Lifeboat Foundation

A novel written by artificial intelligence was a finalist in Japan’s Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The award is named after Hoshi Shinichi, a Japanese science fiction author whose books include The Whimsical Robot and Greetings from Outer Space. The unique contest accepts submissions from humans and machines, and judges for the prize, now in its third year, weren’t told which novels were written by humans and which were penned by human-AI teams. This year was the first time the committee received submissions written by AI programs.

The AI novel is called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi in Japanese. It was co-written by Hishoshi Matsubara, a professor of computer science, along with his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan. According to the LA Times, their AI wrote four books, of which one made it past the first round of the prize. It was one of 1450 submissions, 11 of which were written with the help of AI programs.

According to reports, 80% of the novel had human involvement, as Matsubara and his team did the research for the novel, decided on the plot and developed the characters. The novel’s text was written entirely by the AI. The Professor’s team entered words and phrases from a sample novel into a computer in order for the AI to construct a new novel similar to it, Slate reports.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Writes Novel, Nearly Wins Japan’s Unique Literary Prize” »

Unmanned sea robot technology to the rescue!

Physicist John Martinis could deliver one of the holy grails of computing to Google—a machine that dramatically speeds up today’s applications and makes new ones possible.

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about Code 8, a mysterious project from Robbie and Stephen Amell. Now, the project has been unveiled, and it looks like an intriguing film project.

We speculated that the project was going to be released On Demand, but it turns out that the short film was just a teaser for a much larger project, one that is currently being funded on IndieGoGo.

Continue reading “The Mysterious Code 8 Film Is An Intriguing Crowdfunding Teaser” »

By studying the spatial distribution of gamma-ray emission in the Milky Way, astronomers believe they have identified a signature of dark matter annihilation.

We live in a dramatic epoch of astrophysics. Breakthrough discoveries like exoplanets, gravity waves from merging black holes, or cosmic acceleration seem to arrive every decade, or even more often. But perhaps no discovery was more unexpected, mysterious, and challenging to our grasp of the “known universe” than the recognition that the vast majority of matter in the universe cannot be directly seen. This matter is dubbed “dark matter,” and its nature is unknown. According to the latest results from the Planck satellite, a mere 4.9% of the universe is made of ordinary matter (that is, matter composed of atoms or their constituents). The rest is dark matter, and it has been firmly detected via its gravitational influence on stars and other normal matter. Dark energy is a separate constituent.

Understanding this ubiquitous yet mysterious substance is a prime goal of modern astrophysics. Some astronomers have speculated that dark matter might have another property besides gravity in common with ordinary matter: It might come in two flavors, matter and anti-matter, that annihilate and emit high energy radiation when coming into contact. The leading class of particles in this category are called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS). If dark matter annihilation does occur, the range of options for the theoretical nature of dark matter would be considerably narrowed.

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RENO, Nev. (AP) — A Nevada firm says one of its drones has successfully completed the first fully autonomous package delivery in a residential area in the U.S.

Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeney says the six-rotor drone flew about a half-mile along a pre-programmed delivery route on March 10. It lowered the package outside a vacant residence in an uninhabited area of Hawthorne, southeast of Reno. The route was established using GPS. A pilot and visual observers were on standby during the flight but weren’t needed.

The package included bottled water, food and a first-aid kit.

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Using the Piz Daint supercomputer, cosmologists at the University of Geneva are the first to simulate the structure of the universe in a way that consistently accounts for the general theory of relativity.

- teleportation exists.

Bye with the help of virtual / augmented reality. Read! Is shocking and heartbreaking.

In fact: within the framework of the project points is augmented reality, Microsoft Hololens started laboratory technology called holoportation.

Continue reading “Holoportation: I’m sorry, we can no longer hide this from you:” »

When the apocalypse comes, it won’t do so on four rotors. Drones, especially drones-as-we-know-them—the affordable, commercially available quadcopters—are only really engines of their own destruction. Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate for President, wrote today that the American constitution is unprepared for the challenges of swarming robots. With all due I respect, I couldn’t possibly disagree more.

“The Second Amendment Isn’t Prepared for a 3D-Printed Drone Army”, Istvan argues, and vividly sets a scene of total despair: