Category Archives: STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

New Device Could Greatly Improve Speech and Image Recognition

Posted on by

Holography is a technique based on the wave nature of light which allows the use of wave interference between the object beam and the coherent background. It is commonly associated with images being made from light, such as on driver’s licenses or paper currency. However, this is only a narrow field of holography.

Holography has been also recognized as a future data storing technology with unprecedented data storage capacity and ability to write and read a large number of data in a highly parallel manner.

Source: UCR Today: New Device Could Greatly Improve Speech and Image Recognition

Poker pros win against AI, but experts peg match as statistical draw

Posted on by

“Beating humans isn’t really our goal; it’s just a milestone along the way,” Sandholm said. “What we want to do is create an artificial intelligence that can help humans negotiate or make decisions in situations where they can’t know all of the facts.”

Source: Poker pros win against AI, but experts peg match as statistical draw – Techie News

“The advances made in Claudico over Tartanian7 in just eight months were huge,” Les said, a rate of improvement that suggests the AI might need only another year before it clearly plays better than the pros.

Opportunity Logs Sol 4000, Digs Spirit of St. Louis Crater

Posted on by

It has been written many times in these pages, and it begs repeating: this rover was sent on a 90-day expedition, with the mission success mobility objective of driving 600 meters. In March, Opportunity completed 42.195 kilometers or 26.2 miles. It’s the first marathon “run” on another planet. And in April – the 4000th sol. “This rover just keeps giving and giving,” said Planetary Society President Jim Bell, professor of astronomy and planetary scientist at Arizona State University and lead scientist on the MERs’ panoramic cameras (Pancams).

Source: Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Opportunity Logs Sol 4000, Digs Spirit of St. Louis Crater | The Planetary Society

Carnegie Mellon Computer Faces Poker Pros in Epic No-Limit Texas Hold’Em Competition

Posted on by

In a contest that echoes Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov and Watson beating two Jeopardy! Champions, computer poker software developed at Carnegie Mellon University will challenge four of the world’s best professional poker players in a “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition beginning April 24 at Rivers Casino.

Over the course of two weeks, the CMU computer program, Claudico, will play 20,000 hands of Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em with each of the four poker pros. The pros — Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les — will receive appearance fees derived from a prize purse of $100,000 donated by Microsoft Research and by Rivers Casino. The Carnegie Mellon scientists will compete for something more precious.

Source: Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Carnegie Mellon Computer Faces Poker Pros in Epic No-Limit Texas Hold’Em Competition-Carnegie Mellon News – Carnegie Mellon University

“Computing the world’s strongest strategies for this game was a major achievement — with the algorithms having future applications in business, military, cybersecurity and medical arenas,” Sandholm said.

New Theory Leads to Gigahertz Antenna on a Chip

Posted on by

You can see such symmetry breaking in a once-common 20th century technology: the two-wire ribbons used during television’s first few decades to send RF signals from rooftop VHF antennas to television sets without any loss. The electric RF current in the two conductors flow in opposite directions and have opposite phase. Because of the translational symmetry (the two conductors are parallel) the radiation fields cancel each other out, so there is no net radiation into space. But if you would flare the ends of the two conductors at one end of the ribbon, they aren’t parallel anymore and you break the translational symmetry. The two electric fields are no longer aligned and don’t cancel each other out, causing the RF signal to be converted into electromagnetic radiation.

via New Theory Leads to Gigahertz Antenna on a Chip – IEEE Spectrum.

Statistics Will Crack Your Password

Posted on by

This means that the top 13 unique mask structures make up 50% of the passwords from the sample. Over 20 million passwords in the sample have a structure within the top 13 masks.

via Statistics Will Crack Your Password.

Based on analyzing the data, there are logical factors that help explain how this is possible. When users are asked to provide a password that contains an uppercase letter, over 90% of the time it is put as the first character. When asked to use a digit, most users will put two digits at the end of their password (graduation year perhaps)

Graphics from the command line

Posted on by

This article shows how to perform image manipulation using command-line tools. I do this job quite often, since I’ve picked up a some digital cameras and now manage a library of several thousand happy snaps. For Web developers and administrators who frequently have to batch-process large numbers of images, command line tools are an especially attractive option, because the developer can incorporate them into scripts. But even if you only want to perform a manipulation once or twice, a command-line alternative can save time.

The command line tools discussed in this article are part of the excellent ImageMagick suite, which ships with Red Hat Linux and is freely available online (see Resources). ImageMagick can also be accessed via C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and several other languages, which Linux programmers will appreciate.

via Graphics from the command line.

Rockets Shake And Rattle, So SpaceX Rolls Homegrown CFD

Posted on by

Lichtl says that people have tried to use wavelet compression before, and these particular simulations are based on work done by Jonathan Regele, a professor at the department of aerospace engineering at Iowa State University.

“The difference is that without GPU acceleration, and without the architecture and the techniques that we just described, it takes months on thousands of cores to run even the simplest of simulations. It is a very interesting approach but it doesn’t have industrial application without the hardware and the correct algorithms behind it. What the GPUs are doing here is enabling tremendous acceleration.

via Rockets Shake And Rattle, So SpaceX Rolls Homegrown CFD.

To be more precise, if you get the temperature wrong in the simulation by a little, you get the kinetic energy of the gas wrong by a lot because there is an exponential relationship there.  If you get the pressure or viscosity of the fluid wrong by a little bit, you will see different effects in the nozzle than will happen in the real motor.

Counting Legal Positions in Go

Posted on by

The computation uses dynamic programming to count the number of paths through a graph consisting of 18^2=324 layers with up to 81 billion nodes each. Each node corresponds to a set of partial board (e.g. the top 7 rows plus 6 points on the 8th row) positions that are equivalent in their set of valid completions. Our paper explains the algorithm in detail, and also explains how the resulting exact counts allow derivation of the approximation formula

L(m,n) ~ 0.850639925845714538 * 0.96553505933837387^{m+n} * 2.97573419204335724938^{m*n}

which gives us the approximate number of legal positions on a standard board size

L(19,19) ~ 2.08168199381982*10^170

via Counting Legal Positions in Go.

Thanks to the Chinese Remainder Theorem, the work of computing L(19,19) can be split up into 9 jobs that each compute 64 bits of the 566-bit result. Allowing for some redundancy, we need from 10 to 13 servers, each with at least 8 cores, 512GB RAM, and ample disk space (10-15TB), running for about 5-9 months.