Peter Rhodes: Is Dan the man?

A COMPUTER programme defeated a human champion in the board game Go and is hailed as a great step forward for artificial intelligence. The real step towards human mental processes will come when a computer plays Go and loses - and then kicks over the table and lodges a protest.

THERE are dark whispers of plots against Jeremy Corbyn and once again Dan Jarvis is being tipped as a potential leader of the Labour Party. I can't add much to my comments in May of last year: "Dan Jarvis. Right age, right face, right career, right medals, right name. Jarvis ticks all the boxes and is the sort of man who could win the 2020 election for Labour. They would be mad to let him slip into obscurity."

HOW vicious could the Labour leadership issue become? This forecast from a Guardian reader is physically impossible and gloriously over-the-top but you get the idea: "The blood on the carpet is going to be waist high."

WATCH out for a nasty scam using an email that looks exactly like a BT communication. It begins "Your latest bill is ready to see online." The give-away is the next line: "Dear BT User." If you are a BT customer, BT knows your name, right? It looks like some sort of phishing email. Bin it.

BABS, the keeper of the rhino house at Chester Zoo, as seen in the documentary series The Secret Life of the Zoo (C4) is that rare thing, a TV natural. She has a great voice and a huge smile, and the camera loves her. I would not be surprised if she pops up on our screens again. The only problem for her, after a career working with rhinos, is that she may find some telly folk have much thinner skins.

AN old friend has died. He was well into his 90s and was a wartime Royal Marine, one of those heroes in green berets who stormed the Normandy beaches on D-Day, 1944. Horace in his blazer and tie, was every inch the old soldier but it was not until the obituary appeared that I discovered his middle name was Minden. There was a fashion, a few generations ago, of naming kids after military victories (the Battle of Minden in 1759 was a crucial battle in the Seven Years War). I was reminded of television's best-loved rag-and-bone man whose full name, Albert Ladysmith Steptoe, commemorated the Boer War siege of Ladysmith. And then, quite by chance at the weekend, I found a death notice recording the passing of a lady whose middle name was Cambrai, the epic tank battle in 1917. Back then, people still believed victories were glorious. Not any longer.

IN whimsical mood last week I suggested that David Cameron might one day be forced to apologise to icebergs for the damage caused by ships such as Titanic. A reader points out that the Manchester poet Les Barker has already written a Titanic poem from a non-human point of view. As people gather at the shipping office for news of the missing, a polar bear joins the queue. He asks the man at the desk: "Have you got any news of the iceberg? / My family was on it, you see. / Have you got any news of the iceberg? / They mean the whole world to me." It is strangely moving.

MORE misheard phrases. A vicar (we get all sorts reading this column) tells me he overheard someone dismissing something as "a damn squid."