Amassing more Japanese gadgets by the month; do let me know if you have any ideas for stuff to track down!

Yeah, your experiences are exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. You can set Google Now to recognise multiple languages (only on Android as far as I know) but it’s not very reliable.

And of course it doesn’t help at all with issues like location data or anything with mixed language patterns. I just asked it "How do I get to Iwamotocho station?" and it came back with "How do I get to Eve Immortan Joe station," which, well.

The tablet was on Lollipop when I received it, and I saw similar results then — I was hoping Marshmallow might fix it with Doze, but nope.

I almost feel like the tire isn’t flat enough.

Ha. Looks like I have some alarming news for my friend Mat at Engadget.

I’m a Federer fan. I’m also a humanity fan! But sometimes you have to admit defeat.

Those games made a infinitesimally small difference to the overall pool of AlphaGo’s experience. The system is strong because it’s played versions of itself millions of times; the games against Lee won’t meaningfully increase its ability, either, even though he’s a far better player than Fan Hui.

AlphaGo did get off the ground with a dataset of game patterns, but Demis Hassabis says the system could work just as well with the algorithm alone — it’d just take longer to build itself up.