Ewan McPhail sur Twitter : "Oh great, now *it* follows *me*. The #singularity is closing in.
Vernorvinge. Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity. Switching on: Africa's vast new tech opportunity. This article was taken from the August 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. In 2011, visitors to Africa looking for war, famine and pestilence have to dig a lot deeper than in the past. At Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, hardened missionaries have been replaced by gap-year students clustered around iPads, and on the streets the bad old days have given way to another holy trinity: Premier League football, Toyota Hiace minibuses and cellphones.
Africa's national economies have grown consistently over the last decade. Even in the depths of the financial crisis, GDP growth exceeded three percent: more than in any other region of the world. Improvements in security, Chinese investments and soaring commodity prices have all played a part in transforming the continent's prospects. Agosta Liko Pesapal Kenya. Why you need to be thinking about mobile. | Hoop Associates. It's hard to remember a time when it wasn't instantly possible to connect to the web (signal depending of course) straight out of you pocket. With the release of the original iPhone – arguably the first smartphone to be embraced by the general public – back in 2007, the number of mobile users has increased exponentially. The dramatic rise in smartphone owners has been accompanied by an even bigger increase in the consumption of mobile internet.
In 2009, roughly 8% of the internet's users were on a mobile device. Today, that number sits at around 23% – an increase of almost 300% in just two years. At the end of last year, market research firm IDC published findings showing that for the first time ever, the sales of mobile devices were projected to overtake and significantly exceed the sales of desktops (it's worth noting that, in 2010, the sales of smartphones increased by 87.2%, compared with 5.5% for PCs). You need to start thinking about mobile. How Long Till Human-Level AI? | h+ Magazine. Ben Goertzel, Seth Baum, Ted Goertzel February 5, 2010 When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. Those are great as far as they go, but when will we have really intelligent systems like C3PO, R2D2 and even beyond?
When will we have Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) we can talk to? Ones as smart as we are, or smarter? Well, as Yogi Berra said, “it’s tough to predict, especially about the future.” We asked the experts when they estimated AI would reach each of four milestones: passing the Turing test by carrying on a conversation well enough to pass as a humansolving problems as well as a third grade elementary school studentperforming Nobel-quality scientific workgoing beyond the human level to superhuman intelligence We also asked how the timing of achieving these milestones would be affected by massive funding of $100 billion/year going into AGI R&D. Technology Review: The Singularity and the Fixed Point. Some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil have hypothesized that we will someday soon pass through a singularity–that is, a time period of rapid technological change beyond which we cannot envision the future of society. Most visions of this singularity focus on the creation of machines intelligent enough to devise machines even more intelligent than themselves, and so forth recursively, thus launching a positive feedback loop of intelligence amplification.
It’s an intriguing thought. (One of the first things I wanted to do when I got to MIT as an undergraduate was to build a robot scientist that could make discoveries faster and better than anyone else.) Even the CTO of Intel, Justin Rattner, has publicly speculated recently that we’re well on our way to this singularity, and conferences like the Singularity Summit (at which I’ll be speaking in October) are exploring how such transformations might take place. There’s a second issue. Welcome to the American Go Association. Wang Chen Wins 2014 World Students Go Oza Monday April 14, 2014 Wang Chen, one of the ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ who rule China’s amateur rating list, won the 12th World Students Go Oza Championship, held in late February in Toyko. Wang (right) defeated Ken (Kai Kun) Xie of New Zealand, Japan’s Yamikumo Tsubasa, Go Risa, also from Japan, and Chung Chen-En of Taiwan.
Yamikumo, Go, and Chung did not lose to anyone else, so they finished as part of the four-way tie for runner-up. Tie-breaking points put Yamikumo second, Chung third, and Go fourth. Viktor Ivanov (Russia, 9th place) and Kwan King-Man (Hong Kong, 10th place) matched Maojie Xia by winning two games apiece, and although Yanqi Zhang (France, 12th place) won only once, the opponent she beat was Zhou Shiying, the Chinese female player. Go Spotting: Conway’s Game of Life Cambridge mathematician John Conway apparently conceived Game of Life — his ‘cellular automaton’ — on a go board, according to this video sent in by Peter Kron. Doomsday fears spark lawsuit - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com. Did You Know 2.0. Shifthappens » home.