The bet remains unsettled, but Hawking has recently acknowledged that the newfound understanding of black holes from string theory, as discussed above, shows that there might be a way for the information to re-emerge.
In 2004, Hawking announced that he was conceding the bet, and that he now believed that black hole horizons should fluctuate and leak information, in doing so providing Preskill with a copy of Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia.
