Automatic rule-balancing systems could cater for a variety of player abilities, too, generating different rules for different players. A game with variations built in can be a great way to have fun without anyone having an unfair advantage …
via AI card game knows how to bend the rules – tech – 04 May 2013 – New Scientist.
The records were set using the ROSS (Rensselaer’s Optimistic Simulation System) simulation package developed by Carothers and his students, and using the Time Warp synchronization algorithm originally developed by Jefferson.
“The significance of this demonstration is that direct simulation of ‘planetary scale’ models is now, in principle at least, within reach,” Barnes said. “‘Planetary scale’ in the context of the joint team’s work means simulations large enough to represent all 7 billion people in the world or the entire Internet’s few billion hosts.”
Maybe they can get SimCity modeled correctly.
Students fooled teachers by asking them to enter account information to update their computer’s software, which they regularly do. Teachers were presented with a display that looked “exactly like” it does when prompted for a software update, but instead it was a request for administrative access, according to district technology supervisor Jurgen Johannsen.
via KETCHIKAN, Alaska: Ketchikan students trick teachers to access computers | State News | ADN.com.
The engineers used a weighted context-free grammar (WCFG) to represent Graph Search’s query language. Think of a tree, with the root or base as the “Start” of a particular query. Facebook calls this the “parse tree,” and the various “limbs” branching from the root include verbs, objects, etc. The “leaves” at the top are the terminal symbols, or entities such as users, cities, employers, groups, and the phrases that link those entities together. It’s perhaps easier to diagram than explain:
Now, by plugging an EMI sensor into any wall socket, you can read your house’s EM signature — and if you continue to listen, you can detect changes in the signature. Obvious changes occur when a device is switched on or off, but it also turns out that simply moving your hand close to an LCD monitor also alters your house’s EM signature. It might sound a bit unbelievable, that a single finger moving towards an LCD monitor can be detected by a sensor at the other end of the house, but that’s exactly what the University of Washington researchers have accomplished.
via Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor | ExtremeTech.
During the class in the spring of 2012 he learned the graphics programming language CUDA, and that opened the doors for tweaking GPUs to divide advanced computations across the GPUs massively parallel architecture.
He knew he had something when he wrote an algorithm to connect millions of points on a map, joining the data together spatially. The performance of his GPU-based computations compared to the same operation done with CPU power on PostGIS, the GIS module for the open-source database PostgreSQL, was “mind-blowing,” he said.
via Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention.
Darwin is Wilson’s Bill Gates, his outlier from which he draws general conclusions. However, even Darwin himself wrote:
I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.
It is this extra sense that makes math such a powerful asset to biological thinking. Indeed “thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence.” requires math to chart and define these “processes” as processes in the first place
via Terrible advice from a great scientist | Byte Size Biology.
The Internet and web applications have been enablers for these server farms, for these mainracks, if you will. People use these web apps on smartphones, on notebooks, on tablets, and on the fading desktop. The client paints pixels while the server farm — the mainrack — does the backend work. More than a dozen iterations of Moore’s Law later, and the Wheel of Reincarnation has returned us to terminals connected to Big Iron.
And there’s the rub. The movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented not only the mainframe, but also the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place.
Storm-induced seismic vibes aren’t a newly recognized phenomenon. In 2005, ground motions triggered by Hurricane Katrina were picked up by seismometers in California. And even storms that remain far from land can trigger ground motions, Sufri and Koper note.
Because the strongest ground motions are typically created at or near a storm, researchers can track its progress using seismic data alone. That offers opportunities for scientists to delve through old data sets—especially those from the presatellite era—to look for signs of storms that might have been missed by earthbound observers, or to better estimate their paths and intensities, Sufri says.
via Superstorm Sandy Shook the Earth – ScienceNOW.
It amazes me how sensitive those seisometers must be.
OTEC uses the natural difference in temperatures between the cool deep water and warm surface water to produce electricity. There are different cycle types of OTEC systems, but the prototype plant is likely to be a closed-cycle system. This sees warm surface seawater pumped through a heat exchanger to vaporize a fluid with a low boiling point, such as ammonia. This expanding vapor is used to drive a turbine to generate electricity with cold seawater then used to condense the vapor so it can be recycled through the system.