Communications of the ACM

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.

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

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