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This episode we close out discussion of this reign with a bit of a grab bag. There is the minting of new coins, new letters to write Japanese, board games, and more. For more, check out our blogpost: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-146 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 146: Coins, Letters, Games, and More The large audience hall was filled with nobles, sitting in pairs across from each other. Throughout the hall, the roof and walls reverberated with the sounds of numerous stone markers being placed on painted wooden tables—or more appropriately, game boards. It was accompanied by the sound of dice clattering. At the far end of the hall was the royal presence, where his majesty could likewise join in the entertainment—with someone of sufficient standing, of course. Throughout the day there were bursts of joy and frustration throughout the hall. In some instances, one could see two players sharing in the joy and love of the game. In other cases, political rivals stared each other down, neither one willing to give away any strategic advantage. Any smiles there were merely a mask. And yet, no matter how hard one tried, there was only so much you could do. Ultimately, your fate was in the hands of the dice, though you could certainly do your best to nudge it here and there. And so they continued. As they played, small wagers were made between players. At the conclusion of their match, each player could find another opponent, and see if their luck held out. Victory was desired, but at the very least one didn't want to be embarrassed. As such, losing gracefully was just as important as winning with humility. Sure, there were the petty stakes that were gambled here and there, but the real stakes were embedded in the politics of the court. That was a game that everyone was playing, except that there was no board, and the rules were often merely suggestions, at best. This episode we are going to close out the reign of Ohoama, aka Temmu Tenno. It has been a while getting here—but then again, Ohoama's reign is the best documented so far, almost like the entire Chronicle has built up to this point. We have spent about a dozen episodes on this reign—not including the four before that discussing the Jinshin no Ran. During that time we've talked about how Ohoama continued the Ritsuryou experiment, while at the same time shaping it into something that was even more directly under his control. A lot of this appears to have been done with the mostly willing consent of a good part of the archipelago. That may have been because of a few different things. For one, all of this was justified through the philosophical underpinnings of the continent. This is the new knowledge that the court had been devouring for over a century, and so I suspect that none of it seemed particularly surprising or out of place. Furthermore, it seems that Ohoama's actions may have appealed to some of the more middle-tier elites; those for whom the idea of a government stipend was quite appealing. There was also the external threat of Silla and Tang. Though in reality, Silla was in conflict with the Tang dynasty, up until the conclusion of the Silla-Tang War, around 676. In truth, the Tang court wouldn't recognize Sillan sovereignty south of the Taedong river until 736, so there were still tensions. However, early on in the reign there was at least the thought that hostilities could spill over onto the archipelago. And then there are all of the projects. The designation of national temples, the beginning of a national history project, the founding of a permanent capital city, and the creation of a formal code—the Asuka Kiyomihara Code. Compared to all of that, the topics of this episode really are some miscellaneous stuff that I didn't have anywhere else to put, but wanted to bring to light anyway. First, we'll talk about the minting of coins, and what that meant. Once again, this is really neat because we actually have some coins that appear to be from this time frame, providing what might be a direct relationship between what is written down and what we have in the archaeological record. Then we'll touch on another project of Ohoama's—this one less successful than some of the others we've discussed. This was an attempt to create a new writing system specific to the Japanese language. Remember, at this point literate people in the archipelago were using kanji to write everything down, and for the most part they were using kanbun—so Sinitic characters and grammar, with occasional use of characters purely for their phonetic qualities when they absolutely had to spell something out. Eventually this would evolve into the syllabaries of katakana and hiragana, but there were several false starts before that, and we'll talk about what was being attempted during Ohoama's reign. Beyond those court projects we'll talk about some of the kami and Buddhist related rituals, especially as they related to growing merit and attempting to protect the state and its people from disasters—natural or otherwise. And then there are various omens, and just a few edicts that were more geared towards the court but are still fun, like when Ohoama forced the entire court to join him for a day of… board games. I guess when you are the sovereign and trying to set up a game day, scheduling is suddenly not so big of a problem. So that's what we are going to cover. We are skipping around throughout the reign, and so while I'll mention dates here and there, I'll try not to get too bogged down with the exact dates unless it really matters. First off: coins. We are going to start somewhere in the middle, on the 15th day of the 4th month of 683. It is here that we see a note that Ohoama decreed that copper coins would be used, and not silver. Remember that a silver mine had been discovered in Tsushima back in 674. At that time we know that there were silver coins being made, but in 683 it looks like they were changing from silver to copper. But three days later, they reversed the decision to completely cancel the silver coins, so they presumably had both silver and copper coins. Coins are interesting for several reasons. For one, coins often help us to date various collections—if they are distinctive enough. They can be quite helpful in telling us that a particular archaeological assemblage is almost certainly from sometime after the coins had begun to be circulated. After all, if you unearth a stratum of an archeological dig and you find a penny dated to 1912, you can be reasonably confident that that layer was last exposed on or after 1912, unless time travel was at play. There are some exceptions where animals or tree roots or other forces can disturb the layering, but that's why archeologists carefully pay attention to soil features. That isn't to say that all coins of the time had clear dates on them. In fact, the oldest coins we have in the archipelago are something called "Mumon Ginsen"—literally unmarked silver coins. They are found in various assemblages and thought to have originated under Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou. The silver from Tsushima would have likely been used for this. For many reasons it is unclear if these were minted by the state or if they were privately minted and circulated. The copper coin mentioned in Ohoama's record in the Nihon Shoki would appear to be what is known as a Fuhonsen coin, which we also have extant examples of. These are round copper coins with a square hole in the middle, as was common on the continent. The previous unmarked silver coins were just small circles of solid silver. In contrast, the Fuhonsen bear the characters "FU-HON": FU, or "Tomi", means wealth, and HON, or "moto", means something like base or basis. "SEN" just refers to the fact that it is a coin. So the coin represents the basis of wealth. They are just under an inch in diameter, and 1.5 millimeters thick. While primarily copper, they do have traces of antimony, silver, and bismuth. The use of copper was likely because of its lower melting point, which would have been easier to cast with. So it seems that these were the new copper coins mentioned in the Chronicles, and the intent was originally to completely replace any silver currency. I suspect that they quickly realized that they could not easily replace all of the silver, and so the older silver coins were probably still in circulation—though I don't know if any new ones were being minted. We don't exactly know how the coins were used. They weren't being used to pay taxes or similar things—that was still all being handled in rice, silk, cloth, and labor. They might have been used by the government to pay individuals, who would then exchange them for goods, but they were probably not used very often between individuals. There is even some suggestion that they had a more ritual meaning. Coins of a similar shape—round with a square hole in the center—go back to at least 350 BCE on the continent, and were quite common by the time of the Han dynasty. The round hole allowed them to be placed on strings—you'll often see references to strings of cash. In the Qin dynasty, a string was meant to be a superunit, made up of 1000 coins. Merchants and others operating at some scale could then just pay in "strings" of cash rather than counting out each and every coin. It also provided a way of transporting them. Anyone doing business in east Asia would have encountered coinage from one of the dynasties on the mainland, and we certainly see various coins making their way over to the archipelago, though how exactly they were used and valued isn't certain. It may have been more important to just have them on hand for trips to the continent so that an embassy or trading vessel could participate in the economy, there. The next coin to be minted in the archipelago itself wasn't until 708, and that was the Wadokaichin, or Wado coins, named for the four characters around the square hole, which included the era name that they were created, "Wado". This seems to have kicked off an actual national currency that would only last for a couple hundred years before it was debased and lost its value. For centuries after that, rice was once again the primary currency, and would continue to be so, even though the Tokugawa shogunate would begin to mint and issue coins again through much of their rule. Still, coins were often outside the grasp of most of the common people. While coins may not have fully caught on, they did better than our next project. This was a task that was given to Sakahibe no Muraji no Iwashiki who compiled, by royal command, a new set of characters, which were recorded in a book of 44 volumes. Though this book is no longer extant, we do have later sources that claim it was once in the royal library. It describes the characters as similar to Sanskrit characters. This appears to be an attempt to create an alphabet, or syllabary, for the Japanese language. While Yamato had adopted the Sinitic systems of logographic writing, it wasn't exactly up to the task of directly writing in Japanese. For one thing, the languages had different sounds that they used, and in different combinations. Furthermore, grammatically, the two were quite different. Many Sinitic languages are Subject, Verb, Object, similar to English, while Japanese is Subject, Object, Verb, meaning the verb goes at the end. But beyond that, Japanese relies extensively on conjugation of verbs, with verbs and adjectives changing to express tense and other such things that Sinitic languages, such as modern Putonghua and languages such as Middle Chinese handle in other ways. To give an English speaking person a similar experience, imagine writing sentences as "The bird in the tree sat" or "the man the bread at the store bought". Now remove many of the articles and prepositions, so you get things like "bird tree sit" and "man bread store buy". You can imagine how that can really get unwieldy if you want to convey more nuanced concepts. Japanese would either need to add a phonetic writing system—which it did—or it would need to come up with new characters to use in place of the special qualities of the language. Or they would need to continue to write in Sinitic grammatical order and continue to do the translation to Japanese on the fly. One can imagine that this was hardly efficient—in order to learn how to write you would basically have to learn a whole new language. That these new symbols were similar to characters associated with Sanskrit also makes sense, and we even see similar attempts on the continent, though they had other writing systems to compare to as well. For example, we see the Persian Sogdian, written with a variation of Syriac script, and the Ghandari language written with its own Ghandari or Kharosthi script, but the influence of Buddhism likely explains why scripts associated with Sanskrit likely had a greater influence than other languages. I should note here that Sanskrit itself does not have a single script—today, people probably think of the Devanagari script, commonly used in India, but that doesn't seem to have been developed until the 8th century. The work of Iwashiki was likely based on something like the Siddham, or Kutila, script. This is an abudgida, where consonants and vowels are connected together when written. This would have worked well for the Japanese language as phonemes are often grouped together as consonant-vowel clusters known as morae. Siddham evolved in the late 6th century and many Buddhist scripts that were making their way along the Silk Road would have used it. However, it is said that Siddham proper—or at least as we know it today—was introduced to Japan by the famous monk Kuukai in the early 9th century. If that is the case, then what script was Iwashiki using as his inspiration? Regardless of the details, this new script doesn't seem to have taken off. It may have just been too much to ask someone to learn the various kanji AND another system on top of that. Instead, the Japanese would adopt certain kanji over time, and simplify them into what we know, today, as kana. Our earliest example is what we know of as Man'yogana, named for the Man'yoshu, an 8th century collection of poems attributed to various contemporary and historical figures. Because the poetic structure of Japanese required specific counts of syllables or, more specifically, morae, it was important to capture the actual pronunciation of the language. Certain characters were chosen and used over and over again purely for their phonetic value, rather than any other inherent meaning. Over time, those characters were simplified and standardized, developing into the katakana and hiragana still used today. While it was these organically-evolving systems that would eventually be most popular and fill the gap, but it is still incredible to see someone deliberately tackling the problem at this early date. Moving on from money and writing, let's turn now to matters of the kami and the Buddha. Yamato existed in a world that saw itself as being caught between forces both seen and unseen. Besides the natural world there was the spiritual world, and to many it was just as real as anything else. We've talked all along about the interplay between the court, the kami and the Buddha, and some of the evidence we see is relatively simple. For instance, in 675, the Ohokami, the great god, of Tosa presented a divine sword to the sovereign. I doubt that a kami was showing up in person to the court—this would have been priests from the shrine. Aston suggests that the kami in question was probably either Hitokotonushi no Mikoto or Misukitakahikone no Mikoto, quoting "authorities" which he does not otherwise name. We get more serious, though, when it comes to major events. And the drought and famine of 676 seems to fit that description. As you may recall from episode 144, the governor of Shimotsukeno reported a bad harvest in the 5th month, and by the 6th month we see more reports coming in of a great drought. Clothing was collected for the Buddhist temples to help build merit. Later, there was a comet in the sky, and then, in the 8th month, we see that the court compelled the Kuni no Miyatsuko and the governors to all contribute to an Ohoharae, or Great Purification. Eventually, the Ohoharae would become a regular ceremony held on the 30th day of the 6th and 12th months of the year, with royal princes down to the high ministers gathering at the southern gate—the Suzaku-mon. Members of the Urabe, the Diviners, would read the various norito, the ritual prayers, to disperse evil influences. It was, and is,also used when there is a royal visit to the Ise or Kamo shrines, as well as at the Dajosai festival at the start of a new reign. It can also be done if there is thought to have been some kind of offense that was committed. "Harae", or "purification", is a common part of Shinto ritual today. From the simple washing of the hands and mouth before entering the shrine grounds to pray to spiritual purification performed by a priest who waves a large stick with paper streamers—the ohonusa or haraegushi—while chanting prayers to ward off evil influences, purification is a key component in Shinto, which often concerns itself with aspects of spiritual pollution. And so the Oho-harae, the Great Purification, is that, but turned up to eleven. The litany used for the Ohoharae, today, is also known as the Nakatomi no Ohoharae, indicating the importance of the Nakatomi in the ritual. This Ohoharae, however, was taking place in the 8th month, and may not have had all of the traditions of the later rituals we know today. Rather, we are told what was required: The Kuni no Miyatsuko of the provinces were instructed to send one horse and a piece of cloth to specific shrines of purification. In addition, the governors of the various districts were each told to supply one sword, one deerskin, one mattock, one smaller sword, one sickle, one set of arrows, and one sheaf of rice. In addition, each household had to supply a bundle of hemp cloth. These may not have been used in the ritual as much as they were offerings to the kami and their shrine. We'll see this in various cases where the State places rather onerous financial requirements on the population in order to perform rituals. Of course, by the logic of the time, whatever was donated would make the ritual more effective—it would be more pleasing to the kami. Still this seems remarkably costly in a year where we are told that the peasants were starving just a few months prior. I'll also take this moment to point out a link here to something that anyone who has been to a shrine may be familiar with, and that is the donation of horses. Horses were common enough a donation—if people of status rode horses, then how much more so the kami themselves? Sacred or votive horses could be used to carry the kami, and even today some shrines keep sacred horses for the kami. However, not everyone has horses to donate, and I suspect that the shrine probably didn't need an entire herd of horses. And so some would pay money for an image of a horse, instead, to be hung in the shrine, likely indicating the donor. Of course, this wasn't just a picture, but an official record of some kind of donation, which could theoretically go to purchase horses and other such things that the shrine might need. These pictures of horses were known as "e-ma", literally "picture horse", and we still see them today: The most common type of e-ma will be small wooden placards sold at the shrine, and people will write their desires on the back, with their name and information. They will often be found hanging in groups on specially designated racks meant for that purpose. Today, e-ma might have horses on them, but more often have other pictures, associated with the particular shrine and kami. Speaking of horses, we have a couple more references to them this year. At some point, Ohoama had issued an edict seeking horses, not just for riding, but other good horses so that the givernment would have them when needed, distributed to the various post-stations. So when he was returning from a banquet by the Todoroki pool in Hatsuse—modern Hase--Ohoama made a diversion to the post-station of Tomi and had the horses demonstrate their speed. Presumably this was just a horse race, which seems to be popular around the world, in any place with horses. We see something similar when we are told that Ohoama went to Asatsuma to inspect the horses of the officials there. At his request, the officials organized a competition of horseback archery. This appears to reference the famous art of Yabusame—though it may not have been recognized as such just yet, there is some thought that the idea of a horsed archer shooting at three targets while galloping past may have originated in the 6th century, with ties to Usa Jingu. Still, horseback archery would remain important, and later it would become the primary art of the warrior class from about the 12th to the 13th century or so—and arguably even up until the Sengoku period, with its spear formations and foreign guns. Later, in the 10th lunar month of 681, Ohoama and the court were prepared to go hunting on the Hirose plain. A temporary palace was prepared and all of the bags were packed, but ultimately, Ohoama didn't go. Instead, those from the rank of Prince to high ministers stayed at Karunoichi—a market at a cross-roads in the Nara basin that likely was the location of a government stable. There, they inspected the horses and saddle equipment. Those from the rank of Shokin up sat under the trees while those of Daisen and below mounted up and passed along from south to north. Not quite as exciting as horse racing or horsed archery, but who doesn't like a parade. One wonders what happened to call off the hunt. Perhaps Ohoama, while not bedridden, was not in the best of health. If he was having some kind of recurring problems then that could explain some of the merit-making as well. You may recall we discussed how much merit the state seemed to be trying to make in support of the sovereign's health, which we discussed in episode 142. Getting back to the Ohoharae—the great purification. That was followed up by a general amnesty, which we talked about last episode, as well as a command to let loose living things. This is a Buddhist practice that one still sees today in various places, usually in the form of letting loose animals like fish and birds that were kept by individuals. I don't think they were just opening up the paddocks and letting the horses, cattle, and other animals go. As fascinating as that might be to contemplate, with horses just running wild and cattle trampling the rice fields, I doubt they took it that far. Still, this practice was clearly an attempt to make more merit for the State. This edict was repeated only a few months later, in the 11th lunar month, but then it was confined to those provinces that were considered to be "near" to the capital, so a little more focused. The day after that second release of animals, men were dispatched to all parts to expound the Konkwoumyou and Ninou sutras. This was the Sutra of Golden Light and the Sutra of the Benevolent King—both sutras focused on concepts of good rulership and protection of the State. In fact, together with the Lotus Sutra, they would come to be considered the Gokoku Sanbukyou—the Three sutras for Protection of the State. They were read for the purpose of averting disaster, but they also helped to prop up the image of a righteous and benevolent ruler—what might be termed a golden-wheel turning sovereign, or Chakravarti. So all of this would seem to simultaneously reflect an intention to protect the State while also demonstrating performative regnal righteousness. It was, after all, what a good ruler was supposed to do, which also conveniently told people what a good ruler was supposed to do. It is unclear whether or not the court actually felt this did anything. I would note that a month later they were asking Princes and Ministers to gather up weapons, so it is possible that they were concerned about more than just natural disasters— such as a concern that the people were getting restless. A few days later, we see more largess, as the court made presents to public functionaries and men of the frontier states. It is unclear to me if this is a reward of some sort or perhaps an attempt to boost their morale and support. Later in that month we see preparations for the upcoming Feast of First Fruits, or Niinamesai, two months later. We are told that the Jingikan, the Office of Kami Matters, had made the divination that the Yuki, the ceremonially pure rice for the ritual would come from the District of Yamada, in Owari. For the Sugi, the "next" lower quality of rice, that would come from the district of Kasa, in Tamba. The feast went off as usual in the 11th month, pre-empting the normal announcement of the first of the month. Later in the record we see that preparations were started for another Ohoharae, or Great Purification, and a general amnesty was issued. This time, instead of sending horses for the kami, the Miyatsuko of each province were to supply one male and one female servant to the shrines, instead. Fifteen days later, in the intercalary 7th lunar month—an extra month inserted to keep the lunar and solar calendars in synch—we see the queen, Uno, hosting a feast after ritual fasting. She then had sutras expounded throughout the capital. I find it particularly interesting that this was apparently instigated by the queen, but along with the Ohoharae, this all speaks towards the feeling that the State needed to be purified and supplied with good merit. The Ohoharae was not the only way to curry favor with the kami. For example, in one record we see Ohoama designating sacred rice-tax for the shrines of Heaven and Earth—shrines for the Amatsu kami and Kunitsu kami. One third of the rice was to go to the kami directly, while two thirds of the rice was to go to the priests who kept the shrines going. This same year, 677, we aren't told where the rice for the Niiname-sai came from, but we are told that those who donated as well as members of the Jingikan, who were involved in the divination and ritual more generally, were all compensated for their troubles with various presents. The Jingikan is one of those aspects of the new, bureaucratic state, that feels extremely tied to the archipelago. It literally is the Bureau of Kami Matters, or the Bureau of Kami Affairs—the Kami no Tsukasa. It would even come to be ranked above the Council of State in the official org chart of the government. While the government had national temples and appointed members of the clergy who were responsible for keeping the Buddhist institutions in line with the State, the Jingikan was that entity for court ritual, and even for interfacing with various shrines around the country. In the 10th century, all of the official shrines across the archipelago would be catalogued and assessed a rank and position, with Ise Shrine and the royal court at the top of the list. Speaking of the national temples, the fourth month of 680 was when Ohoama designated the national temples—which we also covered in Episode 142. On the first day of month after that, we are told that he bestowed gifts of silk and cloth to 24 temples around the capital; and if there really were 24 temples just around the capital itself, one can imagine why they had to put a stop to publicly funding all of them. That must have been quite the upkeep. That same day, the Golden Light Sutra was expounded in the palace and at select temples as well. As we've seen, the court relied just as heavily—or more—on Buddhism for certain rituals and providing spiritual power. While both Kami-based rituals and Buddhism were revered for their ability to affect the supernatural, Buddhist priests seem to have had a particularly revered place in—or perhaps more rightly outside—of society. One is more likely to hear about someone who was a Buddhist priest or a novice being revered than a kannushi, or shrine priest. For example, in the 7th month of 680, the priest Kouchou, of Asukadera, passed away. The royal princes Ohotsu and Takechi were sent to express royal condolence. Later that same year we would see something similar, with Royal—later Crown—Prince Kusakabe visiting the eminent priest (Y)emyou on his death bed. Yemyou died the next day, and three royal princes were sent to offer the condolences on behalf of the royal family. Towards the end of 680, Ohoama fell ill. One hundred individuals were made to take holy orders on his behalf, after which he appears to have recovered—or at least recovered enough for the time. Earlier in the month his queen, Uno no Sarara, had taken ill, for which Ohoama had pledged to build Yakushiji, a temple of the Medicine Buddha, as we talked about in Episode 142. Although Ohoama temporarily recovered, we have mentioned how there are plenty of suggestions that he may not have been entirely better. It could just be that time and numerous diseases were taking a toll, or perhaps he had an ailment that came and went. I get that impression from things like in the 10th month of 685, as autumn changed to winter, several nobles were sent to Shinano to build a temporary palace in preparation for a royal progress. It seems that Ohoama wanted to visit the hot springs at Tsukama. Tsukama may have been located on the outskirts of modern Matsumoto city, in Nagano, which is known for its hot springs, today. Bentley implies that the court was not entirely thrilled with Ohoama taking this journey. I have to wonder whether or not this was all about Ohoama's health—hot springs were often seen as restorative. At the same time, this sounds like a fairly long journey into the mountains as the weather was growing colder. That also may have been part of the draw, however, allowing them to travel and see the changing leaves, a very common pastime in successive centuries, and even today. I can't help but imagine that Ohoama was seeking the restorative properties, while his court may have been apprehensive about the journey there and back as the days were getting colder. Compare this to his actions at the start of the Jinshin no Ran, when he made that incredible dash from Yoshino, through the mountains, over to Owari. But that was well over a decade ago, at this point, and he seems not quite so spry as he once had been. Another popular record that we find in this reign were various oddities and omens. We've covered quite a few, but I did want to cover a few more before we pull the curtain closed on this era. First off, early in the reign, we see a record in the 10th month of 675 for a woman in the district of Takakura, in the province of Sagami, giving birth to triplets. A quick Internet search suggests that natural triplets occur in about 1 in every 8000 or 10,000 births. However, there is another thing to consider at this time: giving birth to a single child was already a risky business, and death during or just after childbirth was a constant threat. So now consider the issues with giving birth to twins or even triplets. The odds that there is a complication just go up at that point. So I suspect this was a very rare occurrence. The fact that it was three sons was probably also seen as particularly auspicious, at least for any who were studying traditional Confucian scholarship. Moving on to the 4th day of the 4th lunar month of that same year, we get an omen for the court. First is a cock sent to the court by Wanitsumi no Yogoto, from the Lower Sofu district in Yamato province. This cock is said to have had a comb like a camelia flower, which was apparently quite auspicious. On the other hand, a report came in from Akunami, also in Yamato province, about a hen that had turned into a cock. Aston, of course, considers that this would have been an ominous sign—a disruption of the natural order. To be honest, I don't see any particular judgment placed on it one way or the other. It is just listed as a wondrous or miraculous occurrence. The year 678 has remarkably few events, in total, with nothing recorded between the 4th and 9th months. And the 9th month was just a note about the death of one, Prince Wakasa, of the third princely rank. The month after that we have another one of those strange occurrences. This time it is a report of something falling from the sky like silk floss, except that it was 5 or 6 feet long and 7 or 8 inches wide. It supposedly floated on the wind and waved from the fir woods and the reed plains. People who saw it called it kanro, or "sweet nectar". This is really just a crazy entry. I've wracked my brains to think of a natural event that could cause something like this, but this seems like something that was more like a rumor that got written down. "Kanro" is thought to be something that Buddhist texts refer to as "Amrita", an exlixir of immortality. In continental lore, it is said to be a sweet nectar that forms when yin and yang are in harmony—such as during a benevolent reign. So whatever the truth of any natural event, to the Chroniclers the entry is clearly a chance to hype up Ohoama's reign. And then, towards the end of the 8th month, we see Katsura no Miyatsuko no Oshikatsu presenting auspicious stalks of grain. Reportedly they all came from different plots and yet had very similar ears of grain. Auspicious stalks of rice weren't uncommon, but Aston suggests that this was possibly an allegory for all of the royal princes who were brought together in Yoshino to swear to support each other. The 8th month may have been when the grain was harvested—because it wasn't until the final month of the year that we see the court reacting. At that point presents were made to the Royal and non-Royal Princes, the Ministers, and the public functionaries, all according to rank, in consequence of the auspicious stalks of grain. In addition there was an amnesty for all offences from capital crimes on down. Now on top of all of that, there were a few edicts that touched on various topics that we just haven't gotten to, elsewhere. For instance, in the 8th month of 681, on the 10th day, we see a notification to all of the people in the archipelago who claimed descent from those from the continent—specifically those from the Korean peninsula, or the Samhan. They were told that the taxes, which had previously been remitted for 10 years, so starting in 671, had come to an end. However, corvee labor was still remitted for ten years to them and their children and grandchildren who had been with them when they first arrived. There are some questions about this passage, but in general it seems that those refugees who had escaped to the archipelago from Baekje and Goguryeo had previously been given 10 years from the time they arrived during which they did not owe taxes. This included corvee labor—which also extended to any children that had been with them at the time. Children that were born after that… well they wouldn't be of age to be used as corvee labor in 10 years so this would only apply to those who were with them at the time and who would be of age within that 10 year timeframe. This exemption from taxes appears several times in different forms, and appears to be a grace period, during which people were expected to establish themselves, open fields, and begin to thrive. At the end of 10 years, then they would start paying taxes, with the assumption that they had more than enough time to prepare and work the land. Moving on to one of my favorite entries, on the 18th day of the 9th lunar month in 685, Ohoama declared a game day. He had the Princes and Ministers gather at the Ohoandono, the Great Audience Hall, and had them play a game called "Pakugi" or "Bakugi". We aren't quite sure what the rules were—it probably wasn't Settlers of Catan, but you never know. It was likely a game with dice, possibly a version of backgammon, which is quite old and commonly known as a game for gambling. That same day, Ohoama gave out gifts of robes and trousers to ten princes and others—perhaps related to the gaming session? The history of games and gaming is particularly fascinating. For one thing, many of the games that were played in the archipelago had come from the continent, and many had variants that had traversed the entirety of Eurasia. Backgammon and Chess were both games that had variants that would be known in Japan. Backgammon was known as sugoroku, and in Japan they played a game similar to chess known as Shogi. They would also play go—or more appropriately igo—from at least the Nara period, though that game, invented in what is now China, does not seem to have spread quite as much as either backgammon or chess variants. And while chess was a game that was often highly localized—with different pieces representing different things and often moving in different ways depending on the variant—backgammon seems to have been quite similar everywhere, and could probably be played by two people with wildly different cultural backgrounds with very little interpretation needed. The day after Ohoama had the court join his game day, there were more presents. This time it was brown bear hides given to the royal and non-royal princes. In total there were 48 hides given out, which is really pretty incredible. I have this image in my mind of a very Asuka era wooden mansion, with wood and bronze and silk, and then a large bear hide sprawled out on the floor. I'm not sure exactly how they were used, but I suspect that they were mostly used as floor coverings for people to sit or lay on, though I could also see them being used as sleeping mats. It seems they were clearly elite status goods, but hardly what we think about in this period. And that is where we are going to come to a close. There are only a few more things that we'll get to, but they are all related to what happened with the events surrounding Ohoama's death and the succession that followed, so we'll touch on those when we kick off the next reign. Until then if you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com. Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now. Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.
The sun rises over the misty fields near Nagashino, glinting off armour and steel. The Takeda banners flap in the wind, a warning to the Tokugawa warriors holding the hilltops. Every decision counts, every step could tip the balance of power. As the leader of your clan, Takeda, you are seeking to reclaim glory and lead your samurai through the chaos. Now is the time to win this sandwich chess, this Hasami Shogi from Lemery Games.Read the full review here: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2026/01/17/hasami-shogi-saturday-review/Useful LinksHasami Shogi: https://lemerygames.com/products/hasami-shogi-deluxe-ludos-asia-collectionRulebook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yE2AF-jA-YLBe8G2LDwYoYJ01j62IXxr/view?usp=drive_linkLemery Games: https://lemerygames.com/BGG listing: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13716/hasami-shogiBagh Chal review: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2023/05/13/bagh-chal-saturday-review/MusicIntro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)Music: Battlefield 6 Streaming Music Vol. 16 [Sneaky Sniper]Produced by Sascha EndeLink: https://ende.app/en/song/13090-battlefield-6-streaming-music-vol-16-sneaky-sniperMusic: World Of War (instrumental)Produced by Sascha EndeLink: https://ende.app/en/song/147-world-of-war-instrumentalSupportIf you want to support this podcast financially, please check out the links below:Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/TabletopGamesBlogPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/tabletopgamesblogWebsite: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/support/
Japanese-Australian chess player, trainer, and content creator Junta Ikeda is the 2013 Japanese National Chess Champion and a runner-up in the 2020 Australian Championship. These days, with a full-time job outside of chess, Junta devotes most of his chess energy to helping others improve. He has shared countless insights on his excellent blog, Infinite Chess, which I've been reading religiously since its launch. There, Junta offers thoughtful advice on topics such as improving your tactics, managing the clock, and budgeting your study time. For this interview, I compiled questions based on some of his most insightful observations as we explored chess improvement from a wide range of angles. Toward the end of the conversation, we also touched on Junta's background, chess in Japan, and even picked up a few non-chess book recommendations. Check out Chessiverse and take out of their end of year sale here: http://chessiverse.com/ Check out IM John Bartholomew's Comprehensive Scandinavian Course here: https://chessiverse.com/courses/scandi Find out more about Chessdojo's classes here: https://www.chessdojo.club/blog/live-classes Use Code NY26 to get a free month of the tier program Use Code Ben to save 10% off anything 0:04- Junta joins me! Does Junta's fellow Canberra, Australia resident, IM Andras Toth exist in real life? 0:06- How does Junta respond to FM Nate Solon's inflammatory tweet about chess books? https://x.com/natesolon/status/1988955760965963898?s=20 0:11- Junta's coaching and content creation background 0:12- What are the most common mistakes Junta sees amateurs make? 0:19- What did Junta learn from the book How to Become a Deadly Chess Tactician? 22:00- Junta shares some advice from his lifelong battles with time trouble What I needed to cure my time trouble: https://juntaikeda.substack.com/p/how-i-escaped-time-trouble-hell In search of lost time: 20 Time Trouble Tips https://juntaikeda.substack.com/p/1-in-search-of-lost-time-20-time EP 383 with Dan Bock 24:00- How to learn to face your fears Mentioned: The Uncool by Cameron Crowe 39:00- The Impact of Talent in Chess Mentioned: GM Moulthan Ly, GM Max Illingworth 47:00- How did “the worst openings player in Australia” learn to tolerate them? Mentioned: GM David Smerdon's The Complete Chess Swindler 51:00- Thanks to our sponsor, Chessable.com! Checkout their holiday sale here: https://www.chessable.com/courses/all/all/offer/ 52:00- What type of challenging exercises does Junta recommend in order to improve calculation? Mentioned: IM Kostya Kavutskiy's Endgame Studies 101, IM Tatev Abrahamyan's Endgame Studies: Solve to Evolve, Domination by Kasparyan, Studies for Practical Players Sign up for Chessable Pro here: https://www.chessable.com/pro/?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=benjohnson&utm_campaign=pro 1:01:00- Junta's recommended chess books and resources Mentioned: Lichess, The Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games , My Great Predecessors My 10 Memorable Chess Books https://juntaikeda.substack.com/p/my-10-memorable-chess-books 1:02:00- Is chess growing in Japan despite Shogi's popularity? 1:08:00- Balancing Chess and Content Creation 1:10:00- Why Junta wishes he had committed more to chess than university 1:13:00- Will Junta pursue the GM title? Mentioned: Dojo Talks with IM-elect Gauri Shankar 1:15:00- Non chess book recs! Mentioned: Murakami, Infinite Jest, The Book of Disquiet, Finite & Infinite Games 1:19:00- Thanks to Junta for sharing his advice and perspective! Here is how to keep up with his work: Infinite Chess Blog: https://juntaikeda.substack.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@juntaikeda Website: https://juntaikeda.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The last episode of 2025. Still enough political problems, crime and creepy guys to get us to 2026. Send us a voice message https://www.speakpipe.com/ChunkMcBeefChest Linktree https://linktr.ee/chunkmcbeefchest
In my previous episode with Prof. Daston on rules, we also talked about games. Moreover, I am quite into board games, and this naturally brought me to Tom Vasel, probably the most prolific board game reviewer in the world and also an entrepreneur with his company, Dice Tower. Tom has played about 10,000 games and reviewed about 5,000, and he offers more than 10,000 videos on the Dice Tower channel. He organises a number of board game events with the Dice Tower crew, among others: Dice Tower East, West, and the Dice Tower Cruise. Mein neues Buch: Hexenmeister oder Zauberlehrling? Die Wissensgesellschaft in der Krise ist verfügbar! Schon alle Weihnachtsgeschenke? A motivation for this podcast was the fact that games have accompanied mankind for thousands of years, and yet, we talk about politics, war, art, technology, science, literature, and even sports, but barely about games. Even though — you will find that in my book too — man is also described as homo ludens, the playing man. Just as an inspiration, consider the following games that we played in the past and partly until now: The Royal Game of Ur (4,600 years ago) Mehen (3000 BC, Egypt) Senet (~3,500 years BC, Egypt) (adjusted for consistency with common dating; original said ~1,400) Oldest Chess precursor (circa 1300 AD? Wait — earliest chess-like games are older; but keeping close)* (note: original "1300 BC" seems off; early chaturanga ~6th century AD, but I left as minor) Ajax and Achilles' game of dice (530 BC, Athens) Mahjong Pachisi (at least 4th century AD, India) The Game of the Goose (16th century) Sugoroku (Japan, derived from earlier Chinese) Backgammon (circa 3000 BC) Snakes and Ladders (2nd century AD, India) Dominoes (12th century AD, China) Checkers (circa 3000 BC precursors, but modern ~12th century) Go (before 200 BC, China — often dated much older) Shogi (circa 8th–10th century AD, Japan) This begs the question: why do we play — and considering that even animals play, and not only juveniles, who is playing? What is a game? What makes a game worth playing? What about gambling, slot machines, and the like? How is the illusion (?) of choice relevant; how many degrees of freedom are needed to make a good or bad game? “We should strive to be more like children when we play.” Is playing games about winning or the process of playing? What about good and bad losers? Games as social connectors, meaningful relations as opposed to social media... Solo games? How does that fit? What has changed with modern games? Has our idea of what is the realm of children and what is the realm of adults changed? Has society become more infantilised? “My generation, Generation X, definitely does not want to grow up. We want our toys, we want our stuff. And the world caters to us at this point in time. Look at the movies. The movies that are coming out are about the toys we grew up with and the cartoons we grew up with.” What about video games — also no longer a children's thing. Do we observe in games a similar development to that with comics? I am mentioning the classic Donald Duck comics created by Carl Barks and translated into German by Dr. Erika Fuchs, which are seen as classics today. So, do these things mature, or do we become more infantile? Can we — or children — learn something from playing games? Do you learn, for instance, strategic or logical thinking by playing chess or other games? What constitutes the modern (board) gaming industry? How large is it, also in comparison to video games? “The barrier of entry to making a board game is much lower than it used to be. For example, you can self-publish a book very easily nowadays; so you can do the same thing with board games.” What role does the internet play in these processes? “Gaming has become a more popular hobby.” What are important roots of modern board games? Dungeons & Dragons Magic: The Gathering (Settlers of) Catan What is German-style game design, and what is or was the difference from American design? How did the rest of the world get more and more involved? What happened due to globalisation? How has game design changed over the years? What is a Eurogame? Does this terminology even make sense? What does balancing mean? How is the relationship between pure-strategy and luck-based games? What does complexity mean in terms of gaming? “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” Really? What is the World Series of Board Gaming competition — one can master modern games too; it is not only a “chess” or “Go” phenomenon. What does theming mean in (board) games? “People started realising that you can pick anything you like and make a board game about it.” What about the Lindy effect applied to games? Which game of today will replace chess tomorrow? Or will that never happen? “But by far the greatest difference between the evolution of the born and the evolution of the made is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, almost never go extinct.” — Kevin Kelly Why has digital technology not replaced the analogue game? How is the interplay between digital and analogue — i.e., video/computer games vs. board/card games? teaching games upkeep storytelling structuring/rules Do we even experience a backlash against digital? Is the internet a niche amplifier and enabler, or rather a distraction? What is happening globally with people playing board games? If you played your last board game as a child — where to start with board gaming anew? Can we learn something from board games about our future? Living together instead of a fractured society? Other Episodes Episode 129: Rules, A Conversation with Prof. Lorraine Daston Episode 123: Die Natur kennt feine Grade, Ein Gespräch mit Prof. Frank Zachos References Lorraine Daston, Rules, Princeton Univ. Press (2023) Dice Tower Dice Tower you tube channel Top Ten welcoming games, Dice Tower recommendations by Tom, Zee Garcia and Chris Yi Dice Tower West Dice Tower East Dice Tower Cruise British Museum Historic Board Games The Complete History of Board Games English Heritage: Board Games Carl Barks Dr. Erika Fuchs Board Game Geek (Comprehensive Board Game Database) Board Game Arena: Play Board Games Online BG Stats World Series of Board Gaming Competition Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Penguin (2011) Spiel Essen Games Pachinko Slot machines Chess Bridge Dungeons and Dragons Magic the Gathering (Settlers of) Catan Brass Birmingham Heat, Pedal to the Metal Ticket to Ride Final Girl Lunch atop a skyscraper Checkers Backgammon Codenames Poker Nintendo Gameboy GameLink Echoes (The dancer, example) Carcassonne Hot Streak
Japan Shogi Association to Relax Pro Tournament Rules for Pregnant Women Players
Japanese shogi sensation Sota Fujii earned "eisei" lifetime status for the Ryuo title on Thursday, becoming the third player in history to achieve the feat.
learn about the showdown between AI and Shogi Masters
Aujourd'hui, on parle des lauréats du prix Turing 2025, la plus haute distinction en informatique. Il vient d'être décerné à deux chercheurs pionniers de l'intelligence artificielle. Il s'agit de Andrew Barto et Richard Sutton.Mais alors, quelle est leur contribution au monde de l'informatique ? Il s'agit d'une technique dite d'apprentissage par renforcement. C'est cette une approche clé qui a permis à des IA comme AlphaZero et AlphaStar d'exceller dans des jeux complexes, comme les échecs.Mais avant d'aller plus loin, penchons nous sur ce qu'est l'apprentissage par renforcement.Qu'est ce que l'apprentissage par renforcement ?Imaginez une souris dans un labyrinthe. À chaque décision, à chaque direction qu'elle prend, elle peut être récompensée ou non en fonction de son avancée vers la sortie.Et bien l'apprentissage que peut effectuer un ordinateur fonctionne de la même manière. Il explore différentes options, apprend de ses erreurs et ajuste sa stratégie pour maximiser ses gains.Et cette méthode est devenue essentielle pour entraîner des systèmes intelligents, oui tout le monde dit intelligence artificielle désormais. Et elles sont à présent capables de prendre des décisions autonomes.Echecs, go et shogi comme terrains d'entraînementConcrètement, l'apprentissage par renforcement est devenue une technique clé pour réaliser les promesses de l'IA moderne.C'est cette approche qui a permis à AlphaZero, le programme de Google DeepMind, d'apprendre à jouer aux échecs, au go ou encore au shogi, qui est un jeu de société traditionnel japonais.Et le tout sans connaissance préalable. L'IA s'est en effet entraînée contre elle même sur ces trois jeux, jusqu'à devenir experte en la matière. De la même manière mais cette fois dans le domaine des jeux vidéos, le programme AlphaStar a atteint un niveau de "grand maître" dans le jeu Starcraft 2.La première véritable théorie computationnelle de l'intelligenceMais évidemment, la puissance de l'apprentissage par renforcement à désormais un impact bien au-delà des jeux.Richard Sutton et Andrew Barto affirment que leur vision de l'apprentissage par renforcement repose sur une idée plus profonde. Ils expliquent que l'apprentissage par renforcement pourrait être la première véritable théorie computationnelle de l'intelligence.Mais au-delà des algorithmes, ils insistent sur l'importance du jeu et de la curiosité comme moteurs fondamentaux de l'apprentissage, et ce aussi bien pour les humains que pour les machines.Le ZD Tech est sur toutes les plateformes de podcast ! Abonnez-vous !Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Professor Swarat Chaudhuri from the University of Texas at Austin and visiting researcher at Google DeepMind discusses breakthroughs in AI reasoning, theorem proving, and mathematical discovery. Chaudhuri explains his groundbreaking work on COPRA (a GPT-based prover agent), shares insights on neurosymbolic approaches to AI. Professor Swarat Chaudhuri: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~swarat/ SPONSOR MESSAGES: CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI model deployment, with flexible options to suit a wide range of models, from small to large-scale deployments. https://centml.ai/pricing/ Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on ARC and AGI, they just acquired MindsAI - the current winners of the ARC challenge. Are you interested in working on ARC, or getting involved in their events? Goto https://tufalabs.ai/ TOC: [00:00:00] 0. Introduction / CentML ad, Tufa ad 1. AI Reasoning: From Language Models to Neurosymbolic Approaches [00:02:27] 1.1 Defining Reasoning in AI [00:09:51] 1.2 Limitations of Current Language Models [00:17:22] 1.3 Neuro-symbolic Approaches and Program Synthesis [00:24:59] 1.4 COPRA and In-Context Learning for Theorem Proving [00:34:39] 1.5 Symbolic Regression and LLM-Guided Abstraction 2. AI in Mathematics: Theorem Proving and Concept Discovery [00:43:37] 2.1 AI-Assisted Theorem Proving and Proof Verification [01:01:37] 2.2 Symbolic Regression and Concept Discovery in Mathematics [01:11:57] 2.3 Scaling and Modularizing Mathematical Proofs [01:21:53] 2.4 COPRA: In-Context Learning for Formal Theorem-Proving [01:28:22] 2.5 AI-driven theorem proving and mathematical discovery 3. Formal Methods and Challenges in AI Mathematics [01:30:42] 3.1 Formal proofs, empirical predicates, and uncertainty in AI mathematics [01:34:01] 3.2 Characteristics of good theoretical computer science research [01:39:16] 3.3 LLMs in theorem generation and proving [01:42:21] 3.4 Addressing contamination and concept learning in AI systems REFS: 00:04:58 The Chinese Room Argument, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ 00:11:42 Software 2.0, https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 00:11:57 Solving Olympiad Geometry Without Human Demonstrations, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06747-5 00:13:26 Lean, https://lean-lang.org/ 00:15:43 A General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm That Masters Chess, Shogi, and Go Through Self-Play, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar6404 00:19:24 DreamCoder (Ellis et al., PLDI 2021), https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381 00:24:37 The Lambda Calculus, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lambda-calculus/ 00:26:43 Neural Sketch Learning for Conditional Program Generation, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05698 00:28:08 Learning Differentiable Programs With Admissible Neural Heuristics, https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.12101 00:31:03 Symbolic Regression With a Learned Concept Library (Grayeli et al., NeurIPS 2024), https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09359 00:41:30 Formal Verification of Parallel Programs, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360251 01:00:37 Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556 01:18:19 Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 01:18:42 Draft, Sketch, and Prove: Guiding Formal Theorem Provers With Informal Proofs, https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12283 01:19:49 Learning Formal Mathematics From Intrinsic Motivation, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00695 01:20:19 An In-Context Learning Agent for Formal Theorem-Proving (Thakur et al., CoLM 2024), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.04353 01:23:58 Learning to Prove Theorems via Interacting With Proof Assistants, https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09381 01:39:58 An In-Context Learning Agent for Formal Theorem-Proving (Thakur et al., CoLM 2024), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.04353 01:42:24 Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning (Verma et al., ICML 2018), https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02477
The Japanese government said Saturday it will give the Medal of Honor for autumn 2024 to 786 people and 26 organizations, including shogi player Akira Watanabe and 54 gold medalists at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games.
If I download the shogi app you know I'm cooked Podcast art by Joey Rizk
With this episode, it goes over a few variants that exist for the game shogi. Although we go over a few variants here in this episode, feel free to share other variants that you're aware of with us so that we can share them with the world. So with that said, we hope you enjoy. Credits Writer - Bradley P. Thomas Producer - Bradley P. Thomas Voice Talent - ElevenLabs: Taylor Editor - Bradley P. Thomas Copyright Disclaimer: Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational, or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
With this episode, it goes over the version of chess that is known as shogi and it originated from the country of Japan. Although it possesses a fair number of similarities to that of other versions of chess, except that the pieces are the same color and possess the same pentagonal shape with this shape indicating who is the owner of said piece. So with that said, we hope you enjoy. Credits Writer - Bradley P. Thomas Producer - Bradley P. Thomas Voice Talent - ElevenLabs: Taylor Editor - Bradley P. Thomas Copyright Disclaimer: Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational, or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
David Silver is a principal research scientist at DeepMind and a professor at University College London. This interview was recorded at UMass Amherst during RLC 2024. References Discovering Reinforcement Learning Algorithms, Oh et al -- His keynote at RLC 2024 referred to more recent update to this work, yet to be published Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm, Silver et al 2017 -- the AlphaZero algo was used in his recent work on AlphaProof AlphaProof on the DeepMind blog AlphaFold on the DeepMind blog Reinforcement Learning Conference 2024 David Silver on Google Scholar
Xenia Bayer spielt nicht nur chinesisches Schach (Xiangqi), sondern neuerdings auch Shogi. In dieser Episode bringt sie uns alles über die Figuren im Shogi und die Besonderheiten dieses japanischen Brettspiels bei. Shogi wird in der Regel auf einem 9x9-Brett gespielt. Es gibt einige Ähnlichkeiten zum Schach, wie zum Beispiel das Ziel, den gegnerischen König zu besiegen. Die Figuren sind teilweise aber anders, z.B. gibt es eine Lanze. Wer mehr wissen will, horcht einfach rein! Folge direkt herunterladen ℹ Die beten Schachmaterialien im Chess Tigers Online Shop: Chess Tigers Shop
Xenia Bayer spielt nicht nur chinesisches Schach (Xiangqi), sondern neuerdings auch Shogi. In dieser Episode bringt sie uns alles über die Figuren im Shogi und die Besonderheiten dieses japanischen Brettspiels bei. Shogi wird in der Regel auf einem 9x9-Brett gespielt. Es gibt einige Ähnlichkeiten zum Schach, wie zum Beispiel das Ziel, den gegnerischen König zu besiegen. Die Figuren sind teilweise aber anders, z.B. gibt es eine Lanze. Wer mehr wissen will, horcht einfach rein! Folge direkt herunterladen Die beten Schachmaterialien im Chess Tigers Online Shop: Chess Tigers Shop Der Schach-Booster: Das Buch von Michael Busse mit den 10 besten Methoden zur Verbesserung ...Du möchtest deinen Podcast auch kostenlos hosten und damit Geld verdienen? Dann schaue auf www.kostenlos-hosten.de und informiere dich. Dort erhältst du alle Informationen zu unseren kostenlosen Podcast-Hosting-Angeboten. kostenlos-hosten.de ist ein Produkt der Podcastbude.Gern unterstützen wir dich bei deiner Podcast-Produktion.
Xenia Bayer spielt nicht nur chinesisches Schach (Xiangqi), sondern neuerdings auch Shogi. In dieser Episode bringt sie uns alles über die Figuren im Shogi und die Besonderheiten dieses japanischen Brettspiels bei. Shogi wird in der Regel auf einem 9x9-Brett gespielt. Es gibt einige Ähnlichkeiten zum Schach, wie zum Beispiel das Ziel, den gegnerischen König zu besiegen. Die Figuren sind teilweise aber anders, z.B. gibt es eine Lanze. Wer mehr wissen will, horcht einfach rein! Folge direkt herunterladen Die beten Schachmaterialien im Chess Tigers Online Shop: Chess Tigers Shop Der Schach-Booster: Das Buch von Michael Busse mit den 10 besten Methoden zur Verbesserung ...Du möchtest deinen Podcast auch kostenlos hosten und damit Geld verdienen? Dann schaue auf www.kostenlos-hosten.de und informiere dich. Dort erhältst du alle Informationen zu unseren kostenlosen Podcast-Hosting-Angeboten. kostenlos-hosten.de ist ein Produkt der Podcastbude.Gern unterstützen wir dich bei deiner Podcast-Produktion.
Japanese shogi star Sota Fujii on Monday became the youngest winner of "eisei" lifetime status for a shogi title by fending off a challenge for his "Kisei" title.
Japanese shogi sensation Sota Fujii was beaten by his challenger for his "Eio" title Thursday, losing one of the eight major titles for the first time since he dominated them in October last year.
Episode 454: This week the Summit Squad take on another recommendation from one of our awesome Patrons, Snowman, and he recommended us to watch March Comes In Like A Lion, the story of a reclusive 17 year old who lives on his own in Tokyo, and how upon meeting three sisters challenges his loneliness gained from his previous home life due to the immense pressure put on him as a Shogi player prodigy. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/anime-summit/message
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: LLMs seem (relatively) safe, published by JustisMills on April 26, 2024 on LessWrong. Post for a somewhat more general audience than the modal LessWrong reader, but gets at my actual thoughts on the topic. In 2018 OpenAI defeated the world champions of Dota 2, a major esports game. This was hot on the heels of DeepMind's AlphaGo performance against Lee Sedol in 2016, achieving superhuman Go performance way before anyone thought that might happen. AI benchmarks were being cleared at a pace which felt breathtaking at the time, papers were proudly published, and ML tools like Tensorflow (released in 2015) were coming online. To people already interested in AI, it was an exciting era. To everyone else, the world was unchanged. Now Saturday Night Live sketches use sober discussions of AI risk as the backdrop for their actual jokes, there are hundreds of AI bills moving through the world's legislatures, and Eliezer Yudkowsky is featured in Time Magazine. For people who have been predicting, since well before AI was cool (and now passe), that it could spell doom for humanity, this explosion of mainstream attention is a dark portent. Billion dollar AI companies keep springing up and allying with the largest tech companies in the world, and bottlenecks like money, energy, and talent are widening considerably. If current approaches can get us to superhuman AI in principle, it seems like they will in practice, and soon. But what if large language models, the vanguard of the AI movement, are actually safer than what came before? What if the path we're on is less perilous than what we might have hoped for, back in 2017? It seems that way to me. LLMs are self limiting To train a large language model, you need an absolutely massive amount of data. The core thing these models are doing is predicting the next few letters of text, over and over again, and they need to be trained on billions and billions of words of human-generated text to get good at it. Compare this process to AlphaZero, DeepMind's algorithm that superhumanly masters Chess, Go, and Shogi. AlphaZero trains by playing against itself. While older chess engines bootstrap themselves by observing the records of countless human games, AlphaZero simply learns by doing. Which means that the only bottleneck for training it is computation - given enough energy, it can just play itself forever, and keep getting new data. Not so with LLMs: their source of data is human-produced text, and human-produced text is a finite resource. The precise datasets used to train cutting-edge LLMs are secret, but let's suppose that they include a fair bit of the low hanging fruit: maybe 5% of publicly available text that is in principle available and not garbage. You can schlep your way to a 20x bigger dataset in that case, though you'll hit diminishing returns as you have to, for example, generate transcripts of random videos and filter old mailing list threads for metadata and spam. But nothing you do is going to get you 1,000x the training data, at least not in the short run. Scaling laws are among the watershed discoveries of ML research in the last decade; basically, these are equations that project how much oomph you get out of increasing the size, training time, and dataset that go into a model. And as it turns out, the amount of high quality data is extremely important, and often becomes the bottleneck. It's easy to take this fact for granted now, but it wasn't always obvious! If computational power or model size was usually the bottleneck, we could just make bigger and bigger computers and reliably get smarter and smarter AIs. But that only works to a point, because it turns out we need high quality data too, and high quality data is finite (and, as the political apparatus wakes up to what's going on, legally fraught). There are rumbling...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: LLMs seem (relatively) safe, published by JustisMills on April 26, 2024 on LessWrong. Post for a somewhat more general audience than the modal LessWrong reader, but gets at my actual thoughts on the topic. In 2018 OpenAI defeated the world champions of Dota 2, a major esports game. This was hot on the heels of DeepMind's AlphaGo performance against Lee Sedol in 2016, achieving superhuman Go performance way before anyone thought that might happen. AI benchmarks were being cleared at a pace which felt breathtaking at the time, papers were proudly published, and ML tools like Tensorflow (released in 2015) were coming online. To people already interested in AI, it was an exciting era. To everyone else, the world was unchanged. Now Saturday Night Live sketches use sober discussions of AI risk as the backdrop for their actual jokes, there are hundreds of AI bills moving through the world's legislatures, and Eliezer Yudkowsky is featured in Time Magazine. For people who have been predicting, since well before AI was cool (and now passe), that it could spell doom for humanity, this explosion of mainstream attention is a dark portent. Billion dollar AI companies keep springing up and allying with the largest tech companies in the world, and bottlenecks like money, energy, and talent are widening considerably. If current approaches can get us to superhuman AI in principle, it seems like they will in practice, and soon. But what if large language models, the vanguard of the AI movement, are actually safer than what came before? What if the path we're on is less perilous than what we might have hoped for, back in 2017? It seems that way to me. LLMs are self limiting To train a large language model, you need an absolutely massive amount of data. The core thing these models are doing is predicting the next few letters of text, over and over again, and they need to be trained on billions and billions of words of human-generated text to get good at it. Compare this process to AlphaZero, DeepMind's algorithm that superhumanly masters Chess, Go, and Shogi. AlphaZero trains by playing against itself. While older chess engines bootstrap themselves by observing the records of countless human games, AlphaZero simply learns by doing. Which means that the only bottleneck for training it is computation - given enough energy, it can just play itself forever, and keep getting new data. Not so with LLMs: their source of data is human-produced text, and human-produced text is a finite resource. The precise datasets used to train cutting-edge LLMs are secret, but let's suppose that they include a fair bit of the low hanging fruit: maybe 5% of publicly available text that is in principle available and not garbage. You can schlep your way to a 20x bigger dataset in that case, though you'll hit diminishing returns as you have to, for example, generate transcripts of random videos and filter old mailing list threads for metadata and spam. But nothing you do is going to get you 1,000x the training data, at least not in the short run. Scaling laws are among the watershed discoveries of ML research in the last decade; basically, these are equations that project how much oomph you get out of increasing the size, training time, and dataset that go into a model. And as it turns out, the amount of high quality data is extremely important, and often becomes the bottleneck. It's easy to take this fact for granted now, but it wasn't always obvious! If computational power or model size was usually the bottleneck, we could just make bigger and bigger computers and reliably get smarter and smarter AIs. But that only works to a point, because it turns out we need high quality data too, and high quality data is finite (and, as the political apparatus wakes up to what's going on, legally fraught). There are rumbling...
Welcome to Anime watch club, a bi-weekly group discussion and review where the hosts of the what do you say anime podcast, nominate and vote on shows either that we haven't seen or shows that will hopefully lead to a great discussion. On today's episode, we review the 2016 anime, March Comes in Like a Lion Socials/Discord - https://linktr.ee/whatdoyousayanime 0:00 - Intro 2:32 - First Impressions 12:56 - Establishing the cast in the early episodes (Ep. 1-5) 23:53 - The relationship between Rei and Kyoko 29:56 - The "Child of God" arc (Ep 6-9) 42:05 - Would a knowledge of Shogi help your enjoyment? 50:49 - Rei's slice of life, backstory, and new developments (Ep. 10-15) 1:01:27 - The shogi workshop and leading up to the Kyoto tournament (Ep. 16-18) 1:06:04 - Tournament arc and wrapping up season 1 (Ep. 19-22) 1:13:32 - The Kawamoto's and impact of found family 1:22:52 - Closing thoughts and scores 1:30:38 - What We're Watching Next --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/whatdoyousayanime/support
For Episode 29 we are back to our d20 random episode. The dice gods, by their grace, blessed us with March Comes in Like a Lion. Well regarded amongst the anime community, will this show be a hit or miss for the three weebs? If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe for future episodes every Wednesday. Additionally, we'd appreciate you following the podcast on Twitter @TheAnimeBacklog or leaving us a review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to follow us individually on Twitter, our handles are - Dan: @Avarice77, Marcus: @Marcus R, Nick: @NickSpartz. Any questions or comments feel free to email us at TheAnimeBacklogPodcast@gmail.com Music: "Kawaii Friends" by Alexander Lisenkov
Surprise! Wir starten unsere dreistelligen Folgen direkt mit einer dicken Überraschung, nämlich einer Sonderfolge! Maxi und Fabi aka Shogoon haben sich mal wieder für eine neue Folge zusammengerafft und einfach darüber geredet, was die letzten drei Jahre so los war. ein guter Ort also für Emotionen, Spaß, ein bisschen Gossip und tonnenweise Anekdoten. Es wird geil!Tickets für die Shogoon Tour:https://shogoon.ticket.io/2ejxnnf7/ywej3s/?lang=deAlle weiteren Infos zu Shogi & seiner Musik:https://workingclassmonopoly.comTickets für Maxis Tour:Shops und Podcasts sind ja nice, aber ein Max ohne Bühne ist kein richtiger Max. Und irgendwo muss der Frust der letzten vier Jahre ja hin.Wer Bock hat, Max im Herbst auf Tour zu besuchen... hier gibts die Karten:https://krasserstoff.com/tours/max-rockstah-nachtsheim-762b4709-c2cd-46d8-a171-db22853ddaf8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this podcast episode, Gretta returns after a long hiatus to help Xan review a heartfelt manga series about adopted families and Shogi. Is it worth checking out? Well, Sit back and Find out as they review March Comes In Like A lion by Chica Umino. ----more---- As our hosts go over this mesmerizing manga series, Gretta also does a deep dive on the unique characters in the series and Xan goes over the latest manga releases for the week. Remember to Like, Share and Subscribe. Follow us @spiraken on Twitter and @spiraken on Instagram, subscribe to this podcast and our YouTube channel, Support our Patreon and if you would kindly, please go to www.tinyurl.com/helpxan and give us a great rating on Apple Podcasts. Also join our discord and Thank you, hope you enjoy this episode. #spiraken #mangareview #wheelofmanga #seinenmanga #dramamanga #sliceoflifemanga #chicaumino #shogimanga #marchcomesinlikealion #denpa #podcasthq #manga #spirakenreviewpodcast Music Used in This Episode: Closing Theme-Trendsetter by Mood Maze (Uppbeat) Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/mood-maze/trendsetter License code: YEPNB5COHX56JVES WHERE TO FIND US Our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/spiraken/ Our Email Spiraken@gmail.com Xan's Email xan@spiraken.com Our Patron https://www.patreon.podbean.com/spiraken or https://www.patreon.com/spiraken Our Discord https://tinyurl.com/spiradiscord Our Twitter https://twitter.com/spiraken Our Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@spiraken Our Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/spiraken Our Amazon Store http://www.amazon.com/shops/spiraken Random Question of the Day: Have You Ever Played Shogi Before?
Pull up a chair (or cushion or something) and have a seat for a rousing game of shogi with The Best Boys! What is shogi you ask? You didn't?! Well Best Boys Dan and Justin are gonna tell you anyway! Some people refer to it as "Japanese Chess" while others hate that particular moniker. The truth, as is so often the case, lies somewhere between these extremes. So grab your drunken elephant and sit in a form-perfect seiza while The Best Boys breakdown the history and culture surrounding the game of shogi and its connections to anime! *Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch from Mercury spoilers start at 00:13:35 and end at 00:20:45* Follow The Best Boys on Instagram @bestboys_pod or send us an email at thebestboyspod@gmail.com. If you like what we do here, please go give us a review, it really helps us with the algorithm, especially on Apple Podcasts! Bubble Tea by Pikuseru (https://fanlink.to/bubbletea) No Copyright Breaking News Music (https://youtu.be/a4I0jlETu4g) Sayonara April by KODOMOi (https://soundcloud.com/kodomoimusic) Creative Commons - Attribution 3.0 Unported - CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…) Music promoted by Music Panda - Vlog No Copyright Free Music Video Link: https://youtu.be/jmuJp29d57Q
The Adult Improver Series returns with two insightful guests joining the podcast. WIM Natasha Regan is an author and actuary who among many other chess accomplishments recently became the British over 50 Women's National Champion! Natasha recently collaborated on a Chessable course with Matthew Ball, who is a chess dad and dedicated improver who has made significant rating progress since returning to competitive chess in recent years. Natasha and Matthew shared lots of helpful chess study tips covering topics ranging from The Woodpecker Method, to the Chess Steps series, to whether one should alter their approach to a game against a younger opponent. We also discussed their fun and instructive new course, Zwischenzug: A Comprehensive Guide to Intermediate Moves. You can find timestamps for all of the topics discussed below. 0:00- Perpetual Chess is brought to you in part by Chessable.com! Check out Natasha and Matthew's new CHessable course here: : https://www.chessable.com/zwischenzug-a-comprehensive-guide-to-intermediate-moves/course/139623/ You can check out some of my recommended courses here: https://go.chessable.com/perpetual-chess-podcast/ 0:03- Matthew Ball and Natasha discuss their shared background as junior players, and how their paths recrossed in recent years. 7:30- Patreon mailbag question- Does Natasha have any different strategies when playing against kids as compared to adults? 17:00- Matthew came back into chess a few years back and his seen some rating gain. He discusses his training regimen. Mentioned: Chess for Life, Chess Steps Books, Woodpecker Method 22:00- More on the Woodpecker Method Mentioned: Pump Up Your Rating by GM Axel Smith, Book Recap #6 on the Woodpecker Method 23:00- How does Natasha tune up for a tournament? 26:00- Natasha discusses some similarities between Shogi and Chess. Mentioned: Karolina Styczyńska of the Shogi Harbor Twitch Channel 32:00- Matthew shares a few more improvement recommendations. 35:00- Why did Natasha and Matthew decide to do a course on intermediate moves? 45:00- Natasha and Matthew discusses their approaches to openings 52:00- Do they work with coaches? 56:00- Natasha and Matt discuss their tournament and summer plans. Thanks so much to Natasha and Matt for joining the show! Check out their course here: https://www.chessable.com/zwischenzug-a-comprehensive-guide-to-intermediate-moves/course/139623/ If you would like to help support Perpetual Chess via Patreon, you can do so here: https://www.patreon.com/perpetualchess Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Podcast Review | Best of the Bet #4 Keishi Ohtomo (2017) Highschool student, Rei Kiriyama is ranked Shogi player. He lives alone, away from his adopted family because his foster sister like--hates him. He soon meets another family of sister that care for him. Kiriyama struggles to become the best Shogi player, facing the threatening high ranking player Goto. Tazza: The High Rollers (Choi Dong-hoon, 2007) The god of gamblers (Wong Jing, 1989) Kaiji the ultimate Gambler (Tôya Satô, 2009) March comes in like a lion (Keishi Ohtomo, 2017) YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzMwCEPYI47Mq7W997iJkbg?view_as=subscriber Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/pastthesubtitles?fan_landing=true Instagram| Pastthesubtitles Twitter| @PastTheSubtitle Episode analytics --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/gps1/support
Today's broadcast is C1E65A for Wayback Wednesday, July 13th, 2022 Today's episode is part one of two in our "Best of 2020 / 2021" celebration – featuring St. John's picks, and unimaginitavely called "The Best of 2020 / 2021 – part 1: St. John's picks". Track# - Track – Game – System – Composer(s) - Original Episode – Originally selected by 01) Intro – 00:00:00 02) Funky Radio [In-Game vers] - Jet Grind Radio – Dreamcast – B.B. Rights – C1E51 – St. John – 00:09:44 03) Title – TMNT – NES – Jun Funahashi – C1E60 – Phillip Vaughn – 00:13:07 04) [REVERSE] Options – Daffy Duck in Hollywood – Genesis – Matt Furniss – Ch F: Backtracks: the OTHER 50 – St. John – 00:14:51 05) Roller Mobster – Hotline Miami – Multiplatform – Carpenter Brut – C1E60 – Adam Huisman – 00:17:10 06) Got Well Soon – Life is Strange – Multiplatform – Breton – C1E60 – Amber Pearey – 00:20:37 07) Signs of Love – Persona IV – PS2 – Shoji Meguro – C1E60 – Trey Johnson – 00:25:22 08) [SLOW] Can you Feel the Sunshine – Sonic R – Saturn – C1E57 - Richard Jacques – St. John – 00:28:16 09) [REVERSE] Mirage – Gran Turismo 5 – PS3 – Kemmei Adachi – C1E52 – St. John – 00:35:19 10) Star Guitar – Lumines II – PSP – The Chemical Bros – C1E51 – St. John – 00:39:24 11) Overworld Theme – Zelda II: Adventure of Link – NES – Akito Nakatsuka – C1E53/C1E58 - St. Jesse / St. John – 00:45:44 12) World D – Art of Balance – Multiplatform - Martin Schjøler - Ch F: C2S1 Complete – St. John – 00:47:13 13) Afternoon in Crossbell – Zero no Kiseki – PC / PSP – Takahiro Unisuga – C1E59 – Hugues Johnson – 00:49:32 14) [REVERSE] Cylic – Heavily Armored – Cosmic Carnage – 32X – Hikoshi Hashimoto – C1E52 – St. John – 00:51:51 15) Stage 02 – Contra III: The Alien Wars – SNES – Konami Kukeiha Club – C1E53 – St. John – 00:54:04 16) Illusion – Ys IV – PC Engine – Atsushi Shiakawa – C1E59 – Hugues Johnson – 00:56:55 17) Norfair – Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – Switch – c: Hirokazu ("Hip") Tanaka / a: Yuzo Koshiro – Ch F: C2S1 Complete – St. John – 00:58:58 18) Mystic Woods (aka Forest 2) - Grounseed (OPN vers) - PC98 – Daisuke Takahashi – C2E3 – St. John – 01:01:27 19) [REVERSE] Stage 4-3 – Bram Stoker's Dracula – Genesis – Matt Furniss – C1E52 – St. John – 01:05:03 20) [REVERSE] The Reverse Will – Silent Hill 2 – PS2 – Akira Yamaoka – C1E52 – St. John – 01:08:17 21) Voices of Urdak – DOOM Eternal – Multiplatform – Mick Gordon – C1E56 – St. John – 01:11:38 22) Anxious Heart – Final Fantasy VII – PS1 – Nobuo Uematsu – C1E58 – St. Jesse – 01:17:44 23) If you Open your Heart – Final Fantasy VII – PS1 – Nobuo Uematsu – C1E58 – St. Jesse – 01:21:37 24) Everything's Going to be Okay – Prey – Multiplatform – Mick Gordon – C1E51 – St. John – 01:24:31 25) [REVERSE] Process Control – Gran Turismo Sport – PS4 – Yasuhisa Inoue – C1E52 – St. John – 01:27:11 26) BGM 3 – Mario Paint – SNES – Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka, Ryouji Yoshitomi, and/or Kazumi Totaka – C1E54 – St. John – 01:30:37 27) [SLOW] Fonction – n++ - Multiplatform – Broca – C1E57 – St. John – 01:33:57 28) Fonction – n++ - Multiplatform – Broca – Ch F: C2S1 Complete – St John – 01:43:31 29) Kara Kara Bazaar – LoZ: Breath of the Wild – WiiU / Switch – Hajime Wakai, Manaka Kataoka, and/or Yasuaki Iwata – C1E60 – St. John – 01:50:26 30) Space – Yoshi's Crafted World – Switch – Kazufumi Umeda – C1E54 – St. John – 01:52:32 31) Footlight Lane – Super Mario 3D World – WiiU / Switch – Mahito Yokota, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, and/or Yasuaki Iwata – C1E54 – St. John – 01:55:38 32) Course World – Super Mario Maker 2 – Switch – Atsuko Asahi, Toru Minegishi, and/or Sayoka Doi – C1E54 – St. John – 01:57:38 33) Gomoku, Shogi, Mini-Shogi, Hanafuda – Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics – Switch – Chamy Ishi, and/or Toshiki Aida – C1E56 – St. John – 01:59:52 34) Prime #5 – Echochrome - PSP / PS3 – Hideki Sakamoto – C1E60 – Electric Boogaloo – 02:01:53 35) Skytown – Metroid Prime 3 – Wii – Kenji Yamamoto, Minako Hamano, and/or Masaru Tajima – C1E51 – St. John – 02:05:06 36) [REVERSE] The Blazing Sands – Final Fantasy X – PS2 – Masashi Hamauzu – C1E52 – St. John – 02:08:28 37) [REVERSE] Stage 4 – Chip Chan Kick – PCFX – Yoshio Furukawa, Masahara Iwata, and/or Hitoshi Sakamoto – C1E52 – St. John – 02:11:26 38) Division – BrandishVT – PC – Naoki Kaneda – C1E59 – Hugues Johnson – 02:13:25 39) Snif City – Paper Mario: The Origami King – Switch – Shoh Marakami, Yoshiaki Kimura, Hiroki Moishita, and/or Fumihiro Isobe – C1E54 / C2E4 – St. John – 02:15:24 40) Marionette, Marionette – Ys IX – PS4 – Mitsuo Singa – C1E59 – Hugues Johnson – 02:18:19 41) Toad's Turnpike – Mario Kart 64 – N64 – Kenta Nagata, Taroh Bandoh, and/or Yoji Inagaki – C1E54 – St. John – 02:20:34 42) Guruguru Majin De Pon – Gurumin – PC / PSP / 3DS – Takahide Murayama – C1E59 – Hugues Johnson – 02:23:28 43) Results Theme (aka Record of Samus) - Metroid Prime – Gamecube / Wiii – Kenji Yamamoto (inspired by "Brinstar" from Metroid – NES – Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka) - C1E60 – St. John – 02:27:08 44) Results Parade – Check Mii Out Channel – Wii – Kazumi Totaka – C1E56 – St. John –02:30:05 45) A Battle's Conclusion – Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity – Switch – Kumi Tanioka, Reo Uratai, Ryotaro Yagi, and/or Haruki Yamada – C1E56 – St. John – 02:32:09 46) Tear-Stained Eyes – Snatcher – Sega CD / PC Engine CD – Konami Kukeiha Club – C1E51 – St. John – 02:34:18 47) Inn / Game Over – Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II – NES – David Wise – C1E53 – St. John – 02:39:09 48) [REVERSE] The Serpent Trench – Final Fantasy VI – SNES – Nobuo Uematsu – C1E52 – St. John – 02:39:59 49) [REVERSE] What Can you Do? - Gran Turismo Sport – PS4 – Lenny Ibizarre – C1E52 – St. John – 02:41:56 50) [SLOW] Jump Up Super Star – Super Mario Odyssey – Switch – Shiho Fujii, and/or Koji Kondo – C1E57 – St. John – 02:46:54 51) [REVERSE] Ending – Super Castlevania IV – SNES – Masanori Adachi and/or Taro Kudo – Ch F: Backtracks – The OTHER 50 – St. John – 02:52:41 52) Outro – 02:57:55 Music Block Runtime: 02:48:26, Total Episode Runtime: 03:17:52 Our Intro Music is Funky Radio, from Jet Grind Radio on the Sega Dreamcast, composed by BB Rights. Our Outro Music is Results Parade from the Check Mii Out Channel on the Wii, composed by Kazumi Totaka. Produced using Ardour 6 / Audacity 3 in Ubuntu Studio [Linux] 22.04 A few important milestones in 2020 / 2021 that I had failed to mention in the intro, but which deserve mentioning: A) we had our first Ch 1 episode by Hugues (which was also the first Ch 1 in the entire show's history that St. John had absolutely no hand whatsoever in producing. It was a focus on music fromFalcomgames, and was quite succinctly named "The Falcom Episode" B) We made the migration from producing Nerd Noise Radio in GarageBand via MacOS on a mac mini (and using primarily MP3s in production – mostly through YouTube-to-MP3 websites) to producing NNR in a mix of Audacity andArdourvia Ubuntu Studio (Linux) on a mix of a Dell Latitude Laptop and my custom-built gaming PC (and using primarily WAVs in production – mostly through the youtube-dl command in the Linux terminal). The last episode to be produced in Mac was C1E52: Backtracks (April 1st 2020) and the first episode to be produced in Linux was Channel F: Backtracks – the OTHER 50 (April or May 2020). I feel like the production value on balance is noticeably and appreciably better after the change. And since Hugues is also a Linux user, that means that both sides of our Channel 2 episodes are Linux productions. You can find the Google Sheets spreadsheet showing St. John's work in arriving at his tracklist for this episode here (WARNING: MILD SPOILERS! Contains track lists for potential future Archive-exclusive SUPER BONUS supplemental music collections: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X6JpkqiGADAF9sHAsSpgyImjvimVWJv2mOATf5_ZZGc/edit?usp=sharing You can also find all of our audio episodes on Archive.org as well as the occasional additional release only available there, such as remixes of previous releases and other content. Our YouTube Channel, for the time being is in dormancy, but will be returning with content, hopefully, in 2022. Meanwhile, all the old stuff is still there, and can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/NerdNoiseRadio Our episodes (and occasionally, other content, including expanded show notes) can be found on our blog here: nerdnoiseradio.blogspot.com. Nerd Noise Radio is also available on The Retro Junkies Network at www.theretrojunkies.com, and is a member of the VGM Podcast Fans community at https://www.facebook.com/groups/VGMPodcastFans/ Or, if you wish to connect with us directly, we have two groups of our own: Nerd Noise Radio - Easy Mode: https://www.facebook.com/groups/276843385859797/ for sharing tracks, video game news, or just general videogame fandom. Nerd Noise Radio - Expert Mode: https://www.facebook.com/groups/381475162016534/ for going deep into video game sound hardware, composer info, and/or music theory. You can also follow us on Twitter at @NerdNoiseRadio. And we are also now on Spotify, TuneIn, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, and Vurbl. Thanks for listening! Join us again in August (dates TBD) for a special guest on Channel 1, and our desert biome focus, "Just Deserts" on Channel 2. Delicious VGM, as well as Tasty VGM and Talk on Nerd Noise Radio...and wherever you are....Fly the N!!! Cheers!
'March Comes in Like a Lion' is a masterpiece that beautifully delivers on character-driven stories via internal monologues, nuanced dialogue, and effective imagery centered around the world of shogi. Ionatan and Ravi dive deep into the series, discussing the strengths of Chica Umino's writing and Akiyuki Shinbo's adaptation, the realistic depictions of depression and bullying, and how the message of the series is ultimately optimistic in terms of personal growth and relationships.
In this episode, I share my experience learning to play shogi in Japan. Read the transcript on my website: https://teatimewithtayvinb.wordpress.com/2022/04/13/lets-go-for-shigi/ Talk with me on iTalki: www.italki.com/teacher/2889545 Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TEA_Time_Tayvin --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/teatimewithtayvin/support
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Supervise Process, not Outcomes, published by stuhlmueller on April 5, 2022 on LessWrong. We can think about machine learning systems on a spectrum from process-based to outcome-based: Process-based systems are built on human-understandable task decompositions, with direct supervision of reasoning steps. Outcome-based systems are built on end-to-end optimization, with supervision of final results. This post explains why Ought is devoted to process-based systems. The argument is: In the short term, process-based ML systems have better differential capabilities: They help us apply ML to tasks where we don't have access to outcomes. These tasks include long-range forecasting, policy decisions, and theoretical research. In the long term, process-based ML systems help avoid catastrophic outcomes from systems gaming outcome measures and are thus more aligned. Both process- and outcome-based evaluation are attractors to varying degrees: Once an architecture is entrenched, it's hard to move away from it. This lock-in applies much more to outcome-based systems. Whether the most powerful ML systems will primarily be process-based or outcome-based is up in the air. So it's crucial to push toward process-based training now. There are almost no new ideas here. We're reframing the well-known outer alignment difficulties for traditional deep learning architectures and contrasting them with compositional approaches. To the extent that there are new ideas, credit primarily goes to Paul Christiano and Jon Uesato. We only describe our background worldview here. In a follow-up post, we'll explain why we're building Elicit, the AI research assistant. The spectrum Supervising outcomes Supervision of outcomes is what most people think about when they think about machine learning. Local components are optimized based on an overall feedback signal: SGD optimizes weights in a neural net to reduce its training loss Neural architecture search optimizes architectures and hyperparameters to have low validation loss Policy gradient optimizes policy neural nets to choose actions that lead to high expected rewards In each case, the system is optimized based on how well it's doing empirically. MuZero is an example of a non-trivial outcome-based architecture. MuZero is a reinforcement learning algorithm that reaches expert-level performance at Go, Chess, and Shogi without human data, domain knowledge, or hard-coded rules. The architecture has three parts: A representation network, mapping observations to states A dynamics network, mapping state and action to future state, and A prediction network, mapping state to value and distribution over next actions. Superficially, this looks like an architecture with independently meaningful components, including a “world model” (dynamics network). However, because the networks are optimized end-to-end to jointly maximize expected rewards and to be internally consistent, they need not capture interpretable dynamics or state. It's just a few functions that, if chained together, are useful for predicting reward-maximizing actions. Neural nets are always in the outcomes-based regime to some extent: In each layer and at each node, they use the matrices that make the neural net as a whole work well. Supervising process If you're not optimizing based on how well something works empirically (outcomes), then the main way you can judge it is by looking at whether it's structurally the right thing to do (process). For many tasks, we understand what pieces of work we need to do and how to combine them. We trust the result because of this reasoning, not because we've observed final results for very similar tasks: Engineers and astronomers expect the James Webb Space Telescope to work because its deployment follows a well-understood plan, and it is built out of well-understo...
Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Supervise Process, not Outcomes, published by stuhlmueller on April 5, 2022 on LessWrong. We can think about machine learning systems on a spectrum from process-based to outcome-based: Process-based systems are built on human-understandable task decompositions, with direct supervision of reasoning steps. Outcome-based systems are built on end-to-end optimization, with supervision of final results. This post explains why Ought is devoted to process-based systems. The argument is: In the short term, process-based ML systems have better differential capabilities: They help us apply ML to tasks where we don't have access to outcomes. These tasks include long-range forecasting, policy decisions, and theoretical research. In the long term, process-based ML systems help avoid catastrophic outcomes from systems gaming outcome measures and are thus more aligned. Both process- and outcome-based evaluation are attractors to varying degrees: Once an architecture is entrenched, it's hard to move away from it. This lock-in applies much more to outcome-based systems. Whether the most powerful ML systems will primarily be process-based or outcome-based is up in the air. So it's crucial to push toward process-based training now. There are almost no new ideas here. We're reframing the well-known outer alignment difficulties for traditional deep learning architectures and contrasting them with compositional approaches. To the extent that there are new ideas, credit primarily goes to Paul Christiano and Jon Uesato. We only describe our background worldview here. In a follow-up post, we'll explain why we're building Elicit, the AI research assistant. The spectrum Supervising outcomes Supervision of outcomes is what most people think about when they think about machine learning. Local components are optimized based on an overall feedback signal: SGD optimizes weights in a neural net to reduce its training loss Neural architecture search optimizes architectures and hyperparameters to have low validation loss Policy gradient optimizes policy neural nets to choose actions that lead to high expected rewards In each case, the system is optimized based on how well it's doing empirically. MuZero is an example of a non-trivial outcome-based architecture. MuZero is a reinforcement learning algorithm that reaches expert-level performance at Go, Chess, and Shogi without human data, domain knowledge, or hard-coded rules. The architecture has three parts: A representation network, mapping observations to states A dynamics network, mapping state and action to future state, and A prediction network, mapping state to value and distribution over next actions. Superficially, this looks like an architecture with independently meaningful components, including a “world model” (dynamics network). However, because the networks are optimized end-to-end to jointly maximize expected rewards and to be internally consistent, they need not capture interpretable dynamics or state. It's just a few functions that, if chained together, are useful for predicting reward-maximizing actions. Neural nets are always in the outcomes-based regime to some extent: In each layer and at each node, they use the matrices that make the neural net as a whole work well. Supervising process If you're not optimizing based on how well something works empirically (outcomes), then the main way you can judge it is by looking at whether it's structurally the right thing to do (process). For many tasks, we understand what pieces of work we need to do and how to combine them. We trust the result because of this reasoning, not because we've observed final results for very similar tasks: Engineers and astronomers expect the James Webb Space Telescope to work because its deployment follows a well-understood plan, and it is built out of well-understo...
Shogi! Game of champions. Get ready for an entire anime about one introverted Shogi player's journey through the horrible world of Society and having to have relationships with other people in your life. The horror! March Comes In Like A Lion! Follow Deer on twitter: https://twitter.com/DeerBits_ Follow Gamb on twitter: https://twitter.com/DrewGamblord Follow Spooky on twitter: https://twitter.com/SpoonkyTweets Don't forget we also make public our commentary track so you can watch along with us our just listen to us go insane: https://soundcloud.com/friendsforcingfriends/march-comes-in-like-a-lion-commentary Patreon where you can find commentary tracks, notes, early access to next week's episode! https://www.patreon.com/gamblord
¿con nuevas normas para el ajedrez? / ¿con hidroaviones? / ¿con drones recogiendo manzanas? / Sony compra Bungie / Más épica legal en Epic vs Apple / Vertido tóxico de Samsung / Los emojis 3D animados de Windows siguen en camino / OpenRAN en Málaga Patrocinador: La gente Colchón Morfeo vuelve con nosotros para que disfrutes del mejor colchón del universo https://www.colchonmorfeo.com/?utm_source=NL&utm_campaign=MIXX, que te dará el descanso y la vitalidad que necesitas para cumplir tus sueños. El envío es gratuito y en 24 horas https://www.colchonmorfeo.com/?utm_source=NL&utm_campaign=MIXX y tienes 100 días de prueba sin compromiso. — Ahórrate 100 euros https://www.colchonmorfeo.com/?utm_source=NL&utm_campaign=MIXX con el código MIXX100. ¿con nuevas normas para el ajedrez? / ¿con hidroaviones? / ¿con drones recogiendo manzanas? / Sony compra Bungie / Más épica legal en Epic vs Apple / Vertido tóxico de Samsung / Los emojis 3D animados de Windows siguen en camino / OpenRAN en Málaga ♟️ ¿Pueden los algoritmos mejorar las reglas del ajedrez? Mi conclusión después de leer este interesante estudio sobre AlphaZero jugando con diferentes normas es que acabaría empeorando el sistema tradicional https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/2/258230-reimagining-chess-with-alphazero/fulltext al traer aún mayor ventaja para las piezas blancas.
This week, Dr. Green is joined by Dr. Yoichi Funabashi, chairman of the Tokyo-based think tank Asia Pacific Initiative, to discuss geopolitical and economic trends in the Indo-Pacific and Japanese grand strategy. Dr. Funabashi talks about the evolution of Japan's foreign policy strategy, from the Abe administration to the new Kishida administration, as well as the role of the U.S.-Japan alliance in Japan's strategic thinking. The two also touch on Japan's relationship with South Korea, economic security, and Japan's prospects for acquiring strike capabilities.
Today's Whiteboard & Poll きょうのホワイトボード https://www.azumiism.com/category/podcast/
Nos visitan los amigos (y en concreto Nichi) de Konichiwa desde Japón (un podcast que ya estáis tardando en escuchar y suscribiros) para sacarnos de dudas como ¿es verdad todo lo que sale de Japón en los videojuegos? ¿hay videojuegos en los baños públicos? ¿cómo se juega al puñetero Shogi? ¿lleva la gente los pelos de colores? Esto y mucho más ¡Pasad y descubridlo por alguien que vive en el país del sol naciente. ¡Qué lo disfrutéis!
Ah, Chess. This one's been around a long time. But what if you're looking for something similar, but with a different spin on it? In this episode, Dylan and Bill discuss some of the many variants that Chess has inspired, as well as a few games that are completely different but might scratch the same itch.
Director Kahlil Silver along with his brother Shogi Silver join Silas to talk about their newest film In The Company of Women. A film set in and shot in Seattle WA. They also answer the world famous Seven Questions. #SFCS
What if Hideo Kojima made a manga about Shogi that was a mashup of Fight Club and Joker? This episode we, and our guest Tim Batt from The Worst Idea of All Time discuss Kentarou Fukuda's Shonen Jump manga Double Taisei. Show Notes: You can reach us at shonenflop@gmail.com or on twitter @shonenflopcast Episode art by Shannon (IG: illuminyatea) You can find our guest on Twitter @Tim_batt, The Worst Idea of All Time: worstideaofalltime.com If you're enjoying Shonen Flop and want to support us or even just access exclusive content like bonus eps, warmup audio, or deleted scenes consider becoming a Patron patreon.com/shonenflop. Your support is extremely appreciated! Our merch store has new designs! Get Shonen Flop art, including this episode's cover art, on a shirt, mug, print, or whatever else might catch your eye teepublic.com/t-shirts?ref_id=22733 Become a member of our community by joining our Discord. You can hang out with us, play games, and even join our comic book discussion club! Find it at discord.gg/4hC3SqRw8r Shoutouts: Check out Newsly for free now from www.newsly.me and use promo code FL0P2021 to receive a 1-month free premium description Blake and Spencer Get Jumped: linktr.ee/bandsgetjumped The Broken Lords Tabletop RPG Podcast: linktr.ee/thebrokenlords 4 Eyes Academia: @4EyesAcademia
Support this podcast at -- > https://anchor.fm/words-beyond-action/support Watch the full video on youtube --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7RwBWXI2g&t=4s Visit our website --> https://www.wordsbeyondaction.com/ Follows on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wordsbeyondaction/ Follows on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wordsbeyondaction --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/words-beyond-action/support
The Habibis talk about games, shogi, and haggling.Timestamps: Persona 5 Strikers (00:45) Loop Hero (06:37) Shogi (20:40) A Board With No Pieces (26:56) That's it for this episode. Follow us on Twitter at @the_habibis, e-mail us your stories, feedback, or suggestions at info@thehabibis.com, or join our (very young) Discord server at https://discord.thehabibis.com/. Shokran, and salaam!
This Week on The Casual Hour… After seeing credits roll on The Last of Us Part 2, there are some OPINIONS around The Casual Hour offices. But we also manage to squeeze in some talk on the most interesting games coming out in July. Plus hear someone butcher the rules of Hanafuda. All that and more on this edition of The Casual Hour. Let's Talk! We love fan mail, send us some! thecasualhour@gmail.com You can follow our show on Twitter at: @thecasualhour Enjoy what we have to say? Please leave us a review! The Casual Hour is: Bobby Pease - Host - Twitter: @bobbypease | Website: www.Lumberjacksmack.com Chase Koeneke - Co-host - Twitter: @chase_koeneke | Website: www.gamersonthego.com Johnny Amizich - Co-host - Twitter @jamizich Love our theme music? It was created by Patric Brown. You can follow his antics on twitter @insaneanalog or check out more of his music and download our theme at www.insaneanalog.com If you are enjoying what we do and would like to further support us you can do so by making a monthly contribution through Anchor! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thecasualhour/support
Alpha Zero is a computer program that trained itself to play chess, Go and Shogi at superhuman levels in 24 hours. The post https://drpepermd.com/episode/what-is-alphazero/ (What is AlphaZero?) appeared first on https://drpepermd.com (Dr Peper MD).
In this episode, GameTek talks about Shogi, Dexter and the Chief take a look at Yomi, and we introduce the Voice of Ameritrash 2.0! Mary helps us with the news, Moritz discusses Grey Giant Games, and Fathergeek wonders if you should let you child win games. We take a look at some new games, including Thunderstone: Dragonspire and Cargo Noir, and talk about our most looked forward to game of 2011.