It's not even a good example of image recognition, because the images to be processed don't have to be "understood" to be used. On top of that, the graphics of the games in question were very simple and primitive compared to what image recognition software deals with.

Add to that the repetitive nature of old video games that were based on 99% reaction time and 1% strategy, and you can just flat out colour me "unimpressed" with this "research".

Back in University, my AI project was a game player (a simple strategy game whose name I forget.) As it turned out, the entire game mapped down to a pre-determined set of decisions, so after playing only a dozen games, the "AI" would win every time, and that was just with a simple weighted-algorithm system of play. Some problems are just eminently suited to "AI" is all that I ended up learning from that project, but it was a useful lesson on the difference between optimizing a decision tree and actual "intelligence".

Until someone comes up with a system that can deal with bad and erroneous inputs as well as humans, I will continue to be unimpressed. Yet at the same time, I don't consider it necessary for a computer to be able to think and understand per se to be considered an "intelligence." It just needs to be able to make decisions and choose between alternatives faster than it's human counterparts in order to be useful, and to reduce the number of errors compared to it's human counterparts.

I have little faith in "neural networks." They place too much emphasis on emulating simple biological components and not enough on the "art" of understanding. Neural networks basically take the approach that "if it's big enough, we'll maybe get lucky and it will start to think." That's not "solving a problem." That's "playing the lottery."

Given Apple's own abusive patent behaviour over the years, I can't help but smugly thinking "That's Karma, bitch!"

Overkill it may be, but I've been writing my prototype security code to generate new AES256 keys for each session, using the pre-generated keys only to initialize communications and handshake the generated keys. Even I won't know what keys are in use.

The NSA can kiss my ass. So can CSEC, GCHQ, and everyone else who thinks they have a "right" to spy on me.

Approach the service provider with a properly signed warrant in the appropriate jurisdiction of the server if you want access to my data.

You spent 10.4 minutes in the bathroom this morning.

The staff in your department average 5.6 minutes.

The doors in your office will therefore remain locked until 5:04 today to ensure you make up the time.

This was a lot of years ago. Things weren't as tightly controlled back then. '386 days...

I think you underestimate how much of the design is actually done by computers and auto-routing/placement algorithms.

I've yet to meet a Buddhist who was anything like you describe. Don't confuse Buddhism with Californicatin' "New Age" hipsters. The latter only claim to be Buddhists, and only pick and choose a few select pieces of their scripture that goes with their crystal-worshipping nonsense.

A buddy's brother works (or worked, who knows now) for Intel, and used to bring along demos of the latest and greatest lab technology when he came for visits. Some of the stuff he had was up to 10-15 years ahead of actual release cycles in terms of performance and capability. I'm sure some of the ideas got scrapped, but a lot of them probably made it into production in the chips we use today.

Wild stuff. Both brothers were major hardware geeks.

I'd love to see what kind of technology he's showing his brother from the labs over Christmas and Easter holidays nowadays. :D

What kills all console games eventually is the difficulty of working with their development kits, and the paucity of documentation about how to wring maximum performance out of those development kits.

Write a game using OpenGL or DirectX, and you have millions of potential buyers. Write a game using Android or iOS APIs, and you have millions of portable buyers.

Consoles? Not so much. Your only market with those devices are dedicated gamers willing to spend money just to play games. It's a smaller market share by a huge margin.

Somebody beat me to it. :)

No matter what you do in life, you are going to die. There is no escaping that.

So live a life of wonder, mystery, and enjoyment, rather than spending it fretting about exactly what might be the thing that kills you. Eat a bacon sandwich. Put cream in your coffee. Have a steak once in a while. Have a doughnut once a month. And by all means, have a glass of wine with your meal and spark a bowl of cannabis afterwards.

No one ever said it was a documentary. It's a movie meant to entertain, not inform.

Apparently the issue depends on where you live, because while I used to see such wankers in Regina, Saskatchewan, I've never had the problem in the smaller community of Yorkton. Not only will people both walk through the snowbank on the side of the tromped-down path here, they'll actually say "Hi" to you while you're passing them.

they should be able to expect that junior can sit at the computer and look up something for school and not get links to goatz or tubgirl or whatever

That is absolute nonsense. I have never had Google nor Bing bring up porn when I was searching for terms that didn't involve pornography. This whole concept of "drive by porning" is nothing more than fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the "think of the children" namby-pambies who want to block adult sites from anyone accessing them on the internet.

If your kids are finding porn on the internet, it's because they're looking for it. Stop blaming the internet, and start blaming your horny or curious kid.

The best trick is for parents to actually supervise their children.

I hate all you lazy buggers who just "plug the kids in" and leave them for hours a day unsupervised. Do your damned job as parents!

That "powerful AI" thinking is done by designers and analysts, not programmers. The vast majority of "programmers" merely translate the business models and logic specifications into code. What I'm saying is that we're not far off at all from capturing that information in the business models and diagrams themselves, and translating it directly into code without the intervention of "grunt coders" (the people you hire for $20/hr from sweat shops or through overseas companies.)

Those few who are also business analysts and designers will be working with those new tools instead of UML diagrams. They'll push a button, and bam, out comes most of the code for implementing the system.

User interface programming and report specifications are the only aspect of "programming" that I see as being retained by the human coders in the long run, and even the report specifications could prove subject to analysis algorithms that allow a report designer to simply highlight the model attributes they want to present, drop-down-select group-by functions over those attributes, and do a little bit of layout specification to produce the report. For all I know, there are already tools that let you do that.

You only need "strong AI" if you expect the system to be designed by the system. I'm not expecting any such thing -- I'm merely expecting the automation of grunt work and IDE point-and-click operations by rule-based systems.

If you want a crude example of the kind of technology I'm talking about, check out my pet project, MSS Code Factory. From an XML business application model, it produces the database schema scripts, stored procedures, JDBC layers, object implementations and interfaces, and XML messaging layers. I keep adding to it and extending it, but it does more than enough to prove my point: you can automate an awful lot of the grunt code of a system.

Now if I can automate that much of the coding process by myself, imagine what a team of serious computer scientists with a real budget could do in the bowels of an IBM, Microsoft, or Apple R&D department.