“We landed on the moon,” Demis Hassabis, chief executive and co-founder of Google subsidiary DeepMind, which built AlphaGo, said in a tweet after the victory.Google’s AlphaGo computer program on Wednesday won the first of five matches against one of the world’s top players of a complex board game, Go, marking a dramatic advance for the field of artificial Google’s AlphaGo computer program on Wednesday won the first of five matches against one of the world’s top players of a complex board game, Go, marking a dramatic advance for the field of artificial intelligence (AI). “What AlphaGo is doing is essentially cutting down the number of potential moves to consider.

“So proud of the team!”AlphaGo had made history in October, by becoming the first computer program ever to beat a human professional player at the ancient Asian game, which many experts consider to be the most fiendishly complicated of its kind. “I would like to express my respect to the programmers for making such an amazing program.”Go, most popular in countries such as China, South Korea and Japan, involves two contestants moving black and white stones on a square grid, with the aim of seizing the most territory.Lee expressed surprise at his loss.Experts did not expect an artificial intelligence program to beat a human professional for at least a decade, until AlphaGo’s victory last year over player Fan Hui.

”Google executives say Go offers too many possible two color injection molding machine moves for a machine to win simply through brute-force calculations, unlike chess, in which IBM's Deep Blue famously beat former world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. But 33-year-old Lee, a much more challenging opponent, was considered a bigger hurdle for a machine to vanquish.South Korean professional player Lee Sedol, the holder of 18 international titles, conceded defeat in a match broadcast live, with one YouTube stream drawing tens of thousands of spectators worldwide, while domestic television gave frequent updates.“Today’s win is symbolic, but nevertheless a very important step,” said Jang Woo-seok, a research fellow at the Hyundai Research Institute.“I didn’t think AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner,” he told reporters after the match.

"We are in the conceptual phase of identifying approaches that could reduce the quantity of spent nuclear fuel without creating proliferation risks - a goal with significant economic and security benefits," NNSA spokesman Dov Schwartz said."It’s not the volume of the nuclear waste that’s the issue, but the radioactivity and heat it gives off as well as the fact that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years," he said.(Source)."That way you could address a country’s concerns about spent fuel without transferring ownership of the technology to them," said one of the sources.The first, called consolidation, reduces the volume of nuclear waste by taking apart spent fuel assemblies and crunching the waste down to two times smaller than the original volume – an approach that is considered costly but which doesn’t add much security risk.The sources did not name countries to which the service would be marketed, or where the waste would be stored after it is run through the equipment.The federal government designated Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the sole permanent US nuclear waste repository decades ago to solve the problem, spending about USD 13 billion on the project, but it has never opened due to local opposition.The machinery would be encased in a "black box" the size of two color injection molding machine Manufacturers a shipping container and sent to other countries with nuclear energy programs, but be owned and operated by the United States, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.The NNSA confirmed a project to help other countries with nuclear waste is underway but declined to provide details.

Thomas Countryman, the State Department’s top arms control officer during the Obama administration, said the government should make headway on the domestic problem before helping other countries. The process, which gives off gases that must be contained, results in a waste product that has more environmental and health risks.A second technique involves heating radioactive pellets in spent fuel assemblies.Former President Jimmy Carter banned nuclear waste reprocessing in 1977 because it chemically unlocks purer streams of uranium and plutonium, both of which could be used to make nuclear bombs.US reactor builder Westinghouse, which emerged from bankruptcy in August and is owned by Brookfield Asset Management, hopes to sell nuclear power technology to countries from Saudi Arabia to India, but faces stiff competition from Russia’s state-owned Rosatom.The sources familiar with the NNSA’s deliberations said there are three basic ways that the physical volume of nuclear waste can be reduced, all of which are costly.The United States produces some 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste each year, which is currently stored in pools or in steel casks at the nation’s roughly 60 commercial nuclear power plants across 30 states.US Energy Secretary Rick Perry visited Saudi Arabia this month for talks on a nuclear energy deal with the kingdom, despite pushback from lawmakers concerned about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.The effort is being led by NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Brent Park, a nuclear physicist and former associate lab director at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, appointed by President Donald Trump in April. That reduces volume, but concentrates plutonium and uranium – making it a potential proliferation risk.The NNSA’s Schwartz said the plans under consideration do not involve reprocessing, but declined to say what technologies could be used."The primary issue on this front … is not that the US can’t offer a low-volume option to potential buyers; rather it’s that the US still has no option for disposing of its own spent fuel," he said.The National Nuclear Security Administration is considering helping other countries by using technologies that could involve techniques such as crushing, heating and sending a current through the waste to reduce its volume, the sources said.

The US Department of Energy’s nuclear security office is developing a project to help other countries handle nuclear waste, an effort to keep the United States competitive against global rivals in disposal technology, according to two sources familiar with the matter.The Trump administration has made promoting nuclear technology abroad a high priority, as the United States seeks to retain its edge as a leader in the industry, amid advancements by other nations like Russia, and France – both of which already offer customers services to take care of waste.A third approach called pyroprocessing - developed at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory - puts spent fuel in liquid metal and runs an electric current through it. But they said they were concerned the processes under consideration could increase the risk of dangerous materials reaching militant groups or nations unfriendly to the United States.The NNSA declined a Reuters request for an interview with Park.The nuclear community is divided on whether pyroprocessing fits the definition of reprocessing.The United States is also struggling to support its own nuclear industry at home, with aging reactors shuttering, new projects elusive due to soaring costs, and an ongoing political stalemate over a permanent solution for mounting nuclear waste stockpiles. At least one of the techniques poses a security threat, they said.The push comes as the United States struggles to find a solution for its own mounting nuclear waste inventories amid political opposition to a permanent dump site in Nevada, proposed decades ago, and concerns about the cost and security of recycling the waste back into fuel.Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said NNSA should be less concerned about volume of waste and more concerned about the dangers that make it hard to store

The secular trend shows that year on year, this number increases. Surely, the GST could have been one of the reasons. In conclusion, the GST’s year-long jouney has seen both bumps and smoothening of the ride.The new tax regime, which was billed as the biggest taxation reform since Independence, had promised to remove tax on tax but it still remains as compensation cess.Even GST Network was decided by Centre to be converted into a 100 per cent government-owned company. Going foward, it promises to yield far better results in terms of revenue realisation as also the tax-payers’ experience. However, subsumption of 17 taxes into GST has led to greater formalisation.

It required a huge amount of political courage on the part of the government, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi showed enough of it to implement the most important tax reform in the country after independence.84 crore in FY18.Experts feel that difficulties being faced by people and companies are due to the complexity of the fiscal system and argue that it’s not yet the time to write an obituary for the tax reform. In order to encourage exports, the government has been refunding taxes paid on exported products to exporters. However, after the rollout of GST, the duty refund processes witnessed inordinate delay. Surely, taxpayers and tax callectors have had a mixed experience.Well beyond the taxation oversight, the GST data aggregation and the kind of analytics emerging from the same have immense possibilities of improving the way we run our economy.While it may be true, it would also be jumping to a conclusion if the rise in the number of people filing I-T returns is attributed to GST. For instance, the entire consumption pattern, raw material usage, supply chain and logistics are now available in a solid data format which can be used for productive purposes. Now that all merges into a single data pool and tracking of the stakeholders — from big corporates to small traders — would be well-synchronised. There were naysayers in plenty, but Mr Modi put at stake the political capital and bit the bullet..Then, the system had to be sensitised about new concepts such as the input tax credit, e-way bills, anti-profiteering etc. The taxes of Central excise, the state sales tax or VAT, octroi etc were being implemented with or without unified data aggregation.The controversial provisions of the liability to pay tax on reverse charge basis has been deferred till June 30.The shake-up in India’s taxation system with the Goods and Sales Tax (GST) has shown not only the inherent strength of the official machinery but also the resilience of trade, industry and consumers in adopting to an altogether new paradigm. The GST also aggregated the taxes into a solid database, driven by a smart technology backbone.The anomalies in GST has affected exporters greatly.While the way forward is being suggested by several experts, the GST Council should be complimented for ironing out some of the contentious issues like jurisdiction or dealing with different cesses, without really getting bogged down by any political considerations, some skirmishes here and there notwithstanding.

The number of people filing their I-T returns has gone up from 5. The provisions for tax deducted and collected at source also remain suspended till June 30.GST rates have been rationalised multiple times.In May, GST Council decided on a new format in which only one return will have to be filed in a month. Still a long way to go for smooth rollout26% widening of the taxpayer base in FY18 was seen, according to the data available in public. One of the major pull factors for the tax net was the input tax credit, but the bigger trigger was capturing of the data in a seamless manner. Big corporates could engage lawyers and chartered accountants to work their way out, the problem was more pronounced for the trading community, small manufacturers and small contractors.Lack of clarity in GST law as to the applicability of provisions and complex return filing procedures were the major problems.Calling the GST regime more "primitive" than the VAT, West Bengal finance minister Amit Mitra has recently said that the Centre is using ledger for manual record of refunds due to lack of interface between the GSTN and customs electronic date interchange as well as the DGFT.43 crore in the FY17 to 6.18% rise in direct tax collection was also noted over FY17. Many rates were slashed after the government realised that it had wrongly calculated higher taxes on these items.While the government has set up an anti-profiteering body to ensure that companies pass on low costs China plastic injection machine Manufacturers to end user, the absence of guidelines make companies worry.Somehow, a message went around that through this indirect tax system, data relating to direct taxes was also being captured and the end result was a big jump in the number of people filing their income-tax returns.Besides, the consumer had to be educated and sensitised, as the larger part of the economy was getting formalised.Formalisation of the economy through GST should not be seen from the prism of only a punitive measure whereby willy-nilly you have to be part of the taxation net.The fact that about 17 different taxes were subsumed into a single tax also led to greater formalisation of the economy. The initial stages were more difficult as confusion had arisen on various counts — the IT backbone, filing of returns, complexities in rates and the methodologies of fixation