58006175
submission
mikejuk writes:
As if we didn't have enough of a distraction in the form of the Loebner prize, the Turing Test turned into a circus. Now we have AI Xprize for a robot that can give a TED talk that gets a standing ovation.The new AI Xprize is: ...for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) so advanced that it could deliver a compelling TED Talk with no human involvement
Want input from you in the form of suggestions as to what the competition should be. The idea seems to be that there will be 100 predetermined topics and the AI agent will be given 30 mins to prepare a 3 min talk on one of the topics. The agent doesn't have to be a bipedal humanoid robot but as the audience gets to vote on its performance it certainly has to have an attractive presentation. After the talk it will be asked to answer some questions on the topic.
once you set a task this specific clever programmers can start to exploit its regularities and the intelligence of the audience to fool them into thinking that agent is indeed intelligent. This is what happened in the case of the Turing test and the chatbots. Attempts to understand language and respond with meaning were quickly replaced by automatic language transformations and tricks to make the observer interpret the output as intelligent.
I suppose anything is better than nothing but the AI Xprize could so easily be about something that is less easy to subvert. Perhaps this is what we should suggest on the website http://www.xprize.org/ted rather than detailed rules?
57982075
submission
mikejuk writes:
An "off-the-program" conversation at lat week's TED 2014 Conference in Vancouver between Charlie Rose and Larry Page reveals some of what is on the mind of Google's Founder and CEO.
It ranges over so many topics you can't really come to any particular conclusion, but it is well worth listening to.
The interview starts off with a discussion about Google's recent acquisition of Deepmind, an AI company. Page explains how Google has used neural networks to learn how to recognize a cat from YouTube videos — and the audience doesn't laugh.
When the conversation turns to privacy he turns it round to privacy depends on security and then emphasises that you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He points out that allowing access to anonymised medical records could save 100,000 lives per year. When it comes to his own recent voice problems he said that
"I was scared to share but Sergey encouraged me and we got thousands of people with similar conditions,"
The interview ends with a contemplation of business and technology.
"Most businesses fail because they miss the future,"
57969441
submission
Todd Palin writes:
Researchers at Penn State university are trying to reconstruct images of faces based only on the DNA sample of the individual. As far out as this sounds, they did a pretty good job at matching the actual appearance of the faces. This is a pretty good start on a whole new use for DNA samples. Imagine a mug shot of a rapist based only on a DNA sample.
57967953
submission
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
Travis Gettys reports that creationist Danny Falkner appeared Thursday on “The Janet Mefford Show” to complain that the Fox television series and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, had marginalized those with dissenting views on accepted scientific truths. “I don’t recall seeing any interviews with people – that may yet come – but it’s based upon the narration from the host and then various types of little video clips of various things, cartoons and things like that,” said Falkner of Answers In Genesis who also complained that Tyson showed life arose from simple organic compounds without mentioning that some believe that’s not possible. “I was struck in the first episode where he talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion – it’s all on the table – and I thought to myself, ‘No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion, it would seem." To be fair, there aren't a ton of shows on TV specifically about creationism says William Hamby. "However, there are entire networks devoted to Christianity, and legions of preachers with all the airtime they need to denounce evolution. Oh, and there was that major movie from a few years back. And there's a giant tax-payer subsidized theme park in Kentucky. And the movie about Noah. And entire catalogs of creationist movies and textbooks you can own for the low low price of $13.92."
57700073
submission
mikejuk writes:
Yes it is Pi day again, but this year it feels as though we aren't celebrating alone. For the first time it looks as if the momentum has built up to the point were a few people have heard about pi day and there are even attempts to sell you Pi connected items — as if it was a real holiday.
But there is always some one to spoil the party so what ever you do to celebrate don't miss Vi Hart's Anti-Pi Rant video.
57410037
submission
mikejuk writes:
Conway's game of Life is huge among programmers and mathematicians alike. It has generated a community of "Lifers" dedicated to constructing whole worlds in Life and investigating it as if it was a universe of its own. And yet, in this new video, John Conway, its inventor admits to hating it...
You can see his point.
Conway is a talented mathematician with lots of other, arguably more important, results, inventions and insights and they are all overshadowed by his creation of the cellular automata we call Life.
In a second video he explains how it came to be invented. There are lots of interesting bits of background such as how the glider was almost called the ant but overall it is the impression that like a serious musician who has become famous for a TV jingle Conway wishes it wasn't so.
57225463
submission
mikejuk writes:
The OpenNI website, home to the widely used framework for 3D sensing, will be shutdown in April.
When, in November 2013, Apple bought PrimeSense for $350 million, people speculated how this would affect the Capri mobile technology but no mention was made of what would happen to OpenNI, the open source SDK most often used as an alternative to Microsoft's closed SDK for the Kinect..
After Apple acquired PrimeSense, its website quickly shut, but the Developers link still points to Open NI.
The status of OpenNI is a not-for-profit whose framework allows developers to create middleware and applications for a range of devices, including the Asus Xtion Pro. It claims to be a widely used community with over 100,000 active 3D developers.
Surely that, together with the "open" nature of its software could have guaranteed it a longer future?
It seems not.
56955265
submission
mikejuk writes:
Programmers often think that users are overly sensitive about their data. What could it hurt to allow the collection of location data, for example. Here is a short video from the ACLU that might make you stop and think about persisting any data you capture.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says:
"Since mobile carriers are retaining location data on their customers, government officials can learn a tremendous amount of detailed personal information about you by accessing your location history from your cell phone company, ranging from which friends you're seeing to where you go to the doctor to how often you go to church. The Justice Department and most local police forces can get months' worth of this information, without you ever knowing — and often without a warrant from a judge."
If you don't like the idea of your location data data being under scrutiny, then the ACLU has a page where you can lobby your representatives in favor of the GPS Act, which seeks to control access to location data.
56823737
submission
mikejuk writes:
We have surely got over the shock of computers being involved in mathematical proofs?
It seems not, but in this case the proof occupies a 13GByte file — bigger than the whole of Wikipedia, so perhaps we have crossed a line.
The theorem that has been proved is in connection with a long running conjecture of Paul Erdos in 1930. Discrepancy theory is about how possible it is to distribute something evenly. It occurs in lots of different forms and even has a connection with cryptography. In 1993 it was proved that an infinite series cannot have a discrepancy of 1 or less. This proved the theorem for C=1. The recent progress, which pushes C up to 2 was made possible by a clever idea of using a SAT solver — a program that find values that make an expression true. Things went well up to length 1160, which was proved to have discrepancy 2, but at length 1161 the SAT returned the result that there was no assignment. The negative result generated an unsatisfiability certificate, the proof that a sequence of length 1161 has no subsequence with discrepancy 2, is 13GBytes.
As the authors of the paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2184) write:
"[it]...is probably one of longest proofs of a non-trivial mathematical result ever produced. Its gigantic size is comparable, for example, with the size of the whole Wikipedia, so one may have doubts about to which degree this can be accepted as a proof of a mathematical statement."
Does this matter?
Probably not — as long as other programs can check the result and the program itself has to be considered part of the proof.
56666539
submission
mikejuk writes:
If you want to find a way of dividing up some indivisible items between entities then here is a way to do it that eliminates envy as the outcome. The suggestion is that this could be a good way to divide up possessions during a divorce — algorithms get into everything. A new paper (http://www.ams.org/notices/201402/rnoti-p130.pdf) by New York University’s Steven Brams, Wilfrid Laurier University’s D. Marc Kilgour, and the University of Graz’s Christian Klamler and published this month in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, outlines how to do it so that both parties are happy in a maximal sort of way — i.e it assigns as many items in the pool of things to be divided and only holds back those that if allocated would cause envy.
As long as the players assign true rankings to the items then the more algorithm will find the maximal envy-free assignment and as the number of items increases, the probability of a complete envy-free assignment approaches one.
The bad news is that you can cheat.
If you lie about your ranking you can end up with an assignment that, when you true ranking is revealed, provokes envy. However, as the authors note the danger is that you won't work things out perfectly, because it depends on the ranking of the other player and you could end up worse off. The best strategy is to play fair and end up with an envy free allocation.
So the next time you file for divorce, remember to hire a programmer as well as a lawyer.
56375903
submission
mikejuk writes:
Is this JavaScript's ultimate step towards world domination? Webkit is a full strength industrial HTML rendering engine — and guess what so is webkit.js, only it's a JavaScript program. So who needs a browser?
OK, I admit that webkit.js isn't actually "industrial strength" at the moment, but it is another example of what you can do when you think outside the box. The method is straightforward — take the current WebKit code and feed it through the Emscripten C++/C to JavaScript compiler and the rest is a matter of making it work. In this case "the rest" is quite a lot of work.
The final goal — a JavaScript browser that runs under node.js. Yes you could in theory get away with a "browser" that was 100% JavaScript. There would be no HTML rendering engine just a JavaScript engine and the rest would be JavaScript code. So just JavaScript — it's all you need.
56274283
submission
mikejuk writes:
It looks as if the obligatory xkcd cartoon has it wrong this time
http://xkcd.com/1244
NASA seems to not only like Kerbal Space Program but is developing a downloadable mission pack, that will allow players to put Kerbals on an asteroid. If you don't know Kerbal Space Program it is a physics based simulator that like Minecraft allows you to build things only in this case the "things" are rockets to get the Kerbals into space. In the NASA mod players will first have to launch a spacecraft to fly alongside the asteroid. Then they will have to push the giant rock into a stable orbit around the Kerbal's home planet without creating an extinction-level impact below. Finally, they'll need to safely land on it. It's all a matter of applied physics.
NASA itself hopes to land humans on an asteroid by 2025 and it seems that Kerbals will manage it more than a decade before their real-life counterparts. Unless of course it turns out that an extinction level impact is unavoidable...
56138257
submission
mikejuk writes:
Google and Opera split from WebKit to create Blink, their own HTML rendering engine, and everyone was worried about the effect on standards. Now we have the first big example of a split in the form of CSS Regions support. Essentially Regions are used to provide the web equivalent of text flow, a concept very familiar to anyone who has used a DTP (DeskTop Publishing) program. The basic idea is that you define containers for a text stream which is then flowed from one container to another to provide a complex multicolumn layout. The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe — long time DTP company. Now the Blink team propose to remove Regions support saving 10,000 lines of code in 350,000 in the name of efficiency.
If Google does remove the Regions code, which looks highly likely, this would leave Safari and IE 10/11 as the only two major browsers to support Regions. Both Apple and Microsoft have an interest in ensuring that their hardware can be used to create high quality magazine style layouts — Google and Opera aren't so concerned. I thought standards were there to implement not argue with.
56094783
submission
mikejuk writes:
A new open source CodePlex project makes it possible to run your own Windows 8 App Store designed to allow you to privately publish enterprise apps.
"BootyBay" is a private "sideloading" Windows Store.
"A proof-of-concept of a Windows Private Store solution for enterprise side-loading app management, including a Windows Store App as the “Private Store”, a Desktop App as the “Store Agent”, an ASP.NET MVC web application as the “Store Server”.
To make use of it you need Windows 8.1 or Windows 2012 R2 for the client and they have to be set up to allow sideloading. For the server you need an ASP.NET 4.5 MVC machine. The store app is currently not polished, but it allows the user to list apps, check details, etc. In the long run this will look like the real store app.
At the moment BootBay doesn't work with Windows RT devices but the team have plans to add ARM and RT support. There is no word of Windows Phone 8 support.
As they plan to appeal to enterprises perhaps the codename "BootyBay", after the port city in Warcraft III, is not a good choice. There is also the interesting question of what Microsoft will make of it. After all Microsoft really would like to keep control of the Windows app market and this certainly blows a fairly large hole in its walled garden.
56005059
submission
mikejuk writes:
Simulated bipedal creatures can learn to walk naturally without any input as to how they should do it. They even learn to adopt different gaits according to the speed they are trying to move at. The technique is simple in theory but the difficulties are in the detail. A new video of a variety of virtual creatures learning is fun to watch as they slowly evolve and fall over.
Take a simulated skeleton and attach a set of biologically inspired simulated muscles — both in full 3D, The muscles even have a neural delay included in all feedback paths. The arrangement of the muscles, the muscle routing, isn't fixed and it and it is part of the optimization along with the muscle control systems. This is a bit like evolving the muscle arrangement that works best with a given skeleton.
To obtain the optimum control and muscle routing, the performance of the creature is measured taking into account speed, pose, and effort. The optimization was performed offline using an evolutionary algorithm.
Yes the virtual creatures really do evolve the best way of walking and fall over a few times in the process.
