Numlock News: October 2, 2026 • Stratego, Drive-Thru, WWII Wreck

Oct 02, 2026

By Walt Hickey

E-Trucks

One-third of trucks sold in China this year run on electricity, which is having an immediate payoff as diesel spirals upward in cost. E-truck sales were up 80 percent in the first half of this year, and that’s one reason diesel consumption in China will drop 10 percent this year. A 200-kilometer journey for a diesel truck in the United States costs about $101; the same journey for an electric truck in China charged off-peak would cost $21.

Bloomberg News

Stratego

Neural networks, well before LLMs entered the mainstream, were how Chess and Go-playing algorithms like Deep Blue and AlphaGo could compete against grandmasters. Stratego, however, resisted the AI revolution in games, in no small part because of how much of the game is played with imperfect information and, given the number of pieces on the board, the sheer number of possible configurations of pieces is endless. Chess is a game where each player has 16 pieces, and all parties operate under perfect information, and might run for about 40 moves; Stratego involves 40 pieces per player, with a decillion possible setups, and one’s opponents are all unknown at the start of the game, with games that might run 2,000 moves, all of which combine for a tough problem for robots. A team of researchers built Ataraxos, an AI that managed to beat Pim Niemeijer — one of, if not the best, Stratego players ever — in a best-of-20 demonstration, with Ataraxos winning 15, losing 1 and drawing four. To develop Ataraxos, the system was trained on 163 million games in total, with reinforcement learning carried out on 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars.

Jacek Krywko, Ars Technica

Drive Thru

The annual QSR Drive-Thru report is out, and the average drive-thru in the study took 323.9 seconds to serve a car. The best performers were Tim Hortons (260 seconds), KFC (265 seconds) and Dunkin’ (289 seconds). The slowest were Raising Cane’s (380 seconds), Dutch Bros (382 seconds) and Chick-fil-A (426 seconds), though people in line at Chick-fil-A famously have shockingly high levels of satisfaction with their wait times in this study. Starbucks had the highest accuracy (96 percent) while Wendy’s had the lowest (81 percent). This year looked at the presence of AI in the drive-thru and found it lacking: AI was five seconds slower than the non-AI baseline, saw lower satisfaction rates, and only said “thank you” 67.4 percent of the time, a drop of 23.9 percentage points compared to non-AI visits.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

Not Exactly Brain Surgery, Is It?

The lead times on getting a rocket to move a payload into orbit are up sharply, from about 12 months last year all the way up to 30 to 36 months right now. This is largely because SpaceX is sunsetting the Falcon 9 — a workhorse of the rocket industry that saw 165 launches last year, launches where companies can get a ride to space at the historically excellent price point of $3,000 per kilogram. SpaceX is not taking Falcon 9 bookings beyond 2028, as it transitions to the larger Starship rocket, and hitching a ride on that new rocket is also in question, as SpaceX may very well choose to prioritize its Starlink constellation as payloads. Russia had been an alternative, with its Soyuz long being the best way to turn dollars into something in orbit, but its post-Ukraine pariah status has taken the country off the table for many ventures.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

Loudest

Global opinion about social media’s impact on democracy has soured sharply in multiple countries around the world. The percentage of respondents who said that social media has been a good thing for democracy in their country dropped across the board in a dozen democracies between 2022 and 2026, falling steeply in Germany (down from 57 percent to 37 percent), Japan (57 percent to 48 percent), Hungary (65 percent to 49 percent), Poland (67 percent to 55 percent), Indonesia (64 percent to 55 percent) and the Netherlands (44 percent to 27 percent). There was also a reported 15-point decline for respondents in Sweden, a 14-point decline in France, a 12-point decline in Spain and an eight-point decline in the U.K., Canada, and Greece.

Richard Wike, Maria Smerkovich and Moira Fagan, Pew Research Center

Time Bomb

The Liberty ship SS Richard Montgomery ran aground in August, 1944 in the Thames Estuary. Its cargo was thousands of tons of ammunition bound for Allied forces in Europe, only half of which was unloaded before the vessel sank. Since then, 1,400 tons of explosives have remained aboard, undisturbed, as the ship slowly disintegrated near Kent. There has been a long-running effort to reduce the risk of the wreck, much of which has related to a legally enforced exclusion zone. Now, the government is getting serious about dismantling the ship and removing the risk altogether, starting with the removal of the masts, an engineering challenge that has been under consideration for a long time given that, first off, they are causing additional strain on the aging deck, and secondly, the mast collapsing into the cargo hold is precisely the kind of thing that has people worried.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Polar Wander

Earth’s magnetic poles are well-known to move, as the magnetic field of the planet shifts and at any given moment might be hundreds of kilometers away from the geographic north and south. Those poles — the geographic poles, the imaginary axis upon which Earth turns — were thought to be relatively fixed, but a new study argues that sea level changes provide clues as to their movement. A little movement in the geographic poles is known as true polar wander, and it does happen, mostly driven by plate tectonics and whatever the mantle is getting up to as it relates to Earth’s spin. This new study looked at the way the ocean adjusted to centrifugal potential changes and found that the poles did move (over the course of about 10 million years) four times in the geological past: 20 million years ago, 90 million years ago, 140 million years ago and 190 million years ago.

James Woodford, New Scientist

This week, I spoke to Jude Isabella from the newly returned bioGraphic about their new story on the new bees in South America. I’m a huge fan of bioGraphic, which has returned after a summer break and newly independent structure, kicked off by this story about how wild pollinators in Argentina and Chile are suffering from an steady import of non-native species.

A bit of a direct appeal: longtime readers of Numlock will know Hakai Magazine, which became a part of bioGraphic and which recently became independent on its own feet. If you enjoy this kind of one-of-a-kind work, do consider supporting it, this kind of work cannot happen unless a critical mass of people decides to send five bucks a month toward biodiversity, please join me in supporting them.

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read.

Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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