Page 7 - The Jewish Voice - January '20

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The Jewish Voice, Page 7

Local Happenings from page 6 After all was
s aid and done,
named Barak. He too was killed in the line of fire. There was Chabad PBG
hardly a dry eye in the room as she shared the news that she experienced one of
is now married to a man who currently serves as a fighter the most successful
pilot in the Israeli Air Force! fundraisers and they
The adrenalin was high as the winners of the golf event were proud to provide
and winners of the $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 Grand Raffle an extra three IDF
were announced. soldiers with full
college scholarships!

In the World of AI, Bridge Is the
Quintessential Human Game

By Chris Van Leeuwen
The Fall North American
Bridge Championship
(NABC) starts on
Thanksgiving Day each year.
It’s a tournament that includes
some of the most prestigious
bridge events in the world
while offering competitions
for players of all experience
levels. Recently I sat down at
a card table in a hotel ballroom
in San Francisco across from my partner, a distinguished woman
who came from Tokyo just for the tournament. Our opponents
were already there: two men, one from Italy and one from
Cupertino, California. As we waited for the game to begin, the
conversation turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and games.
It can be argued that bridge has more in common with

2020 SPRING TRAINING chess than it does with other card games. It involves strategy
and logic, and with every card in the deck dealt out on every
hand, the “pieces” in play are known. Unsurprisingly, there has
been cross over between chess and bridge champions, perhaps
most notably Irina Levitina. Irina was one of the top female
chess players in the 1980s, but when she became enamored
with the card game she retired from chess completely to play
bridge. While the skills required to excel in both games might
overlap, there is one not so obvious difference between chess
and bridge.
Famously in 1997, a computer program called “Deep Blue”
beat Russian Grandmaster Garry Kasparov becoming the first
computer to defeat a world champion at chess. In 2016, a
program called AlphaGo defeated Lee So-dol who was then
recognized as the best go player in the world. Go, which was
developed in China over 2,500 years ago, is widely considered
to be one of the most complex games in the world. Lee very
recently announced his retirement because the AI was so strong,
he did not think a human player could ever beat it. Could a
bridge-playing computer good enough to beat the very best
human players really be far behind?
There are seven bridge-playing programs that will
compete against one another in the 23rd World Bridge-Bot
Championship this week, but even the best of these programs

Local Happenings on page 8

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