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William Lindesay, a British traveler and writer, has been exploring the Great Wall—one of the human’s most wonderful building projects. Not even a Chinese knows the Great Wall of China as well as he does.
When, as a schoolboy, Lindesay announced his plan to explore the Great Wall, nobody took him seriously. But Lindesay achieved his goal, by spending 25 years on the Great Wall and has become one of the world’s most famous experts on its rich history. Lindesay now lives and works in Beijing. This year his new book has come out, The Great Wall Explained, with a lot of photographs and articles.
Running on the Great Wall was a brave trip and Lindesay had already run 3,000 kilometers along it! During those years, he got to many villages along the way. He was often helped by friendly villagers, although they didn’t quite understand why the Englishman would have such interest in the Great Wall.
Who is smarter, human being or artificial intelligence(AI, 人工智能)?The question swept the world a few months ago. In March 2016, AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Google, had the Go(围棋) match with Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go player. He is the world top player of this old Chinese game.
In October 2015, AlphaGo became the first computer program to beat a professional(职业的) human Go play er. And this time, it beat Lee Sedol 4-1.
In fact, before the match, most people believed that Lee would certainly be the winner, because they didn’t think that AI was good enough to beat the human mind. However, the result was disappointing. As a machine, AlphaGo would never get tired, while Lee Sedol was only a human and humans must have some weaknesses.
AlphaGo’s wins over a human champion(冠军) show that computers can do more difficult tasks. Some people may worry whether computers are now smart enough to beat us at everything. But scientists say that is not the case. Real life problems can be more difficult than the Go game. Thomas Johnson, a scientist of AI said, “It’s not hard to get a computer program to remember and produce facts. What is hard is getting computers to use knowledge in everyday situation. ” We believe we can use the technology of AI to improve the world.