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ARLINGTON, Texas -- Jose Bautista hit another long, punctuating home run for the Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs against the Texas Rangers.This time, Bautista dropped his bat softly near home plate and rounded the bases after a 425-foot, three-run blast in the ninth inning of the Blue Jays 10-1 romp Thursday in Game 1 of the AL Division Series.I have a couple of home runs in my career and I think Ive only flipped it once, Bautista said. Just kind of been blown out of proportion because of the moment last year. So I dont think there was anything too special about laying it down the way I did, because thats the way that 99.9-plus percent of the time I do it.Bautista had that emphatic bat flip after his tiebreaking homer in the ALDS Game 5 clincher last October against the Rangers, and got punched the last time the Blue Jays played in Texas in May. He drove in four runs this time, including an RBI single in Torontos five-run third off All-Star lefty Cole Hamels.Marco Estrada took a shutout into the ninth inning. The All-Star right-hander with an impressive changeup, who won Game 3 in last years ALDS after Toronto lost the first two at home, struck out six without a walk.Hes mastered his craft, manager John Gibbons said. Hes a very calm guy. ... He doesnt get down on himself. As well as hes pitched in two years here, really no need.Estrada has never pitched a complete game in the majors and the Blue Jays didnt throw one this season. No matter, Estrada gave them all they needed to start this best-of-five series.Who cares. We won, Estrada said.The last of the Rangers four hits off Estrada was Elvis Andrus leadoff triple in the ninth. Gibbons removed the right-hander after Shin-Soo Choos RBI grounder ended the shutout bid.Troy Tulowitzki hit a bases-loaded triple for the Blue Jays. Toronto has won four straight overall, including an 11-inning, 5-2 victory over Baltimore in the AL wild-card game Tuesday night.Bautista was booed heartily during pregame introductions and while he batted in the first inning. There also were chants of Rougie! Rougie! -- those were for Rougned Odor, the second baseman who punched Bautista and ignited a bench-clearing brawl in their last meeting May 15. Odor was suspended seven games.By time Bautista led off the seventh with a walk, the ballpark was quiet with the Rangers down 7-0. After he homered, a fan threw the ball almost back to the infield.Hamels, the MVP of the 2008 World Series and NLCS for Philadelphia, threw 42 of his 82 pitches in the third. He allowed seven runs (six earned) with three walks in 3 1/3 innings.When you give up the amount of runs that I did early in the game, it can kind of deflate anything and everything of what home-field advantage really is, Hamels said. It was a major letdown for what I was able to not do.Ezequiel Carrera was on second base with two outs in the third when Josh Donaldson hit a liner toward third base. Donaldson, who had four hits, had even stopped running, assuming that Adrian Beltre would catch the ball -- instead, the rising liner ricocheted off the mitt of the four-time Gold Glover and into left field for an RBI double that made it 1-0.Encarnacion then had a single on a liner off Hamels outstretched glove, before Bautistas run-scoring single and Russell Martins walk to load the bases.Tulowitzki followed with a triple deep into the right-center gap on a ball that All-Star center fielder Ian Desmond might have lost when running out of the sun and into the shadows while getting close to the wall during the late afternoon.Wed be talking about how great a play it was if he made the catch, Texas manager Jeff Banister said.Melvin Upton Jr. homered starting the Toronto fourth before Andrus one-out throwing error from shortstop allowed leadoff hitter Devon Travis to reach. Donaldsons RBI double chased Hamels, and Alex Claudio then pitched 3 2/3 scoreless innings.When Texas had errors on three consecutive plays in that shaky seventh inning of Game 5 last October, leading up to Bautistas homer, Andrus had two of them. Andrus had misplayed a grounder to start that frame, and dropped an easy toss on what would have been a sure force out.UPON FURTHER REVIEWThere were two replay challenges early in the game, and the umpire calls stood on both. Elvis Andrus made a back-handed snag and a jump-step throw to get Kevin Pillar out by the slimmest of margins to end the second, and the out stood after a nearly 2-minute review.On Donaldsons double off Beltres glove, Banister challenged whether Donaldson was tagged out at second base. Donaldson had been called safe, and the play stood.NO SWEET HOMEThe Rangers are 1-10 in ALDS home games. This is the seventh ALDS in their history. Texas started the last years ALDS with two wins in Toronto, before losing twice at home and then the clincher at Toronto.TRAINERS ROOMBlue Jays: Closer Roberto Osuna came out of the AL wild-card with shoulder soreness, and it was never clear beforehand if the right-hander was available for the ALDS opener. He was never needed. If not today, there should be no limitations tomorrow, Gibbons said before the game.Rangers: Choo was on the postseason roster, batting ninth in the opener and went 0 for 3. He had four stints on the disabled list this season, and had missed 39 games with a fractured left forearm before returning for the last three games of the regular season.UP NEXTBlue Jays: LHP J.A. Happ, a 20-game winner, allowed one run in seven innings in a win against the Rangers on May 5. He stars Friday afternoon at Texas.Rangers: Yu Darvish starts only his second postseason game in his five seasons with Texas. The right-hander from Japan lost the 2012 AL wild-card game against Baltimore, and missed last season after Tommy John surgery. D. J. Wilson Bucks Jersey . Pierce was ejected in the third quarter of Indianas 103-86 win Monday. George Hill stole a bad pass and was going in for a layup, and Pierce hustled back and appeared to be trying to wrap him up. Brook Lopez Jersey . LOUIS -- Attorneys for the St. http://www.nbabucksproshop.com/ . The Celtics closed out their first preseason under Stevens on Wednesday night with a 101-97 victory over the Brooklyn Nets, who rested a lot of their lineup including former Celtics Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. Eric Bledsoe Bucks Jersey . -- The Bishops Gaiters are showing they belong among the countrys top varsity football teams. George Hill Bucks Jersey . - NASCAR announced a 33-race schedule for the 2014 Nationwide Series with virtually no changes from this years slate. Its match point at the grand finals of a huge StarCraft II tournament. One player booth contains a professional Zerg player complete with massive headphones and stoic concentration. The other booth is ... empty. After Zerg wins in the late game with an unexpected tech switch to infestor/broodlord, the crowd goes wild. The pro player comes out on stage and accepts a huge trophy. They are proud not only of winning, but of dealing a blow to their opponent the likes of which could contribute to technology benefiting millions of people worldwide.At BlizzCon earlier this month in Anaheim, California, Blizzard announced an ambitious new project in collaboration with DeepMind, a leading artificial intelligence research company acquired by Google in 2014. After creating the AlphaGo AI that bested the worlds top Go player earlier this year, DeepMinds next groundbreaking challenge will be StarCraft II. If DeepMind is able to build an AI that could learn how to beat top players such as Byun ByuN Hyun Woo in the complex real-time strategy, tactics and resource management of this game, it would be a giant step forward in AI research. And with DeepMinds interest in using its research to solve hard problems in areas such as?healthcare and energy efficiency on a massive scale, this Starcraft II project could impact the whole world.Soon after AlphaGos Go victory, there were signs that DeepMind would take on StarCraft next. This was not lost on legendary StarCraft player/commentator and former competitive chess player Dan Artosis Stemkosi, for whom StarCraft seemed like the logical next step for AI research after games like chess and Go. While he thought that an AI could have a huge advantage in terms of mechanical skill and precise resource calculations, he also thought this advantage would not be enough to defeat experienced, resourceful pros.I think this is a good place to bring up the super-confident statement made by The Emperor of Terran himself, Lim BoxeR Yo Hwan: Even if it has studied all of the many strategies Ive used, Ill go at it with an unstoppable strategy Ive prepared, Artosis wrote.As soon as I saw this quote, I knew exactly what he meant. There will be some flaw within the AI. Everything you do in StarCraft has a cost, somewhere you have to cut a corner. With enough games under his belt, BoxeR, or any other extremely experienced pro gamer, would find where the AI would be cutting these corners. ... There will be patterns, and patterns are dangerous in StarCraft.StarCraft play is highly situational, the argument goes, and trying to manage all of these pieces in real time based on certain algorithms or formulas cannot top humans in the realm of intuitive pattern recognition (and breaking such patterns). In the long-running AIIDE StarCraft: Brood War AI Competition, the three best programs of 2015 each faced off with a top Russian StarCraft player. They all lost.Furthermore, DeepMinds proposed AI is at an interesting disadvantage compared with, say, IBMs Deep Blue. Deep Blue had sophisticated pre-programmed rules and calculations that allowed it to dominate in chess, but it couldnt do anything else; this is called a narrow AI. DeepMinds StarCraft AI will be the opposite. Its goal is to become a general-purpose learning machine, which means it will learn the game from scratch, with only very basic game-specific information guiding it through automated trial-and-error in order to develop real, generally applicable intelligence. Essentially, this digital mind will cut its baby teeth on conquering StarCraft in order to learn how to adapt to and operate in the outside world.But just like Legend of Zeldas Link needs the Old Men to provide him with hints and weapons to achieve success in Hyrule, a true StarCraft AI also needs information and tools to bootstrap itself from blank slate to World Championship Series winner. The DeepMind team has Googles massive computational infrastructure to help with one side of it, but thats not enough. It needs the community.This is where Blizzard comes in. In a BlizzCon session fittingly hosted by Artosis, StarCraft II senior software engineers described two ways in which the game itself would enable players and fans everywhere to participate in this grand experiment. First, all players from bronze leaguers to pros will be feeding massive amounts of data into DeepMind and other developing AIs just by generating replays on ladder. Second, Blizzard is creatiing a powerful set of software tools?that will enable modders and researchers to develop AIs that can fully interact with the game.dddddddddddd. Blizzard is transforming StarCraft II from a popular computer game and esport into a platform for cutting-edge computer science all over the world.This unprecedented partnership is coming at a perfect time for game development and AI research.On a large, competitive scale, there has not really been any other scenario ... where the game companies have actively helped [third parties to create game AIs], and you really need that level of assistance, Matthew Fisher, an AI researcher who recently finished his Ph.D. from Stanford, said in an interview with ESPN.In 2011, Fisher was building a StarCraft II AI with a similar approach to DeepMind, and he had to do it all on his own.The main reason youre seeing this particular thing happening now is [because] its the first time the artificial intelligence community has really been developed enough ... to the point where you [could start to see AIs that] would challenge professional players, he said.Sure, blowing the AI research field wide open is a big deal, but how could this project affect the esports scene? Polish StarCraft II pro player Artur Nerchio Bloch, a Red Bull-sponsored player on EURONICS Gaming who won DreamHack Valencia earlier this year, spoke to ESPN about his perspective.Some people were saying it could be used to make some kind of dynamic tutorial for players ... but I dont think thats the way to go, really, he said. If anything, this AI is going to help us to develop a lot of strategies ... we havent seen before.Nerchio studied information technology in school and happens to have a particular interest in artificial intelligence. Hes very excited for the DeepMind project. For all that, the larger impact of a theoretical AI that could defeat top players like him is unpredictable.Im a little bit worried, I guess, because an AI beating the best players in the world is always exciting, but at the same time it can be damaging to the competition or to the community surrounding the games, knowing that theres something better than the best players out there, Nerchio said. I am excited but worried at the same time.Although the specter of an unbeatable AI might loom large, Fisher believes the process of getting to that theoretical point could produce some of the most interesting and exciting StarCraft ever.Expert players will find weaknesses in the AIs, and then youll have this really cool period of a year or more where the AIs are adapting, Google is updating its AI to deal with the power of expert players, expert players are battling against Googles AI ... [in] this very cool interplay, Fisher said.The benefit of the research to StarCraft is not ultimately focused on esports, however.I feel that, for the players of the game, this should be equally exciting regardless of your level, DeepMind research scientist Oriol Vinyals said to ESPN. It may be more obvious that the esport scene may be more enthusiastic about it, but in fact I believe that average players may see some benefits sooner, such as AI coaches, or additional aids for the novice players so they can focus on certain aspects of the game (e.g., by letting AI control your units and letting the player decide on the high level strategy).We dont know what will happen with the Google DeepMind StarCraft II project -- whether their AI will be able to defeat pro players, whether it will be able to revolutionize player coaching or whether it will be able to transfer its approach to the real world at all. But people wont give up, because the desire to change the world through technology and the fascination with a game that ruthlessly challenges us to think are inextricably intertwined in a new generation.As a teenager, I played the original Starcraft and Brood War for a while. I was a very good player on the Spanish and European scene (top 32 or so, Id say) back in around 2000, Vinyals said. Later on, as an AI Ph.D. student at Berkeley when I was approached to be the coach of the bot we built back then, I had no doubt that my unique skills in the game plus knowledge about AI would be a nice mix to build what we did. It is extremely nice that, even further into my career, StarCraft is making yet another comeback. ' ' '