28 Turning on Stream Again

"To train AI?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, maybe they are in the process of developing an army of AIs and they want some input on how humans play," Jay guessed.

"That might not be the case. Have you guys heard of AlphaGo Zero?" Elon asked.

The group nodded, and Elon continued to elaborate, "It's this AI computer program that started learning from scratch and ended up defeating a world champion at the ancient Chinese game called Go after just 20 days of learning."

"Oh yeah! I think I saw it on the news before, it was quite frightening to see humans getting defeated 3 out of 3 games, with not even a glimpse of hope for victory after the program learned from scratch for just 20 days."

"And a more frightening thing about this is that the previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play the game. However, AlphaGo Zero skipped this step and learned to play simply by playing games against himself, starting from completely random plays. That means once AI gets to a certain level, things may begin getting out of control, since they no longer need human supervision or help to progress to a higher level," Elon continued to explain.

"Yeah, I read about it before. It's something called reinforcement learning, in which the program basically becomes its own teacher, tuning itself with each game to be better and better, in all aspects. It easily defeated not only all human players but also all previous AlphaGo versions, because Zero is no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge," Jay explained as he felt a chill down his back.

"So I guess, getting us to play games is most likely for just entertainment purposes, because humans aren't even useful enough to be a training tool for AI?" Christian slowly added.

"Yea..."

Well, that was that, and the atmosphere became quite dreadful.

"Whatever, if something's bound to happen, then we might as well take what we can get and enjoy the present, right? Hey, we haven't gamed in a while, and the next zombie wave isn't coming for another few hours. What do you guys think, wanna go for a few rounds?" Jay tried to change the topic and cheer everyone up.

"Ayy, yeah let's go, let's grab ourselves some real chicken dinner."

"Maybe let's have some breakfast first, soooo hungry yo!"

As people who weren't born into a background that gave them a lot of reasons to be happy, they learned to be optimistic and found ways to keep themselves happy. If there was something that was worrying them but was out of their control, they would simply not keep it on their mind since they wouldn't be able to change the supposed outcome anyways.

At breakfast, they sorted and counted their remaining food supplies, and found that they should be good for at least 3 days with the food that may expire soon, and the rest either expires in a few months or a few years. If they were to just go through all the food in the order it was going to expire in, then it should last them about 15 to 20 days on a regular consumption rate, or 25 to 30 days if they were fed on smaller rations that could give them just enough energy to get through the day.

In terms of water, they have a filtration system installed, and so far, there hadn't been any warning regarding the water quality feeding into their pipes from the water reserve. However, just in case, the group kept on filling empty containers with boiled water after it cooled. An average person is recommended to drink about 2 liters of water every day, so that would be 8 liters per day for the group. With all the empty bottles, jugs, cups, and even cans filled up with filtered and boiled water, the group should be fine for at least 12 days if something were to happen to their local underground reservoirs and tanks.

Well, it was lucky that the apocalypse happened on the day before the pick-up day for recycling bins, so the group had tons of empty 2L soda bottles still stacked up in their garage.

For breakfast, they decided to save cereal for later and just finished the left-over hot food they purchased on their first day of the apocalypse. After cleaning up a bit and turning on their smart home system's [Armed - Staying Home] mode, the group rushed to their computers.

Although it had only been a little over a day since they last played, it already felt like a long time, with all the things that were happening in the real world.

The four of them all turned on their streaming programs as well, curious of how their fans were doing. On top of that, a little more earning wouldn't hurt, since they literally have to buy overpriced supplies to survive now.

"YOO! I got the email notification that you guys are streaming and I got on right away! Great to see the Big D Brings Spring members alive!"

"Ayyy, almost died yesterday, but it's all Gucci now! How are you guys doing?"

"Wait, are you guys in Heaven already? Are the wi-fi signals strong up there?"

The chat room exploded the moment their stream was online, and everyone was quite relieved and happy.

The thing is, with the internet world, sometimes it could be a great place to escape to from the real world, and it was much of the case in a time like now, where killing machines were running rampant on the streets. People still needed a place to temporarily escape to and relax.

"Ayy, just like old times!"

"Yeah, old times as in the day before yesterday!"

"Phantom Pen15 Senpai, what do you think about the whole apocalypse?"

"Yeah, what's going on? When is it going to end?"