession, not just a career. ACM
should thus consider these issues
before deciding to lobby on behalf of
bringing in tens of thousands more
foreign tech workers.
Paul J. Campbell, Beloit, WI, USA
Communications welcomes your opinion. To submit a
Letter to the Editor, please limit yourself to 500 words or
less, and send to letters@cacm.acm.org.
© 2018 ACM 0001-0782/18/12
by setting its performance time at two
seconds per move rather than three
minutes on a mainframe at the time.
While I consider the moves played by
LCZero’s neural network generally
plausible, even without search, Merlin
beat it decisively in these games, as a
neural network without search often
blunders in chess positions where non-trivial tactics really do matter.
I thus consider Cerf’s claim about
computer chess and neural networks
misleading, but is such a claim indeed
worth pointing out here, in a letter to
the editor? What worries me is the effect of the kind of “telephone game”
begun by Silver et al., 2 a message mischaracterized in Chess News and now
again in Communications by an author
of Cerf’s stature. We can only imagine
how such a telephone game would
continue to play out in the regular nontechnical press if we did not cut the
thread now.
References
1. Scheucher, A. and Kaindl, H. Benefits of using
multivalued functions for minimaxing. Artificial
Intelligence 99, 2 (Mar. 1999), 187–208.
2. Silver, D. et al. Mastering chess and Shogi by self-play
with a general reinforcement learning algorithm. arXiv,
2017; https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
Hermann Kaindl, Vienna, Austria
Author Responds:
Kaindl is correct. I meant to say AlphaZero
and mistakenly wrote AlphaGo Zero. I also
I agree that search is important for the
AlphaZero system and should have drawn
attention to it but honestly had not done
enough due diligence with the DeepMind
team, a deadline effect …
I appreciate the additional color
and clarity.
Vinton G. Cerf, Mountain View, CA
Communications Addresses
the Intellectual Challenges of CS
I am not one given to writing complementary letters to publications but
must say Communications (Sept. 2018)
was brilliant in exploring several extremely relevant intellectual challenges
with its readers, specifically Vinton
G. Cerf’s discussion of the “Treaty of
Westphalia” in his Cerf’s Up column
“The Peace of Westphalia” and its relevance to ongoing international interference in elections around the world;
Moshe Y. Vardi’s discussion of “disrup-
tive technology” in his Vardi’s Insights
column “Move Fast and Break Things,”
noting that while computer scientists
should “celebrate” their achievements,
they also need to, as Vardi put it, “drive
very carefully”; the passion of the let-
ters to the editor concerning a prior
Vardi column “How the Hippies De-
stroyed the Internet” (July 2018) on the
past (and future) of the Internet; and
my favorite, Adam Barker’s Viewpoint
“An Academic’s Observations from a
Sabbatical at Google” on the impor-
tance and relevance of software prac-
tice to software academics worldwide.
I also noted the then-recently an-
nounced “China Region Special Sec-
tion” (Nov. 2018). As a participant in
a 1987 People to People international
travel visit to China with other interna-
tional computer scientists, I recall being
amazed to find that, in what was at the
time a fairly primitive country techno-
logically, Chinese computer scientists
were almost all theoreticians, rather
than pragmatists. It took considerable
thought for me to realize, or perhaps
rationalize, that this was happening be-
cause labor was notably inexpensive in
China at a time that doing things manu-
ally was significantly less costly than do-
ing them with computer support.
Robert L. Glass, Toowong,
QLD, Australia
Before Inviting More Tech
Workers into the U.S. …
James Simpson’s letter to the editor
“Side with ACM Ethical Values” (Aug.
2018) concerning Moshe Y. Vardi’s
Vardi’s Insights column “Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility” (Jan. 2018) rightly suggested that
ACM policies are inextricably linked to
ethical and moral values and hence to
political considerations. Simpson even
urged establishment of a new ACM
special interest group dedicated to ethics and public policy.
But Simpson’s implicit encouragement of ACM to lobby for immigration
of tech workers into the U.S. fell flat on
two accounts: First, it would avoid responsibility for home-growing the talent American industry needs. The news
story “Broadening the Path for Women
in STEM” by Esther Stein (also in Aug.
2018) included data on the declining
participation of women in CS majors in
Face2Face: Real-Time Face
Capture and Reenactment
of RGB Videos
Imperfect Forward Secrecy:
How Diffie-Hellman Fails
in Practice
The Game Theory
of Sybil Attacks
The Church-Turing Thesis:
Logical Limit
or Breachable Barrier?
Plus the latest news about
quantum vs. classical computing,
the secret language of AI,
and who owns 3D scans. C
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