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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2020
PUTRAJAYA (AFP) - A rising eSports
player has won a years-long battle
for Malaysian citizenship, a victory
that allows him to compete inter-
nationally and highlights problems
faced by hundreds of thousands of
stateless children in the country.
Muhammad Aiman Haizi Ah-
mad was part of a team compet-
ing in the popular
PlayerUnknown's
Battlegrounds
(
PUBG
), which pits
participants against each other in a
virtual ight to the death. But when
they won the chance to take part in
two tournaments in China last year,
the 20-year-old had to skip them -
he could not travel overseas, as he
was oficially stateless.
Aiman was born in Malaysia to
an Indonesian mother and adopted
by local parents, but he had never
been recognised as a Malaysian citi-
zen and could not get a passport.
He had applied to become Ma-
laysian years earlier and was re-
fused. But after being forced to
miss the tournaments, he renewed
his efforts by launching a widely
publicised legal battle.
Authorities then decided to
grant him citizenship, making the
court ight unnecessary. "I have
waited to get this certiicate of citi-
zenship for eight years," a delighted
Aiman said on Tuesday in the admin-
istrative capital Putrajaya, clutching
the document.
With the legal battle behind him,
Aiman said he looked forward to
"resuming playing in the competi-
tive scene".
While travel overseas for com-
petitions looks unlikely in the near
future due to the coronavirus pan-
demic, the decision nevertheless
opens the door for Aiman to de-
velop his career in the booming eS-
ports scene.
Born to an Indonesian mother
and an unknown father, Aiman was
adopted by a couple from Malay-
sia's ethnic Malay Muslim majority
in the town of Taiping, in the central
state of Perak.
Though his birth was later reg-
istered by his adoptive parents, his
documents described him as state-
less. As well as leaving him without
a passport, this made it more dif-
icult to get access to healthcare,
education and work, and he could
not even open a bank account.
Unlike some countries, Malaysia
- which is home to millions of mi-
grant workers from poorer parts of
Asia - does not automatically grant
citizenship to people born there.
At least 290,000 stateless chil-
dren live in Malaysia, many with
parents from Indonesia, the Philip-
pines and Myanmar, according to
media reports citing oficials. There
are believed to be many stateless
adults as well, although the overall
igure is not clear.
Malaysia's constitution says the
government can choose to regis-
ter anyone under the age of 21 as
a citizen. But Aiman's lawyer, New
Sin Yew, said the process was "quite
opaque and takes a very long time".
"The fastest (application) can
take about three years and the gov-
ernment often rejects applications
without reasons," he told
AFP
.
He added: "I think if this case
was not brought to the attention by
the media, it would have been much
more dificult, because there would
not have been public support."
Aiman's parents irst tried to
register him as a citizen when he
was 12, but the application was re-
Winning the right to belong
FROM LEFT: eSports player Muhammad Aiman Haizi Ahmad (C) receive a kiss from his adoptive parents Ahmad Sidin (R) and Masniah Ramli after receiving his Malaysian citizenship certiicate;
and Ahmad got into eSports by playing games on his phone. PHOTOS: AFP
After missing out on overseas tournaments due to his lack of a passport, eSports player Muhammad Aiman Ha izi
Ahmad wins the citizenship battle in Malaysia.
fused. He got into gaming by play-
ing on his phone, and then discov-
ered
PUBG
.
Aiman, who now lives outside
the capital Kuala Lumpur, then
started playing in PUBG competi-
tions and joined a team, and hones
his skills by practising four to ive
hours a day.
And he is hopeful for a bright fu-
ture in eSports.
"I want to make my family proud
and my country too," he said.
"That is my dream."
Muhammad Aiman Haizi Ahmad was born in Malaysia but classiied as
stateless
PARIS (AFP) - An artiicial intelligence (AI) technol-
ogy made by a irm co-founded by billionaire Elon
Musk has won praise for its ability to generate co-
herent stories, novels and even computer code but
it remains blind to racism or sexism.
GPT3, as Californian company OpenAI's latest
AI language model is known, is capable of com-
pleting a dialogue between two people, continu-
ing a series of questions and answers or inishing
a Shakespeare-style poem. Start a sentence or text
and it completes it for you, basing its response on
the gigantic amount of information it has been fed.
This could come in useful for customer service,
lawyers needing to sum up a legal precedent or for
authors in need of inspiration.
While the technology is not new and has not yet
learnt to reason like a human mind, OpenAI's latest
offering has won praise for the way its text resem-
bles human writing.
"It is capable of generating very natural and plau-
sible sentences," said Bruce Delattre, an AI specialist
at data consulting agency Artefact. "It's impressive
to see how much the model is able to appropriate
literary styles, even if there are repetitions."
GPT3 is also capable of inding precise respons-
es to problems, such as the name of an illness from
a description of symptoms.
It can solve some mathematical problems, ex-
press itself in several languages, or generate com-
puter code for simple tasks that developers have to
do but would happily avoid.
Delattre told
AFP
it all works thanks to "statistical
regularities. The model knows that a particular word
is more or less likely to follow another."
Amine Benhenni, Scientiic Director at AI re-
search and development irm Dataswati, told
AFP
that "the big difference" compared to other systems
is the size of the model. GPT3 has been fed the con-
tent of billions of web pages that are freely available
online and all types of pieces of written work.
To give an idea of the magnitude of the project,
the entire content of online encyclopaedia Wikipe-
dia represents just three per cent of all the informa-
tion it has been given.
Educated AI with a moral blind spot