I would guess that they trained AlphaGo from many thousands of hours of match footage. Writing a computer vision script to segment / extract the data may cost cycles as you say, but would save many human hours by eliminating the need to re-watch the footage and literally type out state information for each move.
Ehh. Hilary Clinton is far more powerful than the people that invite her to give speeches. More than likely this is a way for a business interest to pay tribute in the hopes that someday she might remember their fealty.
One interpretation of this interview: If Machiavelli had had a prince for a disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been to write a book against Machiavellism. --Voltaire
Another interpretation of this interview: P.T. for POTUS.
I realize that this is besides the point but going on the title alone we could write a script that could generate an 'infinite' (max out available memory) sized image.
Imagine a system which levied taxes not to fund government expenditure but to carefully control inflation. In this system there is no need for the government to collect taxes from citizen X to fund the needs of citizen Y. How is this possible? Study U.S. fiscal policy and you will learn about such a system. Given enough consideration you will eventually see that 'the redistribution of wealth' from citizen X to Y is an antiquated idea given how our monetary system actually works. A more accurate description of what occurs is: given the growth of the productivity of the population as a whole, we can 'distribute wealth' to those with less as long as this distribution doesn't cause the system to become unstable.
A couple of random thoughts on potential applications/uses:
1. Alexandria needs to communicate with Bilbo. Alexandria has the privilege of being trusted by whatever organization she belongs to (be that her country, company, etc) and as such is unmonitored AFAsheKs. Biblo on the other hand is some fugitive-type and is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to enter direct communication with Alexandria for fear of compromising himself or his beloved Alexandria. Bilbo could then monitor Alexandria's calls for an encoded message via a protocol they predetermine. This protocol could take the form of linguistic or audio steganography. One could image all sorts of information being leaked by Alexandria.
2. More realistically this could be tool for bribery. Monitor a set of vulnerable targets, wait until they reveal something, take a bribe to stay quite.
3. Or, for the Machiavellian-minded leak information that was supposedly confidential between two parties.