China's Two Face Policy

China, China, China. With over 5 millenniums years worth of experience in the political arts, yet the lesson seems lost again about saying one thing and doing another. The Peoples Republic of China's political wunderkinds are having a collective communist mind melt over being exposed in a Pentagon report to Congress detailing their military aims and growing capabilities. China wants a more flowery emphasis placed on their economic prosperity and growing private sector. In light of their boom and owning the loan papers on a multitude of US debt, China is making a loud case to increase their role in the International monetary Fund (IMF). Popcorn & MRE's all around, this is going to take armies of diplomats to hash out between two nuclear superpowers with space satellites. (Reuters)

After 5 Chinese ships hemmed in a US warship, USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea, plowed through A Tibet-belongs-to China annex anniversary without the number killed last year by the military and rolled over the Dalai Lama's freedom rhetoric, more joint military exercises with Russia, obligatory perennial warnings to Taiwan & an interfering USA that they will backup a One China policy at the point of really big guns and missiles, now with the cyber warfare the Canadians caught from deep inside the land of one time zone happening to 1295 computers in over 100 countries, pulling the camouflage over a hypersensitive world's eyes is tough to brazen out. Canada's report from The Information Warfare Monitor, "Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network" does not attribute the malware directly to the Chinese state. The US military already had suspicous hacker activity attributed to the Chinese at the Pentagon almost eighteen months ago. Those magisterial moments during the 2008 Olympics are over. It leaves China unencumbered by world community threats to showcase its military might on center stage. Only the US military preemptively released their annual assessment on the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Dalai Lama's office raised suspicions about being hacked.

Computers -- including machines at NATO, governments and embassies -- are infected with software that lets attackers gain complete control of them, according to the reports. One was issued by the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies in conjunction with the Ottawa, Canada-based think tank The SecDev Group; the second came from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Researchers have dubbed the network GhostNet. The network can not only search a computer but see and hear the people using it, according to the Canadian report.

"GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras," the report says. (Internet map - portion)

Tuesday, President Obama leaves Washington DC for the G-20 Summit hosted in a protest-ready and poorer London after already having words with China's Ambassador to the US over US Naval ships in international waters. The Chinese ambassador made sure the press knew there were concerns about the US currency amidst a global crisis. Warfare, cyber and otherwise, is definitely practiced economically. China is spreading the wealth around and making more inroads and cyber tracks in the Western Hemisphere. France & China have a frosty relationship after President Sarkozy took a meeting with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, Thailand is pretty pissed about their computers while Austrailia is defending its ties at home with China. This summit will be like a giant Hollywood party where people were married to each other, divorced and married former friends while everybody is ensuring all is truly cordial because the cameras are on.

President Hu Jintao will warmly greet President Obama. The pictures will be pretty and the words carefully chosen to convey maximum strength on both sides as they speak as if at a tennis match. China will hear about the lack of government safety control in their manufacturing and food production environments, the US will get slammed over the health of the Dollar, return serve on the artificial price pegging of the Yuan with a volley back on the stupidity of Iraq, followed by the human rights issues in Burma and Darfur with pointed questions about China's designs on Latin America, followed by talks about climate change with the US saying new rules. And that's just Secretary Hillary Clinton's part in the meeting. President Obama will hear much mutterings on the scale and scope of the US military industrial complex's sales of armaments and delivery systems. China claims they are nowhere near able to keep up on that military scale. Um, yeah... just the end user better hope they have some quality control in the stuff they get from a booming China.



Mixing modernity with the mastery of the ancient eastern tradition makes for compelling reading about China's geopolitical growth spurts. Ralph D. Sawyer chronicles the inside political gamesmanships Chinese generals do on each other and other nonconventional means of projecting military might. China is not adverse to using every tool at their command and this China expert shows us how many means and methods they have already used in The Tao of Deception: Unorthodox Warfare in Historic and Modern China.

Coming Soon: Mystery of the Black Hole

Dire predictions, nails bitten to the quick and nerd joy at the prospect of finding and proving some of physics deepest secrets will play out in on computers in a science red carpet moment. In a monster opening box office, September 10th looms large for Doomsday prognosticators, science watchers and CERN citizens will watch with bated breath as the curtain pulls back and a shaky finger pushes the go live button on the world's largest particle physics lab. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) fires up to smash atoms faster and harder in a cool horror flick kind of way while the search for making Earthly black holes climbs to a new level. There are some nervous nellies freaking out that the world will be instantly sucked into the vortex of a man-made black hole beyond the event horizon to save ourselves from becoming a tossed space particle salad. Somebody wanted to hold the nuts...

Battle of the Colliders

Much larger CERN versus the older Femilab - may the best atom slayer win....

But near Chicago, Illinois, the US Department of Energy's Fermilab is saying, look at us, we have the capacity with Tevatron's 170 giga electron-volts to find the God Particle too, if it exists, except, the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN is is the almost $4 billion USD Godzilla of the particle collider realm. Sequels already. It will be a notable international event about who and where the origins of life are found as atom guts are examined ad nauseum. Dark Matter will star as studies and dissertations do mortal combat to prove the existence of other dimensions tearing asunder current belief systems. The Higgs boson has captivated one man for nearly forty years and is one of the remaining theories that the atomic colliders are focused upon. CERN's LHC is brand new.

“We don’t know what we’ll find,” said Abra­ham Sei­den, di­rec­tor of the San­ta Cruz In­sti­tute for Par­t­i­cle Phys­ics at the Uni­ver­s­ity of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz, a U.S. par­ti­ci­pant in the proj­ect. About half the U.S. ex­pe­ri­men­tal par­t­i­cle-phys­ics com­mun­ity has fo­cused its en­er­gy on the col­lider’s two larg­est par­t­i­cle de­tec­tors, called AT­LAS and CMS, ac­cord­ing to Sei­den.

LHC is huge in eve­ry way—its size, the en­er­gies to which it can ac­cel­er­ate par­t­i­cles, the amount of da­ta it would gener­ate, and the size of the in­terna­t­ional col­la­bora­t­ion in­volved in it. The pow­er­ful beams of par­ti­cles are to cir­cu­late around the 27-km (16.8-mile) un­der­ground tube at CERN, the Eu­ropean par­t­i­cle phys­ics lab based in Ge­ne­va. Af­ter some test­ing, the beams are to cross paths in­side the de­tec­tors to make the first col­li­sions.

Sci­en­tists say the de­bris from those crash­es—show­ers of sub­a­tom­ic par­t­i­cles—will rev­o­lu­tion­ize our un­der­stand­ing of na­ture. A key hoped-for mile­stone is disco­very of the Higgs bos­on, a hy­po­thet­i­cal par­t­i­cle that would fill a gap in the “s­tan­dard mod­el” of par­t­i­cle phys­ics by en­dow­ing fun­da­men­tal par­t­i­cles with mass. This should oc­cur by 2010, Sei­den said, if the Higgs ex­ists at all; na­ture may have found an­oth­er way to cre­ate mass. “I’m ac­tu­ally hop­ing we find some­thing un­ex­pect­ed,” he said.

Black holes are delicious Hollywood diva stories waiting for their closeup. The flying spaghetti monster is what nonbelievers called believer's God or Higher Power in the Universe and science is seeing what makes the noodles flop about in space. Touched by his noodly appendage What happens when one or an entire star like the sun is sucked into the stuff of cosmos conflict - only black holes are theorized at the creation/destruction of particle levels.

Dr. Hawkings, the as-yet non Nobel winning brilliant physicist has some strong feelings on the subject. In an interesting newly released book from Stanford professor Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World safe for Quantum Mechanics details the intricacies of the arguments between the generalists and the string theory practitioners over the years culminating in verbal fisticuffs over what happens inside a black hole. Buy & Read the book first, the movies always screw it up.

Happiest of Birthday's CJ - the world of science will make many great things probable, but your Faith shall make all things possible!

China Spends to Build Their Military Might

China is making it clear that the 2008 Beijing Olympics are part and parcel of their rationale to reorganize, restructure and then use business school speak about what their military spending really means and how the perception of China will be manged as the world looks on. It also provides an opportunity for China's premier, Wen Jiabao, to threaten Taiwan during his presentation at the National Assembly, for its upcoming March 22nd presidential elections and Taiwan's request to the UN on recognition. No public statement by the Chinese goes without a direct challenge to Taiwan's intransigence against the One China policy. The Chinese allocated a substantial portion of funds to increase their known military spending by 18% while standing on a military and rhetorical alert, in instant readiness to thwart any Taiwanese rebellion Beijing deems destructive to their control of the tiny island nation and Asian financial powerhouse.

"All sons and daughters of the Chinese nation are looking forward to them, and they will be of great importance in promoting China's economic and social development and increasing friendship and cooperation between Chinese people and the peoples of other countries," Wen told the 2,970 delegates.

Wen said the changes will "mainly center on changing the way the government functions, appropriately dividing responsibilities among departments that exercise macro-economic regulation, adjusting and improving bodies in charge of management, and improving departments responsible for public administration and public services."...

"We firmly oppose Taiwan independence, secessionist activities and will never allow anyone to separate Taiwan from the motherland ... by any means."

"Attempts of Taiwan independence, secessionist forces to deny the reality that the mainland and Taiwan belong to one and the same China and to undermine peace in the Taiwan strait are doomed to fail," he said.

On multiple levels, the Pentagon does not like to see its supremacy challenged. Especially by a nation that owns so much of the US debt, has its own space program and an army numbering in the millions. China also has a paramilitary operation and ongoing training similar to what the US deploys in Iraq and elsewhere as contractors through the Pentagon and State department, like the notorious Blackwater based in North Carolina and manged by Bush cronies and donors. The US has spent billions of dollars to gain just parity in quelling the violence in Iraq and now faces a challenge; China is free to train an army that is not tied down in two wars and draining its treasury. Cyberwarfare between the US and China has also reached boiling points within the last year as the Pentagon itself came under a cyber attack.

The release of the budget figures came after the Pentagon published a report that expressed concern about China's growing military might and said a lack of transparency from Beijing posed risks to regional and international stability.

The Pentagon said China's military spending in 2007 was between 97 and 139 billion dollars, well in excess of Beijing's official budgeted figure of 45 billion dollars.

The Pentagon further raised concerns over China's development of cruise and ballistic missiles, its testing of an anti-satellite weapon last year and an apparent rise in cyber-espionage emanating from the Asian nation.

"China's expanding and improving military capabilities are changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China's strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region," the report said.

Meanwhile, China is on track to present a peaceful happy face to the world after spending billions to make Beijing a show stopper in Olympic history. A war with China would be a multi-modal fight, economics, military means, space, propaganda and cyber warfare are major components that should be keeping the Pentagon up at night while they figure out how to get the billions of dollars the US treasury does not have to train a broken US military against these threats as it fights a hydra monster world wide terrorist organization in just two places without enough attention on the coming resource wars that are consuming the planet. China is choosing its opportunities judiciously in announcing their military intentions and the funds to back up the rhetoric, unlike George Bush.

James Carroll wrote a lyrical empirical history of the Pentagon with its features and foibles in House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

China's military is the cause for study from author, Xiaobing Li, in A History of the Modern Chinese Army. This is one of the first books for English speaking and reading audiences about the make up and capability of China's armed forces.

A Googling Queen

Regal takes on a whole new quality when Britain's Queen puts up her own Royal Channel on YouTube. The royal technology twist on modernity is not complete without dedicated stiff upper lip minions taking her dictation and pressing send on Her Highness's royal emails to blast out into the ether world. Mind bending is Queen Elizabeth II uses her own iPod and its fully loaded. Crown jewel priceless, is an image of the longest reigning monarch in world history with earbuds singing to the music, making Her seem almost like the rest of us. No doubt, a bevy of royal grandchildren hipped Her to a new tech life. Word has it, she has, insert gasp, a cell phone and a crackberry to summon Buckingham Palace staff, which leads to hilarious speculation about her choice of ringtones, what ringtone lets her ignore Prince Phillip's text messages and whether the queenly pocketbook now vibrates. (Reuters photos/BBC)

Her latest tryst with technology is believed to have emerged at her granddaughters' urging. According to the British newspaper The Observer, the queen was unfamiliar with the popular video-sharing Web site, until her granddaughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, sold her on the YouTube phenomenon.

A statement from Buckingham Palace said that "the queen always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people," pointing out that last year, her Christmas message was podcast as well as broadcast. This year the address will be simulcast live on TV and on the Web site. (AP phot0/Steve Parsons)

Fifty years ago today, marks the very first Christmas message from the Queen of the British Commonwealth on the old tube, the TV. It is up on YouTube now and she is already the most downloaded monarch in history. One can click and see previous garden parties and other state occasions plus A Life in the Day of Prince Charles - too bad we don't get to pick which day. QE II is a tad over eighty years old, never learned to type and knows all about facebook. God Bless her and every other senior who makes an attempt to learn! (Hi Mom, you're doing great!)

A spellbinding movie about Elizabeth II won an Oscar for Helen Mirren, the actress portraying her during one of her most stressful and painful times on the throne. The Queen gave a famed 1992 anus horriblus speech speaking about how bad the year was all around, culminating with the marital separation of Their Royal Highnesses' Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Now that Diana is gone, she is not yet on the Royal Channel which expects to add more archival material. Fergie's MIA too.

The Queen, a 2006 film, is a must have - must watch DVD yielding a layered performance that gives a fictionalized, yet accurate view of Her Majesty and the battle of wills with her British subjects over the People's Princess.

Globe's Bottom Has A New Map

No cracks in the new map down under in the nether region, but overall it is highly interactive. British and American researchers worked together to build a map of Antarctica, known as the White Continent. orbiting 400 miles above the Earth is the Landsat 7 satellite under the joystick thumb of NASA image makers, the US Geological Survey team and the British Survey Foundation. The teams then digitally sew or "stitch" thousands of individual shots together to make a holistic map of the polar region. Now Antarctica expedition planners can zoom in to land features the size of a basketball half court to see if ground conditions are right for a camping visit.

"Being able to see where we couldn't see before will lead to new ideas for research. And these new ideas for research will in turn lead to more knowledge about the continent," said Scott Borg, who directs Antarctic science programs for the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.

Scientists also hope the new image will help the public better understand what is at stake in the world's polar regions as temperatures rise due to human-created global warming.

The new map has high resolution which makes the previous resolutions look positively antiquated. It's the difference in going from the 1960's black and white television sets sans remotes to 21st century color high definition plasma screens in a nanosecond.



Sebastian Copeland wrote a wonderful book graced with a foreword from Mikhail Gorbachev and an afterward from Leonardo DiCaprio named Antarctica: The Global Warning.

Microsoft Sneaks Into PC's Without Leaving A Trace

Busted! The world's largest provider of software quietly unlocked the backdoor and gratuitously opened and updated Windows without you ever knowing or agreeing. Feel better, more secure knowing they could do that, even when the puter was set to seek approvals on updates? After being caught red handed and blushing furiously, a technocrat explained there was absolutely nothing nefarious about it, trust them on this. Microsoft was just silently patching stuff up, overriding your pc wishes for your own good by making sure intruder viruses could not get in, honest.

In the case uncovered by Windows Secrets, the fixes were downloaded and installed automatically, without notification, even in cases where users sought to exercise that greater control.

The twist is that the "silent" updates in question were for the Windows Update program itself.

That made these updates different from other types, contended Microsoft's Nate Clinton, Windows Update program manager, in an online post. Because they involved the Windows Update program, he wrote that it was important to download and install the updates automatically, even if users had opted for more control over the process.

"Had we failed to update the service automatically, users would not have been able to successfully check for updates and, in turn, users would not have had updates installed automatically or received expected notifications," Clinton wrote.

Microsoft Corp., graciously sorta apologized after being outed by the tattletale newsletter, Windows Secrets. Seems that the Windows Update would be able to do this convenient spiffy trick for individual computers and not for large enterprises. Gosh, if only they had left a note so we could thank them for taking action on update concerns we small singular computer users did not know we had. How to thank them for such proactive customer service will keep me up tonight waiting and watching the screen for the smallest flicker of inspiration on stealthy next steps.



Curl up next to your newly triple reinforced firewall in front of your 24/7 guarded laptop and read Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. You'll feel much better, more, um, silently secure.

China Denies Hack of Pentagon Computers

China and the US have colossal conflicts with each other that are embarrassingly breaking into public view. Presidents Hu Jintao and George Bush expect to meet Wednesday to hammer out agreements on a variety of acrimonious topics.

China wears a smirk as they deny successfully hacking the Pentagon's supposedly invulnerable computers, while the red faced US isn't going to own up to the hack attempt. China is taking bows, planning encores, while the US is throwing up shiny objects to keep the focus away from the vast amount of spying American agencies indulged in against China. At the beginning of the disastrous Bush presidency IN 2001, an American military spy plane and its crew were held in the south of China. Cyberwarfare is in earnest now.

Now, even if not on the formal agenda, both sides are likely to be considering the prickly issue of cyber warfare, following the revelation that the Pentagon suffered a major breach by hackers reportedly working for the Chinese military earlier this year.

Disclosure by the Financial Times that the People's Liberation Army, or PLA, assaulted part of the Pentagon's system used by policy advisers to the defence secretary, Robert Gates, is the latest and potentially most serious breach and set alarm bells ringing across the US military.

The Pentagon reportedly resisted the PLA onslaught for several months, but was finally penetrated, forcing a shutdown of that part of its network for a week. A spokesman would not comment on the assault or its source, but emphasised that any information obtained would have been unclassified. The timing of the attack, and the apparent involvement of the PLA, points to an escalation of anxiety in governments across the world.

George Bush had planned to go on the offense about trade issues and global warming. Pot. Kettle. Black and all that, does not stop a perfectly good diplomatic smackdown when one super C02 emissions polluter points fingers at another one. The other 21 nations jumped into the fray. Bush giving honey-do lists to the Chinese when they hold a good portion of America's debt, strikes a discordant note too, at the APEC meeting. Australia is holding the mega Pacific Rim meeting amid lockdown security that is irritating Australians who had a few civil liberties unceremoniously stripped away just for the delight of holding this meeting.

Spying and the use of intelligence is not a strong suit of this inept White House. Electronic and communication intelligence (ELINT & COMINT) are staples of Bush administration against domestic (illegal) and international targets. The shameful six month FISA legal extension recently passed by the 110th capitulating Congress allows the Constitution's 4th amendment to be run over by over zealous eavesdroppers. The FBI acknowledged this. meanwhile, cyber spying is being stepped up by the Chinese while an incredible amount of American spying infrastructure is tied down on Iraq and Iran. China does not have the constraints of having their treasury siphoned off for an unsuccessful occupation. China has bigger stupefying brand management issues of the numerous recalls, poisoned food, poor quality contract manufacturing and a big showy Olympic feat slated for 2008 in a smog filled Beijing because of its pollution issues and devastation of its natural habitat and displacement of indigenous people. Back to global warming, it ought to be a fun discussion as both presidents argue from positions of weakness.

Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping is a must read book outlining the scope and the strength of global and space eavesdropping is done every day all day 24/7 by the USA. Top secret NSA programs such as the famous data mining of Echelon and its great grandchild Carnivore are in existence. It is filled with detailed stories of the locations and people who filter and set up the programs for the US and its allies.

"What I Meant Was Something Else"

Communication covers a universe of theories and emotional stuff with results that may confirm, affirm or deny the original intent. When the striped-pants crowd says things like, "deeply troubling" its diplomatese for somebody is in deep doggy do a bit before starting sanctions or bombs falling on other nations. Diplomats have an exact language and say words conveying dual dire meanings which sound innocuous, but they really just SHOUTED in Internet speak. It takes time and patience to understand, acknowledge and mirror back for confirmation the nuances that derive a nations policies and positions. No wonder a good number of Nobel Peace Prizes have gone to those beleaguered few engaged in diplomacy on the Israel & Palestine issue.

Organizations set up communication departments or teams to translate business/mission speak for their employees. Dilbert mocks the majority of those efforts every day. Today's media gorges on entertainment "news" focusing its trite communication efforts there because its a money maker. Rudy Giuliani gets credit for communicating effectively during 9/11 and failing grades when he panders to an audience, overstating how long he participated at Ground Zero. Same subject matter, but the reason for communicating changed.

At the individual level, we may need just a wee bit more moments of silence, or not. We have a a family values Idaho senator explaining he was not guilty today after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct a couple of months ago, after miscommunication his intentions of why he was in the airport's bathroom stall. We have a verbally challenged president having a hissy fit because his loyal aide de camp must exit the Justice department on the wings of shame, while Bush undermines his own credibility by conflating Iraq and 9/11 once again confusing his message. In the glare of the lights a Miss South Carolina gives an amazingly dumb answer is still being talked about today. She gave it another go on morning television.

During last week's pageant, Miss Teen South Carolina Lauren Caitlin Upton was asked why one-fifth of Americans couldn't find USA on a map.

"I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps," she said tentatively.

She also made random references to South Africa, "Asian countries" and "the Iraq", and said they needed support from the American educational system.

Upton told South Carolina's The State newspaper she "completely misunderstood" the question and "didn't do anything wrong". "I wasn't expecting (the question). I lost my train of thought."

Ah, the essence of communication - sometimes you have it - sometimes you don't.

Here is a very short cool personal test to see how you communicate.


One of my all time favorite great books on communicating is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson et al.

NASA Confirms Sabotage & Drunken Astronauts

To my knowledge, there is no intergalactic chapter of MADD. Soberly, NASA might want to check. There are serious, yet anonymous claims in a health study of at least two incidents of astronauts being cleared to fly when legally drunk. Even more serious are the actual charges of sabotage in a NASA report before Endeavor left on its mission. On purpose, wires were cut. Why remains a mystery. Liftoff for another shuttle is scheduled on August 7th.

This year, NASA is just tanking on its public relations efforts. There was the Houston based astronaut wearing a special absorbent diaper chasing down her love interest's paramour in Florida who gets off the front pages due to Anna Nicole. Shuttle mission sees international blame game ensue after complete computer systems failure.

Former shuttle commander Eileen Collins was as stunned as anyone to learn of the astronaut alcohol claims in the upcoming health report.

Collins worries this will hurt the image of the astronauts, at least in the short term. "I hope people can really look at the good things astronauts do," she said.

Himmel, who retired in 1981 as associate director for what is now Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, wasn‘t surprised to learn the information was anonymous.

"Let‘s face it. Astronauts are a bunch of brothers and sisters, OK, and they‘ll cover each other‘s backsides because they‘re part of the team," he said. "And who knows what the role of the particular ones was to be. If he was just to sit in the middle seat somewhere and just be a passenger, you kind of say, ‘Well, gee, I hope he doesn‘t vomit on the way up.‘"(emphasis mine)

Er, how much money is spent on these very brainy and talented people? No wonder those in charge of NASA's astronaut evaluation team are feeling a bit of radiant heat. These days, who knows who has The Right Stuff? The nascent first female space program is chronicled in Right Stuff: Wrong Sex by Margaret Weitekamp.

Human Poker Players Defeat Computer

One of the people playing poker with the scary sobriquet "Unabomber" and donning a hoodie, wins against a computer's teams software. The Artificial Intelligence research team chose two professional poker players for overall characteristics against the software rather than selecting on the singularity being the best poker players.

Out of four rounds, the humans won two against the software dubbed Polaris. Subtleties of poker with bluffing and "tells" are much harder on either side of this high tech card game. Jeff Laak, aka Unabomber, kept talking aloud to the laptop and of course, no feelings or friendships suffered damage in the competitive process.

The human team reached a draw in the first round even though their total winnings were slightly less than that of the computer. The match rules specified that small differences were not considered significant because of statistical variation.

On Monday night, the second round went heavily to Polaris, leaving the human players visibly demoralized.

“Polaris was beating me like a drum,” Mr. Eslami said after the round.

However, during the third round on Tuesday afternoon, the human team rebounded, when the Polaris team’s shift in strategy backfired. They used a version of the program that was supposed to add a level of adaptability and “learning.”

The match was challenging and layered in its sophistication for Polaris with the use of bots. Humans play poker based on cues and clues. Some of the best poker books may need some upgrades and updates as Polaris goes into its next generation. Video Poker has a Big Brother.