Researchers unearth new clues about ancient ‘computer’

Fox News

 (Giovanni Dall Orto)

Researchers have unearthed new clues to an ancient Greek astronomical puzzle that has fascinated archaeologists for over a century.
The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient machine dubbed “the world’s first computer,” was recovered from a treasure-laden shipwreck off the coast of Greece in 1901. However, the latest research by James Evans, professor of physics at the University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at the University of Quilmes, Argentina, sheds new light on the clocklike astronomical mechanism.
The study, published in the Archive for History of Exact Science, pinpoints the date when the mechanism was timed to begin as 205 B.C., making it 50 to 100 years older than previously thought.
According a statement released by the University of Puget Sound, the research “fills a gap in ancient scientific history by indicating that the Greeks were able to predict eclipses and engineer a highly complex machine” much earlier than was previously thought.
Evans and Carman’s work also supports the idea that the eclipse prediction scheme was not based on Greek trigonometry (which was nonexistent in 205 B.C.) but on Babylonian arithmetical methods, the University said.
The researchers arrived at the 205 B.C. date via a method of elimination they devised. Evans and Carman examined the hundreds of ways that the device’s eclipse patterns could match Babylonian records reconstructed by John Steele, professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University.
“The calculations take into account lunar and solar anomalies (which result in faster or slower velocity), missing solar eclipses, lunar and solar eclipse­s cycles, and other astronomical phenomena,” explained the University of Puget Sound, in its statement. “The work was particularly difficult because only about a third of the Antikythera’s eclipse predictor is preserved.”
The latest research may also place the Antikythera Mechanism close to the lifetime of Archimedes, who died in 212 B.C., although experts have questioned possible links to the celebrated mathematician.
The Mechanism’s heavily encrusted fragments are kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Cuba: Comienzan a cobrar en los Joven Club de Computación

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Quantum engineers make a major step towards a scalable quantum computer

KurzweilAI

Quantum interference on a chip

Photonic quantum computer: two spontaneous photon-pair source are integrated within a tuneable Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The system is capable of generating and manipulating path-entangled two-photon states (credit: J. W. Silverstone et al./Nature Photonics)

Scientists and engineers from an international collaboration led by Mark Thompson from the University of Bristol have, for the first time, generated and manipulated single photons on a silicon chip — a major step forward in the race to build a quantum computer, achieved by shrinking down key components and integrating them onto a silicon microchip, according to the researchers.

Previous attempts have required external light sources to generate the photons; this new chip integrates components that can generate photons inside the chip.

Potential for scaling

“We were surprised by how well the integrated sources performed together,” admits Joshua Silverstone, lead author of the paper. “They produced high-quality identical photons in a reproducible way, confirming that we could one day manufacture a silicon chip with hundreds of similar sources on it, all working together. This could eventually lead to an optical quantum computer capable of performing enormously complex calculations.”

“Single-photon detectors, sources and circuits have all been developed separately in silicon but putting them all together and integrating them on a chip is a huge challenge,” said Thompson.

“Our device is the most functionally complex photonic quantum circuit to date, and was fabricated by Toshiba using exactly the same manufacturing techniques used to make conventional electronic devices. We can generate and manipulate quantum entanglement all within a single millimeter-sized microchip.”

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The group, which, includes researchers from Toshiba Corporation (Japan), Stanford University (US), University of Glasgow (UK) and TU Delft (The Netherlands), now plans to integrate the remaining necessary components onto a chip, and show that large-scale quantum devices using photons are possible.

“Our group has been making steady progress towards a functioning quantum computer over the last five years,” said Thompson. “We hope to have within the next couple of years, photon-based devices complex enough to rival modern computing hardware for highly-specialized tasks.”

Bristol’s newly established Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Engineering will train a new generation of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to harness the power of quantum mechanics and lead the quantum technology revolution. This innovative center bridges the gaps between physics, engineering, mathematics and computer science, working closely with chemists and biologists while interacting strongly with industry.

Computers on Sale in Cuba for First Time

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The NSA Is Building a Computer to Crack Almost Any Code

TIME

In theory, the computer would be able to make calculations faster than any traditional computer. While this could compromise everything from home banking to state secrets, the nearly $80 million project hasn't succeeded yet.

How Supercomputers Will Yield a Golden Age of Materials Science

By Gerbrand Ceder and Kristin Persson

In 1878 Thomas Edison set out to reinvent electric lighting. To develop small bulbs suitable for indoor use, he had to find a long-lasting, low-heat, low-power lighting element. Guided largely by intuition, he set about testing thousands of carbonaceous materials—boxwood, coconut shell, hairs cut from his laboratory assistant's beard. After 14 months, he patented a bulb using a filament made of carbonized cotton thread. The press heralded it as the “Great Inventor's Triumph in Electric Illumination.” Yet there were better filament materials. At the turn of the century, another American inventor perfected the tungsten filament, which we still use in incandescent lightbulbs today. Edison's cotton thread became history.

Materials science, the process of engineering matter into new and useful forms, has come a long way since the days of Edison. Quantum mechanics has given scientists a deep understanding of the behavior of matter and, consequently, a greater ability to guide investigation with theory rather than guesswork. Materials development remains a painstakingly long and costly process, however. Companies invest billions designing novel materials, but successes are few and far between. Researchers think of new ideas based on intuition and experience; synthesizing and testing those ideas involve a tremendous amount of trial and error. It can take months to evaluate a single new material, and most often the outcome is negative. As our Massachusetts Institute of Technology colleague Thomas Eagar has found, it takes an average of 15 to 20 years for even a successful material to move from lab testing to commercial application. When Sony announced the commercialization of the lithium-ion battery in 1991, for example, it seemed like a sudden, huge advance—but in fact, it took hundreds or thousands of battery researchers nearly two decades of stumbling, halting progress to get to that point.

More at Scientific American >>

Douglas Hofstadter: qué es pensar

microsiervos

Hay muy poca gente interesada en cómo funciona la inteligencia humana. Por eso es en lo que yo estoy interesado: en qué es pensar.

– Douglas Hofstadter

En The Atlantic han publicado un largo perfil sobre uno de nuestros autores favoritos: Douglas Hofstadter, titulado The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think. Hofstadter es el autor de esa mítica obra titulada Gödel, Escher, Bach: un Eterno y Grácil Bucle con la que ganó el premio Pulitzer. Es un tío con dos bemoles capaz de debatir con Ray Kurzweil acusándole de ser un magufo. Y por si fuera poco el apellido de Leonard Hofstadter el de The Big Bang Theory es un homenaje a él. ¿Puede haber algo más honorablemente geek?

{Foto: Doug Hofstadter presentation (CC) Null0 @ Flickr}

Douglas Engelbart, inventor of computer mouse dies

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China builds the world's fastest supercomputer Milky Way 2

ITN

AMERICAN AIRLINES GROUNDS ALL OF ITS FLIGHTS UNTIL 5 P.M. ET OVER COMPUTER PROBLEMS

Fox News

American Airlines flights across the country are grounded because of computer problems.
American asked the Federal Aviation Administration to halt its flights until 5 p.m. EDT. Flights on regional affiliate American Eagle heading to Dallas, Chicago or New York's LaGuardia Airport have been stopped until 3:30 p.m. EDT.
Some passengers are stuck on planes while others can't make reservations.
Passengers are using social media to flood the airline with complaints.
American Airlines spokesman Kent Powell said Tuesday that the airline is trying to resolve the issues as quickly as it can.
On Twitter, American is sending out apologies but not offering customers much information about when the problem will be fixed.

Microsoft Makes Significant Investment in Machine Learning Future

ForaTv

Steve Ballmer offers a unique insight on what he believes are the least understood parts of Microsoft's vision--machine learning and big data--and explains the company's investment in both in anecdote from a casino trip he took to Las Vegas.

Artificial Inteligent Could Make a Healthier, Wealthier World

ForaTv

U.S. Energy Department Unleashes Its Titan Supercomputer

Scientific American/  Larry Greenemeier

afterdawn.com

In 2005 engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Jaguar, a system that would later be upgraded into a world-beating supercomputer. By 2011 it had grown to a room-size system that used seven megawatts of energy, ran nearly 225,000 processor cores and had a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops, or 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. Topping Jaguar, albeit necessary to deliver ever more complex modeling of sophisticated energy challenges, would not be easy.
Simply adding more CPUs, or central processing units, to scale Jaguar to 20 petaflops would require enough energy to power 60,000 homes. To best their own record, the Oak Ridge engineers instead turned to video games—or more precisely, to the graphics processors used in Microsoft Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis and other video game systems.
As of Monday Jaguar becomes Titan, a supercomputer that leverages both CPU and GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators to deliver 10 times the performance of Jaguar with more than five times the power efficiency.
The key to Titan's speed and efficiency is a design that uses more than 18,500 NVIDIA GPUs, along with nearly 300,000 CPU cores, which typically form the foundation of high-performance computers. The GPUs account for about 90 percent of the system's computational performance and enable Titan to remain roughly the same size as Jaguar.

When fully brought up to speed, Titan (a Cray XK7 system) promises to be the world's most powerful open-science supercomputer, even more powerful than the DoE's Sequoia, a 16.3-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q system crowned the world's fastest supercomputer in June. Sequoia differs from Jaguar/Titan, which placed sixth on the list, in that Sequoia is used exclusively by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration to monitor U.S. nukes. Titan will be used by a variety of researchers for a variety of projects.
Titan will initially support a handful of key projects at Oak Ridge, including Denovo, simulation software that models the behavior of neutrons in a nuclear power reactor. Oak Ridge's engineers designed Denovo for Jaguar as a way to help extend the lives of the U.S.'s aging nuclear power plants, which provide about a fifth of the country's electricity. Running Denovo, Titan will take 13 hours to model the complete state of a reactor core at a specified point in time, a job that took Jaguar 60 hours to perform.
"The ability to burn nuclear fuel uniformly is very much dependent on knowing and being able to predict the distribution of neutrons in the core," says Tom Evans, a computational scientist at Oak Ridge's Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), which created Denovo. Titan will enable much more precise simulations.
Titan calculations will also be used to provide nanoscale analysis of materials used to build electric motors and generators as well as model the burning of a variety of fuels in internal combustion engines. Still another application will simulate long-term global climate. A sizable amount of Titan's capacity in the coming year will be devoted to the DoE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program (INCITE), which invites academia, government researchers and industry to apply for access to the supercomputer for their various projects.  More >>

Idiots - Canada once quarantined Microsoft mice thinking they were alive

Globe and Mail/ Michael Babad 

Canadian customs officials are on the lookout for many things: Drugs, porn, toxic goods … and newfangled equipment.

Steve Ballmer, the chief of Microsoft Corp., told a wonderful tale yesterday as he unveiled the software giant's new tablet, Surface. Of course, advances in technology were different in the mid-1980s than they are now, and it was a more innocent age.

Here's how Mr. Ballmer put it as he spoke of the interaction between software and hardware:

"Just let's take the mouse as an example. To be successful, Windows 1.0 really needed a mouse. So we built one. Early reviews of mice were not very positive as people struggled to understand the real value. In fact, actually it was so new that Canadian customs quarantined the Microsoft mouse at the border for four weeks thinking that it was alive."  More >>

La nueva guerra de Troya: 40 años del primer virus informático

www.microsiervos.com/

Este artículo se publicó originalmente en La Voz de Galicia, donde colaboramos habitualmente. Esta es la versión sin límites de espacio y con enlaces.

Este año se cumplen 40 años de la publicación del artículo «Autómatas auto-reproducibles con intercambio mínimo de información», disponible en alemán en Selbstreproduzierende Automaten mit minimaler Informationsübertragung, en el que el austríaco Veith Risak incluye la descripción y el código de lo que algunas personas consideran el primer virus informático.

Resumen del esquema de funcionamiento del programa de Risak

Se trataba de un programa para ordenadores Siemens 4004/35 que tenía como único objetivo copiarse a si mismo, y no era más que una prueba de concepto de ideas ya planteadas por John von Neumann, uno de los pioneros de la informática ya en 1949.

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In-Your-Face: Can Computers Catch You Telling a Lie?

By Larry Greenemeier

 

THE EYES HAVE IT?: Researchers at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (U.B.), claim their video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. Image: Courtesy of selimaksan, via iStockphoto.com

A popular school of thought, dramatized in the recent TV drama Lie to Me, is that a careful study of facial expressions—especially eye movements—tells investigators if a perp is dissembling. Reality is neither as dramatic nor as decisive. Even experienced investigators average only about a 65 percent success rate, according to researchers. Could computers do a better job?

Researchers at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (U.B.), claim their video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. The researchers, who first presented their (still unpublished) results at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition a year ago, believe they have laid the foundation for a more extensive study that will include a larger sample and take into account body language in addition to eye movement to determine whether new technologies can help interrogators in their search for the truth.

The 40 interviews were conducted by Mark Frank, a U.B. professor of communication and a study co-author, and included a diversity in age, gender and ethnicity. Prior to the interview, each subject was given the opportunity to "steal" a check made out to a political party or cause that the volunteer strongly opposed. Afterward, subjects sat down with a retired law-enforcement interrogator. The interviewer first posed conversational questions unrelated to the possible theft, to establish a baseline of normal eye movement, and then asked whether the interviewee had taken the check.

Those subjects who successfully lied received a monetary reward for themselves as well as  for a group they supported. Those caught lying received nothing and were told that money would instead go to the party or group they opposed. The software compared each subject's baseline eye movement with those observed during the questions about the check. If the computer detected a large deviation, the researchers noted this change and flagged that person as a potential liar.

The work of Paul Ekman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine served as an inspiration for the study. Ekman's specialty is the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions, and his work formed the basis of the techniques used by fictional psychologist Cal Lightman in Lie to Me. Frank performed postdoctoral research at U.C. San Francisco's psychiatry department under Ekman's guidance.  More >>

Organic Computer Could Change Everything [VIDEO]

mashable.com/

Why we can't use machine learning to predict presidential elections

Off The Broiler

  The UNIVAC 1 is a machine with important historical significance to the computer industry because it was the first mass-produced computer to be sold to corporations. It's also the computer that has the distinction of being the one that Walter Cronkite used to correctly predict the outcome of the 1952 Presidential Election. 

By Chris Wilson/

Slate ran an article outlining why you can’t build a model to predict presidential elections. The logic there still holds: You can predict any outcome you like depending which data you choose to use. One of the most powerful aspects of the algorithms we studied in this class was their ability to compute tremendous amounts of data and scale it down to the most important factors. Researchers also have ways of preventing their models from “overfitting” the data. In other words, one could probably create an algorithm that predicted past elections with great accuracy, but it might be so finely tuned to the quirks and turns of that historical data that it would be meaningless in 2012. It may seem preposterous to think that any mountainous pile of polls, unemployment rates, approval ratings, the stock markets, and a million other factors could, if correctly parsed by a smart machine, predict human behavior. But by and large, people behave rationally, and machines, if we learned anything, can model rational systems very well. And they’re getting better every day.  

Wired.com

Añadir leyendaRemington Rand's Univac computer was big and expensive. But it built its reputation quickly as a predictor of presidential elections.
Photo: U.S. Army

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Tiny Biocomputers Move Closer to Reality

Scientific American Magazine/ By Tim Requarth and Greg Wayne

 

Image: Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

Researchers in nanomedicine have long dreamed of an age when molecular-scale computing devices could be embedded in our bodies to monitor health and treat diseases before they progress. The advantage of such computers, which would be made of biological materials, would lie in their ability to speak the biochemical language of life.

Several research groups have recently reported progress in this field. A team at the California Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Science, made use of DNA nanostructures called seesaw gates to construct logic circuits analogous to those used in microprocessors. Just as silicon-based components use electric current to represent 1’s and 0’s, bio-based circuits use concentrations of DNA molecules in a test tube. When new DNA strands are added to the test tube as “input,” the solution undergoes a cascade of chemical interactions to release different DNA strands as “output.” In theory, the input could be a molecular indicator of a disease, and the output could be an appropriate therapeutic molecule. A common problem in constructing a computer in a test tube is that it is hard to control which interactions among molecules occur. The brilliance of the seesaw gate is that a particular gate responds only to particular input DNA strands.  More >>

IBM Simulates 4.5 percent of the Human Brain, and All of the Cat Brain

Scientific American Magazine/ By Mark Fischetti

Supercomputers can store more information than the human brain and can calculate a single equation faster, but even the biggest, fastest supercomputers in the world cannot match the overall processing power of the brain. And they are nowhere near as compact or energy efficient.

Nevertheless, IBM is trying to simulate the human brain with its own cutting-edge supercomputer, called Blue Gene. For the simulation, it used 147,456 processors working in parallel with one another. IBM researchers say each processor is roughly equivalent to the one found in a personal computer, with one gigabyte of working memory.

So configured, Blue Gene simulated 4.5 percent of the brain's neurons and the connections among them called synapses—that's about one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. In total, the brain has roughly 20 billion neurons and 200 trillion synapses.

IBM describes the work in an intriguing paper (pdf) that compares various animal simulations done by its cognitive computing research group in Almaden, Calif. The group has managed to completely simulate the brain of a mouse (512 processors), rat (2,048) and cat (24,576). To rival the cortex inside your head, IBM predicts it will need to hook up 880,000 processors, which it hopes to achieve by 2019.

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