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Category: entertainment – Page 40

The Man Who’s Building a Computer Made of Brains

Circa 2016 😗

Last month, Google’s AI division, DeepMind, announced that its computer had defeated Europe’s Go champion in five straight games. Go, a strategy game played on a 19×19 grid, is exponentially more difficult for a computer to master than chess—there are 20 possible moves to choose from at the start of a chess game compared to 361 moves in Go—and the announcement was lauded as another landmark moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence.

Or, at least, living neurons. His startup, Koniku, which just completed a stint at the biotech accelerator IndieBio, touts itself as “the first and only company on the planet building chips with biological neurons.” Rather than simply mimic brain function with chips, Agabi hopes to flip the script and borrow the actual material of human brains to create the chips.

Measuring Entropy in Active-Matter Systems

A tool for estimating the local entropy production rate of a system enables the visualization and quantification of the out-of-equilibrium regions of an active-matter system.

A movie of a molecule jostling around in a fluid at equilibrium looks the same when played forward and backward. Such a movie has an “entropy production rate”—the parameter used to quantify this symmetry—of zero; most other movies have a nonzero value, meaning the visualized systems are out of equilibrium. Researchers know how to compute the entropy production rate of simple model systems. But measuring this parameter in experiments is an open problem. Now Sungham Ro of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Buming Guo of New York University, and colleagues have devised a method for making local measurements of the entropy production rate [1]. They demonstrate the technique using simulations and bacteria observations (Fig. 1).

What is Extended Mind? | Episode 1811 | Closer To Truth

What is extended mind? How does the mind work? It’s not obvious. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? What is extended mind? What is embodied mind? Featuring interviews with David Chalmers, Andy Clark, and Raymond Tallis.

Season 18, Episode 11 — #CloserToTruth.

▶Register for free at CTT.com for subscriber-only exclusives: http://bit.ly/2GXmFsP

Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.

▶Free access to Closer to Truth’s library of 5,000 videos: http://bit.ly/376lkKN

Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

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MOS Technology 6502

To show how computer chips are improving a bit, my first computer, an Apple II+ based on the 6,502 chip, had 7 bytes of memory on the chip. Nvidia’s H100 chip has 85,986,377,728 bytes of memory on it!

The 6,502 was a very successful chip and is still made today, with over 6 billion units sold!

(My home PC has about 283,506,646,208 bytes of memory but that is contained in multiple chips.)

(typically pronounced “sixty-five-oh-two” or “six-five-oh-two”)[3] is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology. The design team had formerly worked at Motorola on the Motorola 6800 project; the 6,502 is essentially a simplified, less expensive and faster version of that design.

When it was introduced in 1975, the 6,502 was the least expensive microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin. It initially sold for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as the 6,800 or Intel 8080. Its introduction caused rapid decreases in pricing across the entire processor market. Along with the Zilog Z80, it sparked a series of projects that resulted in the home computer revolution of the early 1980s.

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This Comic Series Is Gorgeous. You’d Never Know AI Drew the Whole Thing

You might expect a comic book series featuring art generated entirely by artificial intelligence to be full of surreal images that have you tilting your head trying to grasp what kind of sense-shifting madness you’re looking at.

Not so with the images in The Bestiary Chronicles, a free, three-part comics series from Campfire Entertainment, a New York-based production house focused on creative storytelling.

The visuals in the trilogy — believed to be the first comics series made with AI-assisted art — are stunning. They’re also stunningly precise, as if they’ve come straight from the hand of a seasoned digital artist with a very specific story and style in mind.

This new VR headset will kill you if you die in an online game

The designer has equipped the headset with explosive charges.

Palmer Luckey, the guy who co-founded the virtual reality (VR) headset-making company Oculus, has now made another VR headset that can kill you if you die in an online game. Luckey’s company was acquired by Facebook, now Meta, and his product is now a critical component of the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg plans to build the company around.

At the outset, it might seem that Zuckerberg did the right thing by acquiring Oculus. Otherwise, we would not really know what sort of products they would bring to the market.

Palmer Luckey.

However, in a blog post, Luckey has given us some clues as to what inspired him to make the VR headsets in the first place and what continues to inspire him even today, and it all boils down to an anime game called Sword Art Online (SOA).

A Bold Solution To a Quantum Mystery: Does a “Game” Between Observer and Nature Define Existence?

A team of scientists from the University of Sciences and Technology of China has proposed a bold solution for the “measurement problem” in quantum mechanics, suggesting the eventual outcome for states of existence is determined by a “game” between the observer and nature.

For over a century, the quantum realm has imposed an abundance of bizarre obstacles along the road to understanding universal existence.

In the microscopic world of atoms and subatomic particles, nature demonstrates unparalleled strangeness, becoming unpredictable and operating in contrast to how it behaves at the macroscopic scale defined by classical physics.

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