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Marcus said the Turing test is not a reliable measure of intelligence because humans are susceptible, and machines can be evasive. Philosopher John Searle introduced the Chinese Room Argument that asserts programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand the language but could not produce real understanding. Even if a computer can interpret symbols and provide sensical responses, it can’t be said to be truly “conscious” because it doesn’t really understand what the symbols mean.

Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, proposed the Winograd schema challenge in 2011. Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, Charles Ortiz, and Gary Marcus developed the schema further. Hector designed it as an improvement of the Turing test. The test is structured with multiple-choice questions called Winograd schemas.

Winograd schemas were named after Terry Winograd, professor of computer science at Stanford University. It is a pair of sentences whose intended meaning can be flipped by changing just one word. They generally involve unclear pronouns or possessives.

While our attention is mostly directed towards ever smaller-integrated silicon circuits providing faster and faster computing, there’s another area of integrated electronics that operates at a much lower speed which we should be following. Thin-film flexible circuitry will provide novel ways to place electronics where a bulky or expensive circuit board with traditional components might be too expensive or inappropriate, and Wikichip is here to remind us of a Leuven university team who’ve created what is claimed to be the fastest thin-film flexible microprocessor yet. Some of you might find it familiar, it’s our old friend the 6502.

The choice of an archaic 8-bit processor might seem a strange one, but we can see the publicity advantage — after all, you’re reading about it here because of it being a 6502. Plus there’s the advantage of it being a relatively simple and well-understood architecture. It’s no match for the MHz clock speeds of the original with an upper limit of 71.4 kHz, but performance is not the most significant feature of flexible electronics. The production technology isn’t quite ready for the mainstream so we’re unlikely to be featuring flexible Commodore 64s any time soon, but the achievement is the impressive feat of a working thin-film flexible microprocessor.

Meanwhile, if you’re curious about the 6,502, we took a look at the life of its designer, [Chuck Peddle].

We have all had the experience of one of our electronic devices overheating. Needless, to say that when that happens, it becomes dangerous both for the device and its surroundings. But considering the speed at which devices work, is overheating avoidable?

A 740 percent increase in power per unit.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have recently devised an invention that could cool down electronics more efficiently than other alternative solutions and enable a 740 percent increase in power per unit, according to a press release by the institutions published Thursday.