Wartime notes belonging to the “father of modern computing”, Alan Turing, have been saved from falling into private hands. They’ll now be on display in Britain’s Bletchley Park. That’s particularly appropriate because Bletchley Park is where Turing and others worked to decipher the Enigma encryption system used for German military communication. This successful work is […]
As a grad student, Cynthia Breazeal wondered why we were using robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms. The key, she realized: training robots to interact with people. Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach, learn — and play. Watch for amazing demo footage of a new kids’ game.
There are plenty of words associated with electric cars — environmentally friendly, efficient, responsible — but luxury isn’t one of them. That might be about to change with the news that Rolls-Royce is working on such a car. The company (now owned by German firm BMW) has completed work on a single demonstration car, which […]
This week, NetworkWorld has a fascinating slideshow of Presidential tech firsts. From James Monroe’s ride aboard the steamboat Savannah to Jimmy Carter’s installation of solar panels on the White House to Barack Obama’s battle to keep his beloved Blackberry while in office (a choice that already seems hilariously old-school), the list serves as a reminder that […]
“A supercomputer that soundly thrashed two of humankind’s most successful players at their own game.” “What is Watson?” Yes, after taking a strong lead after day two, IBM’s machine took a resounding win at the end of the third and final day of its Jeopardy challenge. Final score: Watson $77,147, Ken Jennings $24,000, Brad Rutter […]
The IBM computer “Watson” has established a clear lead after two days of its gameshow challenge against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But thankfully for those fearing 2011 may be the year the machines take over, it has made a couple of flubs. The three-episode challenge is an attempt to test IBM’s abilities […]
I didn’t know that people still used Netscape. Or IE. Whatever, Chrome FTW! [Via Imgur]
“It’s a cross between a beeper and a car phone.” Oh my grok. And it’s only $3300!! [via]
Apparently, that water-powered jetpack we reported on about 2 years ago is about to go on sale to the public, but behold, if you want one, it’ll cost around 136 grands. It’s taken over 10 years for its Canadian inventor, Raymond Li, to realize his dream and see his jetpack go on sale, but judging […]
This week, an episode of NOVA covered Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed to interpret and understand natural human language, with all its ambiguity: wordplay, puns, double-meanings, intuitive differentiations and subtlety. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is the result of the DeepQA Project, the goal of which is to create a computer system […]