59391299
submission
mikejuk writes:
During his state visit to Japan, President Obama interacted with Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO at Tokyo's Miraikan museum, which showcases Japanese emerging science and innovation. After bowing and making a formal introduction in English, ASIMO kicked a soccer ball to Obama who responded with "Good job" — see the video. Asimo also seemed pleased with his performance and jumped around to celebrate his own prowess in suitable soccer-star style. Compared to other soccer-playing robots, such as Nao, Asimo appears rather slow, although his aim is pretty good but President Obama's reservations, expressed later to students according to the Wall Street Journal is that the robots he met on this and previous visits to Japan are "too lifelike".
59053179
submission
mikejuk writes:
Now this really is an interesting iOS app. Gofor is a new company that is promoting the idea of drones on demand. All you have to do is use the app to request a drone and it shows you were they are and how long before one reaches your location.
You want to take the ultimate selfie? Scout ahead to see if the road is clear or just find a parking space? No problem just task a drone to do the job. For the photo you simply flash your phone camera at it and it pinpoints your location for an aerial selfie. If it is scouting ahead then it shows you what awaits you via a video link. See the promo video to see how it might work.
Flight of fancy? Possibly but the company claims to be operational in five US cities.
58483419
submission
mikejuk writes:
The Matrix Reloaded started something when "The Merovingian" wore a number of very flashy ties. The problem was that we thought we knew how many ways you can tie a tie. The number of ways had been enumerated in 2001 and the answer was that there were exactly 85 different ways but the enumeration didn't include the Matrix way of doing it.
So how many "Merovingian" knots are there?
The question is answered in a new paper "More ties than we thought", by Dan Hirsch, Meredith L. Patterson, Anders Sandberg and Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.8242... The methodology is based on the original enumeration and an interesting application of language theory. The idea is to create a programming language for tying ties and then work out how many programs there are.
For single depth tucks there are 177147 different sequences and hence knots. Of these there are 2046 winding patterns that take up to 11 moves, the same as the The Merovingian knot and other popular knots, and so these are probably practical with a normal length necktie.
Who would have thought a little movie would have attracted so much attention....
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...
