### Learning to play Go: computer edition

In a remarkable example of us being psychic (or, what’s also known as ‘a coincidence’), our recently posted introduction to the game of Go has been made more topical by actual Go-related news.

The game of Go has long been considered a difficult game for artificial intelligences to play – much more so than chess, which has plenty of computer players. A Wired article from 2014 describes Go as ‘the ancient game that computers still can’t win’. As well as having a much larger set of possible games ($10^{761}$, as opposed to $10^{120}$ in chess), Go also has highly complicated strategy, compared to its simple rules, and moves made early on in the game can result in important changes to the state of the board further down the line.

### Dark days for MathML support in browsers

For a brief moment at the start of the year, Google’s Chrome browser could render mathematical notation written in MathML. Since then, things have got worse for mathematics on the web.

In February, the MathML rendering code was removed by Google, citing concerns about security and code quality. Now, a member of the Chromium team has announced that Google will not be supporting MathML in the foreseeable future:

MathML is not something that we want at this time. We believe the needs of MathML can be sufficiently met by libraries like MathJax and doesn’t need to be more directly supported by the platform. In areas where libraries like MathJax are not good enough, we’d love to hear feedback about what APIs we would need to expose so that MathJax, et al, can create an awesome MathML implementation.

Peter Krautzberger, manager of the MathJax project, is not happy.

### Happy Birthday Euler!

Today is Euler’s $-306 \times e^{i \pi}$th birthday, and Google have chosen to celebrate (despite ignoring several other prominent mathematical birthdays, including Erdős’s centenary – see the @MathsHistory twitter feed for a full list) by creating a Google doodle on their homepage.

For anyone who isn’t aware, this is when Google changes the image above the search box on the homepage at Google.com, so it still says ‘Google’ but using an appropriate image, which sometimes has built-in interactive elements. I thought it was worth pointing out some of the fantastic maths they’ve included in today’s doodle.

### Recreational Maths Seminar this Sunday at 7pm GMT

There was no Recreational Maths Seminar last Sunday because I had a confluence of work, family stuff and overknackeredness from MathsJam the week before. The coming weekend should be considerably less busy, so let’s have our second seminar this Sunday, the second of December, at 7pm GMT. That’s 2pm EST (New York), 11am PST(California) and 6am EDT (Eastern Australia, on the 3rd of December).

### Recreational Maths Seminar – Picture-hanging puzzles

I hosted the first (proper) Aperiodical recreational maths seminar yesterday. We discussed the paper Picture-hanging puzzles, by Demaine et al. Click through to watch the YouTube recording of the session.

### A recreational maths seminar?

Would you be interested in taking part in a sort of online video-chat seminar about recreational maths? Then read on!