Prof. Art Olson discussed how we understand what we cannot see directly, how we integrate data from different sources, and how to develop software tools to move forward.
Speaking of big computation, cyberspace isn’t yet as potent as Neal Stephenson portrayed in Snow Crash and subsequent books, but it’s getting there. A new article in the Wall Street Journal online titled Can World of Warcraft Game Skills Help Land a Job? states that some job seekers are adding gaming skills to their resumes… Continue reading Surprisingly real value from virtual reality
What 3D printers are doing to facilitate fabrication, 3D drawing programs are surpassing to facilitate design. As described at ScienceDaily.com, two systems referred to as “powerful” and “spectacular” are being highlighted at the SIGGRAPH 2014 conference in Vancouver this week: True2Form (out of University of British Columbia) brings 2D sketches into 3D (excerpt from SD… Continue reading Big computation brings your ideas into 3D
Recently we pointed at a Forbe’s interview with Eric Drexler, in anticipation of his pending new book Radical Abundance. The book has shipped, and Drexler’s tour schedule now includes a few stops on the coasts of the U.S: New York: May 6th Los Angeles: May 8th & 9th Seattle: May 9th Find exact times and… Continue reading Drexler's book tour extends to U.S. May6-9
An article in New Scientist with the optimistic title “Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence” gives an update on how two specific examples of computational artificial life is doing in terms of evolving to have more interesting behavior. An excerpt: Brains that have been evolved with HyperNEAT have millions of connections, yet still perform a… Continue reading Can "artificial life" evolve intelligence? An update
We’ve received an update on work by our friend Anirban Bandyopadhyay at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. Here’s the abstract of his recent Nature Physics paper: Modern computers operate at enormous speeds—capable of executing in excess of 1013 instructions per second—but their sequential approach to processing, by which logical operations are… Continue reading Cellular automata used for 700-bit parallel processing
From Singularity Hub, 5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter: Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin’s Seki5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve out a full scale motorcycle helmet… Continue reading Industrial robot carves metal like butter (video)
From David Cassel: The military is funding a project to create neural computing using memristors, a sophisticated circuit component which HP Labs describes as a stepping stone to “computers that can make decisions” and “appliances that learn from experience.” http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/synapse-chip In a video, HP researcher R. Stanley Williams explains how his team created the first… Continue reading U.S. military to use memristors for neural computing
From Ars Technica: Nobel Intent, a thought-provoking article on what the prevalence of computational science portends for reproducibility in science: Victoria Stodden is currently at Yale Law School, and she gave a short talk at the recent Science Online meeting in which she discussed the legal aspects of ensuring that the code behind computational tools… Continue reading Keeping computers from ending science's reproducibility
Back in April, I wrote: Nanotechnology, the revolutionary technology, was always about the power of self-replication and never only about the very small. The ability of a machine system to make more of itself, or more generally, make its own parts and be able to assemble or replace them as needed, is called autogeny. There’s… Continue reading Autogenous or autopoietic?
