Stories tagged computers
Once more into the breach: We few, we happy few, we band of kitties; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my puss-puss.
Courtesy o205billege
The general holds the binoculars up to his eyes and surveys the battlefield. This will be the first test of the new Coordinated Autonomic Tactical force—C.A.T. for short—an army of robot warriors with electronic brains as complex and powerful as a small mammal’s.
The exercise begins, and all goes exactly to plan. The mechanized warriors sweep across the terrain in formation. Faced with unexpected obstacles, they improvise their own solutions. Soon, they are overwhelming the enemy positions.
Suddenly, a squirrel darts across the field. The entire right flank breaks rank to pursue. Corporal Whiskers beings licking himself. Sergeant Buttercup and Lieutenant Muffy begin hissing at each other. Private Snookums climbs a tree and can’t get down.
The general lowers his binoculars. Staring off into the middle distance, he says to his second-in-command, “We may not have thought this through thoroughly.”
Tags : A graduate student at MIT has developed software that will help emergency managers plan better, safer, more efficient evacuations.
Sixty years ago today, in Manchester, England, a room-sized computer known affectionately as "Baby" successfully ran its first calculation using 128k of memory, and ushered in the era of the "modern PC".
Back in 1948, Baby's programmers had a whopping 1024 bits of memory available to work with while today's 1 GB DRAM chip can store about 8 billion bits. You do the math. Or just read the story.
A few months back, we reported on a machine that can read the images in your brain. Now comes exciting news of a machine that can read the words you are thinking. Because I know I have just way too much privacy as it is.
3D microchip cooling system: H2O in a cooling container (purple) is pumped through spaces between the chip's layers (orange).
Courtesy IBMIBM scientists in Europe announced this week that they’re working on a 3D stacked microchip that will use water running through tiny micropipes as thin as a human hair to transfer heat away from the circuits.
As integrated circuits get smaller and more sophisticated, cooling becomes a real issue, and so far water-cooling seems to be the most efficient solution.
3D chips have their circuits stacked vertically rather than side-by-side. This allows information to travel much more efficiently between them. But the gain in processing speed also generates a tremendous amount of heat. IBM’s solution is to interweave the chip layers with tiny micropipes that will move water throughout the internal workings and carry the heat elsewhere. Silicon and silicon oxide hermetically seal off the tiny 50 microns-wide pipes from other chip components to prevent against an electrical short.
The water-cooled technology is not a new concept – both IBM and Hewlett-Packard have used the liquid to cool some of their mainframe supercomputers. In fact, just this past April, IBM announced a new supercomputer that cools its processors with water. Here's a video about that.
But the idea is moving now to the desktop PC. (Water-cooled technology has been used in some versions of Apple's Power Mac G5 computer but the microchips were standard configuration, and not arrayed in a three-dimensional vertical formation.)
Scientists from both the IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin are involved in the project, and the company believes the new micropipe technology could appear in products as early as five years from now.
Various web and computer applications which some guy in Australia things will be really big. (My partner is heavy into Chumby; I think I have too much web access as it is.)
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.: Or, as the poets say, "hubba-hubba."
Courtesy beardenb
An Israeli student has written a computer program to recognize beauty. Human volunteers were asked to rate the attractiveness of several dozen photo portraits. The photos, along with their scores, were fed into the computer. The computer measured the faces and looked for commonalities between the ones rated most attractive.
The human subjects then rated another set of photos. The computer reviewed these, and compared them to what it had learned with the first set. It then rated the new photos. The computer’s ratings were very close to those provided by the humans.
The most impressive thing about this experiment is that the computer learned by itself. The programmers did not give the computer a definition of beauty. Rather, they let the machine figure it out for itself. This is considered a major step forward for artificial intelligence.
And if you’re wondering, average faces with no distinguishing characteristics are considered the most beautiful, both by humans and computers.
His very own robot slave head. With free jealousy software included!
A computer program called CyberLover mimics the conversation of an on-line dating service chat room. The program fools users into divulging personal information, which can lead to identity theft -- and heartbreak.
The first transistor was unveiled 60 years ago, in December 1947. The computer you are using to read this has hundreds of millions of them. And the blogger The Speculists considers how that has changed the world.
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