The Power of Massive Twitter Accounts – Or Lack Thereof. One of the most interesting and sensational aspects of Twitter are its mega accounts: Twitter accounts with huge numbers of followers. These days mega accounts have anywhere from 1 million to 3 million followers, but in the future they will boast much larger followings. Is a Twitter account with 10 million followers around the corner? Absolutely! How about 100 million or more?
But as with many things in life, it isn’t just size that matters. What is the use of millions of followers if most of them are not really listening? Its not just quantity that matters, it is also quality. In the last few months @techcrunch (1,000,000+ followers), @tonyrobbins (1,323,000+ followers), and @timoreilly (1,087,000+ followers) have each retweeted one of our stories. Thanks for the retweet Tony! One might also expect that being picked up by a major account such as @tonyrobbins might result in large numbers of new followers following your own Twitter account. 1. 2. Information Overload! Singularity Blog Covering Robots, Genetics, Stem Cells, Transhumanism, The Brain, The Future.
Download Your Own Robot Scientist | Wired Science. Ever wanted to have a robot to do your research for you? If you are a scientist, you have almost certainly had this dream. Now it’s a real option: Eureqa, a program that distills scientific laws from raw data, is freely available to researchers. The program was unveiled in April, when it used readouts of a double-pendulum to infer Newton’s second law of motion and the law of conservation of momentum.
It could be an invaluable tool for revealing other, more complicated laws that have eluded humans. “We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. Eureqa is descended from Lipson’s work on self-contemplating robots that figure out how to repair themselves. The program starts by searching within a dataset for numbers that seem connected to each other, then proposing a series of simple equations to describe the links. What took Newton years to calculate, Eureqa returned in a few hours on a decent desktop computer. “Algebra was known. Eureqa – Software to Replace Scientists. The job of a scientist has its fun parts, and its not-so-fun parts. Making new discoveries, understanding the way things work, and experimenting with the natural world are all pretty cool ways to spend your day. Sifting through endless files of data looking for small correlations and insight…not so much.
Which may explain the popularity of the new software from Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab called Eureqa. Toted as something of a virtual scientist, Eureqa finds hidden mathematical relations in large spreadsheets of data. The software uses a technique, symbolic regression, that slowly evolves equations over time to see which best fits the information you give it. How powerful is Eureqa? Well it can derive Newton’s Second Law from the motion of a pendulum without any input on the physical laws of mechanics in just a few hours.
Eureqa examines data from an experiment, and produces equations that explain what happened. There are some limitations. Home Page of the Loebner Prize. What is the Loebner Prize? The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence ( AI ) is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. The test is named after Alan Turing the brilliant British mathematician. Among his many accomplishments was basic research in computing science. In 1950, in the article Computing Machinery and Intelligence which appeared in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing asked the question "Can a Machine Think? " He answered in the affirmative, but a central question was: "If a computer could think, how could we tell? " Turing's suggestion was, that if the responses from the computer were indistinguishable from that of a human,the computer could be said to be thinking.
In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. The Loebner Prize was originally made possible by funding from Crown Industries, Inc., of East Orange NJ. Information on the 2015 Loebner Prize. "The Most Human Human": Can computers truly think? - Laura Miller. This week’s recommendation must be delivered with a caveat: Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive,” is billed as an account of the author’s participation in a Turing Test, but it’s best enjoyed if you don’t expect to read much about the test itself. A Turing Test — named for Alan Turing, the 20th-century mathematician who proposed it — asks a judge to converse with two unseen entities, a computer and a human being, then attempt to determine which is which.
Turing estimated that by 2000 there would exist a computer sophisticated enough to pass itself off as a person in the course of a five-minute conversation. At that point, Turing contended, “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” Christian played the piquant role of “confederate” in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, an annual Turing Test sponsored by an eccentric entrepreneur. Further reading. Singularity: Kurzweil on 2045, When Humans, Machines Merge.