The game is as wide as the Pacific Ocean at the beginning of a rookie's R6 tenure. There's always a new operator to learn, a new gadget interaction to test, a new strategy to try, and the horizon is constantly expanding. Put bluntly, players must do a lot of homework and suffer tens, if not hundreds of hours worth of hard-learned lessons before they feel they can contribute competently. On one hand, the game's complexity is its biggest appeal, on the other, it's a significant barrier to expanding its player base. While that number is massive, numbering 70 as of this year, could this ongoing expanse and evolution eventually case that player base to stagnate?

Efficiently navigating a superpressure balloon in the stratosphere1 requires the integration of a multitude of cues, such as wind speed and solar elevation, and the process is complicated by forecast errors and sparse wind measurements. Coupled with the need to make decisions in real time, these factors rule out the use of conventional control techniques2,3. Here we describe the use of reinforcement learning4,5 to create a high-performing flight controller. Our algorithm uses data augmentation6,7 and a self-correcting design to overcome the key technical challenge of reinforcement learning from imperfect data, which has proved to be a major obstacle to its application to physical systems8. We deployed our controller to station Loon superpressure balloons at multiple locations across the globe, including a 39-day controlled experiment over the Pacific Ocean.

But then there was the Chinese game of go (pictured), estimated to be 4000 years old, which offers more "degrees of freedom" (possible moves, strategy, and rules) than chess (2 10170). As futurist George Gilder tells us, in Gaming AI, it was a rite of passage for aspiring intellects in Asia: "Go began as a rigorous rite of passage for Chinese gentlemen and diplomats, testing their intellectual skills and strategic prowess. Later, crossing the Sea of Japan, Go enthralled the Shogunate, which brought it into the Japanese Imperial Court and made it a national cult." Then AlphaGo, from Google's DeepMind, appeared on the scene in 2016: As the Chinese American titan Kai-Fu Lee explains in his bestseller AI Super-powers,8 the riveting encounter between man and machine across the Go board had a powerful effect on Asian youth. Though mostly unnoticed in the United States, AlphaGo's 2016 defeat of Lee Sedol was avidly watched by 280 million Chinese, and Sedol's loss was a shattering experience. The Chinese saw DeepMind as an alien system defeating an Asian man in the epitome of an Asian game.

Seismic wave data has revealed giant structures 2900 kilometres beneath the surface of Earth, at the boundary between Earth's molten core and solid mantle. The structure, known as an ultra-low velocity (ULV) zone, is about 1000 kilometres in diameter and 25 kilometres thick, says Kim. These structures are called ULV zones because seismic waves pass through them at slower velocities, but what they are made of is still a mystery. They might be chemically distinct from Earth's iron–nickel alloy core and silicate rock mantle, or have different thermal properties. The researchers discovered the structure while analysing 7000 records of seismic activity from earthquakes that occurred around the Pacific Ocean basin between 1990 and 2018.

Turn AI cameras on your employees and you can measure their productivity. Fly them over the Pacific Ocean and you've got yourself an automated shark-warning system. What's happening: UC Santa Barbara, with the help of a few AI experts from Salesforce, is using drones to monitor sharks near California beaches in real time.

The dreaded El Niño strikes the globe every 2 to 7 years.

Artificial intelligence is learning how to predict El Niño climate cycles. The hope is that the technology could be used to improve climate predictions and give policy-makers more time to prepare. El Niño can cause severe weather and devastating damage. A phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, it occurs when water warms over the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting east and increasing rainfall and cyclones over the Americas while pulling rain away from Indonesia and Australia. Strong El Niño events are associated with intense storms and flooding in some areas, and drought and fires in others.

IBM Research labs are part of a tradition where large tech companies had extensive research labs. IBM Research, along with the original Bell labs and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), have developed many innovations. And IBM Research continues that tradition to today. I got to visit IBM's Almaden Research center, nestled in a bucolic part of the south San Jose area, up on a hillside, surrounded with fields of grazing cattle and a thin fog from the Pacific Ocean just over the Santa Cruz mountains. But in that lab a lot of amazing research is underway.

Scientists have extracted a 400-year record of El Niño events using coral reef cores drilled from the Pacific Ocean, revealing crucial new insight on how these weather patterns have changed. And, the data so far suggest something'unusual' has been happening in recent decades. According to the new research, El Niño events appear to be cropping up more frequently in the central Pacific than they have in past centuries, and while eastern El Niños may be getting stronger. El Niño is caused by a shift in the distribution of warm water in the Pacific Ocean around the equator. Usually the wind blows strongly from east to west, due to the rotation of the Earth, causing water to pile up in the western part of the Pacific.

The late Paul Allen's research vessel, the Petrel, has found another historic warship at the bottom of the ocean. In the wake of an initial discovery in late January, the expedition crew has confirmed that it found the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier that played a pivotal role in WWII through moments like the Doolittle Raid on Japan and the pivotal Battle of Midway. It was considered lost when it sank at the Battle of Santa Cruz in October 1943, but modern technology spotted it nearly 17,500 feet below the surface of the South Pacific Ocean, near the Solomon Islands. The team initially narrowed down its search area by using data from the era, such as action reports and deck logs from other ships involved in the Santa Cruz fight. From there, tech took over.