Simulation
milhayser | July 23, 2014With 2001 in the rear-view mirror, there have been no little green men, no meal-replacement pills, no flying automobiles, no space odysseys. But as big-budget plans to model the human brain prove, proponents of artificial intelligence remain hopeful. In its most literal sense, AI exists already: encoded and executed, endowed with sensors, lenses and microphones, connected to the internet, and stuck in your pocket. But how intelligent does a machine have to be before our worst nightmares come true? Intelligent enough to pass a Turing test? Intelligent enough to nuke the human race? And/or…
jhalper | November 18, 2012The idea of “seeing the world through the eyes of a child” takes on new meaning when the observer is a computer. Institute scientists in the Lab for Vision and Robotics Research took their computer right back to babyhood and used it to ask how infants first learn to identify objects in their visual field.
How do you create an algorithm that imitates the earliest learning processes? What do you assume is already hard-wired into the newborn brain, as opposed to the new information it picks up by repeated observation? And finally, how do you get a computer to make that leap from a data-crunching…
jhalper | March 11, 2012The patterns of the dark craters on the near side of the Moon have spurred the imagination of observers from all cultures: Some visualize a woman, others a rabbit, or, like most of us, they see the "Man in the Moon."
Near side
The explanation as to why we always see the Man in the Moon - that is, why we only see one side - is that tidal forces caused the Moon to slow its spin until it reached the present point. It now takes the same amount of time to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around Earth. It is this synchronous rotation that causes the moon to "lock" with Earth, with…
edyong | March 19, 2009Want to know how much you'd enjoy an experience? You're better off asking someone who has been through it, even if they're a complete stranger, than to find out information for yourself. This advice comes from Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University, who espoused it in his superb book Stumbling on Happiness. Now, he has found new support for the idea by studying speed-daters and people receiving feedback from their peers.
In the first study, he found that female students were better able to predict how much they would enjoy a speed-date if they listened to the experiences of strangers than if…
esiegel | March 24, 2008Those of you who keep up with your news may have seen this headline on CNN last week: Star Explodes Halfway Across Universe. What they're talking about is a Gamma-Ray Burst, which was so bright that, despite being 7.5 billion light years (that's 2.3 Gpc) away, it was still visible on Earth with the naked eye. From the article:
The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.
This is the sort of thing that the SWIFT satellite was designed to detect, pinpoint, and then tell Earth-based…