Technology News

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter, intuitive and bit scary with each passing development, testing or challenges thrown at it. Artificial intelligence is known for learning from its mistakes and improvising over it to overcome the challenges or tasks at hand just like a human mind. In China during a series of exhibition matches an artificial intelligence has been able to successfully defeat a team of six poker players. This particular Artificial intelligence system is named Lengpudashi which shocked everyone by beating not just one but six poker players to win a grand prize of $290,000 in the five day competition.

This AI isn’t the first to win a poker game

If you think poker is just for humans then think again. This is the second time in recent history that an Artificial intelligence has been able to successfully defeat professional competitive poker players with ease and grace. The first Artificial intelligence was an earlier version of the same which was named Libratus. Libratus went on to beat four top end world’s best poker players in a 20 day game during the month of January this year.

People behind this AI system

These AI systems were designed by a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, US along with a PHD student named Noam Brown. Both of these men has formed their own firm named Strategic Machine and all the prize money won by the Artificial intelligence will be used for further study and development at the firm.

The poker players who lost against the Artificial intelligence included Yue Du who happens to be an amateur poker player but had came into recognition after successfully winning the World Series of Poker in the $5000 buy in, Texas Hold’em, No Limit category in 2016. The team led by Mr. Du against the AI system was packed with the brightest minds which included investors, computers scientists as well as engineers. They believed that making use of the game theory along with their knowledge about the machine intelligence will help in anticipating as well as coming up with counter measures to score a win over the AI system.

The science behind AI system

When Artificial intelligence plays game like Chess wherein all the pieces are placed right in-front of both the players then the odds of Artificial intelligence winning it doesn’t seems quite enthralling. But in a poker game all the cards remains invisible to players expect the one they are holding for themselves. Scientists has named such games as impact information game wherein players has to rely on their betting strategy as well as the ability to read through the opponents bluffing at the same time bluffing with oozing confidence.

Researchers generally make use of these kinds of matches in order to home the Artificial intelligence skills at reasoning as well as strategic decision making. Similarly this Artificial intelligence system, Lengpudashi, has learned from its experience and started judging the weak or string hands from the player bluffs with enhanced precision and accuracy.

 

If you are an avid flyer then this development will be really bitter news for you. FCC is simply withdrawing the proposal which would have allowed aircraft traveler to make use of the Cellphone at high altitude. Most of the people had never heard about this proposal which emerged back in 2013 when Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler had decided to push towards the free usage of Cellphone devices on the aircrafts. The major reason behind rolling back this proposed advancement was that the usage if Cellphone on the planes has the ability to interfere with the pilots radios.

Can we think just like the computer and become smarter in the process? This isn’t a farfetched theory rather it has already been put to use to train the younger generation in becoming more sync with the computational knowledge and learning for the further advancement of the human race.

Simple and easy to use and learn programs has started emerging all across the world which helps in younger people get acquainted with the core computational procedures and study without being extremely complex or mind boggling.

Some of the researchers are making use of the cooking in order to get around all-important concept in the field of the computer science, which is ‘abstraction’.

It is worth noting that concealing the layers of information helps in getting through the intersection of things without the need of knowing and understanding everything related to the large picture. Abstraction helps in doing away with the complicated system required to understand the intricate working of any computer application, program or software and it also helps in enhancing the knowledge of the users without getting down to extreme basics.

To be truthful the computational thinking has just started captivating the educators which includes not just the kindergarten teacher but also the ones in the colleges. It brings a chance of learning a new language and orientations which eventually leads to tackling problems in real life scenarios with better judgment and understanding.

Thinking like a computer isn’t a new thing

It would come as surprise that the computational thinking isn’t a new think. I was first pioneered by an artificial intelligence and MIT professor named Seymour Papert who came up with this term way back in 1980. He brought forward the idea of how children can make use of the computers to learn new thinks. However the computational thinking was made popular by the Jeanette M. Wing who was in charge of the basic research at Microsoft.

Existing children programs

A children program has been initiated at the Eliot Pearson Children’s School wherein actual blocks are used. The wooden blocks have been created by a child development & computer science professor going by the name of Marina Umaschi Bers. These wooden blocks comes with instruction like spin, forward and shake which are actually used in order to program small robots. These small robots has small and wheeled cards which comes with built in scanners and the sequence or instruction stated on the blocks helps in forming the robot. So the children starts with the green block which acts as begin command and finishes with the red block.

The steps taken by the Dr. Bers has been appreciated by all as her children based activities helps in making children familiar with the basic computing at a very young age. Her approach will help the next generation of human kind in consciously or unconsciously absorbing the computation thinking skills and abilities and it will result in getting highly intelligent digital beings.

Space X rocket launches are mainly associated with misfires and failures but this new age space company is certainly learning from its mistakes at an astounding pace. Space X has launched it test rocket from the Florida’s Kennedy Space Center just a few days ago quietly without much fanfare or anticipation on global scale. The Flacon 9 rocket has been able to achieve what other rockets failed to do in the past for it. Space X is calling it a “flight-proven” rocket which brings a unique feature into the play for the upcoming space rocket development.
Falcon 9 can be reused?Traditional rockets are meant for just one thing and that is to take the payload into the orbit and the job is done. Each rocket takes millions of dollars to develop and millions of hours to ensure it is working in right conditions. However reusing any rocket at the moment isn’t possible as they are designed for one way trip to the space.Space X Falcon 9 is simply works in the opposite direction it can be reused. After the launch during the early morning hours Falcon flew into the orbit, placed the payload and landed vertically back gain for next trip. This is a major landmark in the history of space exploration or rocket development wherein a rocket has been developed by the mankind which can be used again and again burning blowing away.Earlier failed attempts

Success doesn’t come without some failures in the way. Space X aim of developing this kind of rockets met with a number of failures in the past wherein rocket booster tends to explode while landing back from the space.

However Space X has stated success quite a number of times with Falcon 9 when it was able to land the rocket on a landing pat at Cape Canaveral in December 2015. Just a few months later this feat was achieved again and that also at sea. Elon Musk the founder of Space X grew quite emotional at the latest successful launch and landing of the Falcon 9 and he went on to say this is an incredible milestone in the history of space.

The achievement of Falcon 9

The Falcon 9 rocket performed some incredible aerial acrobatics after the launch then turned around and flew back to Earth. It was guided by the highly sophisticated computer algorithms along with GPS navigation to ensure it find its path through the clouds and make its touch down with immense precision.

The goal of Space X in developing the Falcon X rocket is to lower the cost of the spaceflight and ensure that this technology is made accessible to wider range of space firms. And at last it will help in reaching the Mars in the long run.

Elon Musk has once said that the first stages of rocket which are usually discarded into the sea after giving it the initial power to escape the Earth gravity is just like throwing away an aircraft after every use. Falcon 9 is the answer for that.

It is widely known that the microprocessors are getting smaller, faster and extremely power efficient with each passing year. But it thus has certain limitation which comes when size is brought down and overcoming such isn’t a small feat. Two of the semiconductor manufacturing giant has made some announcement which is completely unrelated but signifies a major development in the same field of work.

Intel first announced that they had acquired an Israel based start-up called Mobileye which deals with manufacturing the chips & software for the self-driving cars. While in another announcement NVidia revealed that it has developed a latest generation of system which will help in speeding up the machine learning or to be more precise the artificial intelligence.

Driven by specialized computing

Both the semiconductor company are working towards a new way while developing the microprocessor which helps in getting work done more efficiently than ever before. Both of these latest products will be driven by a specialized computing wherein specific software tasks will be embedded right into the physical chips rather than depending on the chip to get all the work done on a CPU.

For a long time this kind of entity has remained available on variety of technology in different from but this this is first time both the semiconductor company is working towards a simple yet noble solution.

The need of smarter microprocessor

The reason behind this development is pretty simple. CPU’s are not getting faster at the pace which they were showing in the past. Therefore they are unable to deal with highly efficient microprocessor in a more effective and productive fashion. This shows that long held Moore’s Law is dying quite unexpectedly.

Moore’s Law has stated a long time ago that the after every two years or so the transistors present in the chip will double itself. This led to the common misconception that the computing device will become faster at the same becoming smaller in size and certainly they will be power efficient.

For quite some time this theory worked like a charm and the results led to its wide acceptance but the recent development is putting it in a tricky spot. Moore Law is certainly coming to its early demise as the theory on which it is based is going out of the equation.

Daniel Reed who chairs the computational science and bioinformatics at the University of Iowa has opined that the Moore is not coming to standstill rather it ageing and eventually it will die at the end but it will be for the good of the humankind as we will have much better computational capability in near future.

Apart from Intel a number of other chip manufacturing are pushing billions of dollars in the research work which helping in finding new innovative, cost effective and robust ways of developing efficient chips, processors and semiconductors. Device performance will get improved with these improvements which is a good sign.

The first question that must strike your mind is, “what are Bots?” Several automated programs which are running over the internet are what we call bots. Bots can be of various types such as the one which runs automatically whereas the others execute on receiving the command input. Malicious bots, web crawlers and chat room bots are few examples of computer bots. Bots are nothing but the short form of Robots or to say more specifically they are Software Bots. The whole world that is the Wikipedia is in the hands of the computer bots.

There are about forty million articles available in two hundred and ninety-three languages in Wikipedia. It becomes impossible for a human being to edit those pages and keep a track record of all the alterations that are needed to be made. So the Wikipedia needs some computer bots especially the benevolent bots. They are designed in such a way that they are capable of improving the articles of Wikipedia. The editing bots have various functions to carry out such as checking the spellings, adding links to other Wikipedia pages, enforcing bans and automatically importing the content. In this way, human editors get rid of adding information and making several editorial changes.

How are bots different from human beings?

computer Bots tend to behave like human beings and it is often seen that two bots can have completely opposing functions. They are programmed with several tasks such as following different grammatical rules or on how to link the same word to the different Wikipedia pages. But as soon as one of the computer bots makes changes to any of the Wikipedia pages, the other one immediately revert it back. According to the studies, it is noticed that beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies the battleground where silent wars have been raging for years. Bots interact with each other and their interactions are completely unpredictable because they act in distinctive ways. They behave in different ways in different online environments.

Bots are automatons and they can easily roam unchecked as there are no internet police trying to shut down the bots. Research papers show that the simplest of the algorithm can create complex bot-to-bot interactions and thus result in severe consequences. These types of sterile fights can last for years and in some cases, even reach the deadlock. Their conflicts are far more different from the human editors and are persistent in nature.

The final word

Studies show that the fight between the computer bots varies from various language editions available in Wikipedia. There are fewer bot-to-bot conflicts in the German edition of Wikipedia than the Portuguese Wikipedia edition. It is said that more the number of edits, more are the fights.

Nowadays, the online environment has become the ecosystem of bots. The knowledge of their interactions with each other is still poor. There are numerous researches going about the sociology of bots. All you need to do is to spot the problem early enough so that their conflicts do not last for years.

Just a few years ago we were doing all things on our own. But advent of the digital assistants like Google Assistant, Cortana and Siri has simply changed the way we make of the smartphone in today’s time. People tend to make use of the digital assistants on daily basis to get around with nominal to complex tasks with ease and simplicity. One is quite uniform among all the digital assistant i.e. they all have female voice. It is widely believed that men and women alike prefers the female voices but the time has come for us to get the male voice options as well.

Why tech firms use female voice for AI?

The Female Digital Assistants voice in the phones, speakers, TVs, smartphones and even in refrigerators raises the question: ‘why we are using female voice?’ Tech industry is extremely dominated by the male and it is fact that women are often associated with filling up the secretarial positions. A number of academic studies have suggested that women warm up with a female voiced android or software easily than the male voice. It can be easily stated that we are carrying forward the primitive norms from our work, culture, and tradition to right in the technical future by making use of the female voice for getting through our little tasks.

Ever wonder why robots need a gender

If we look at the history then in the early 90’s tech firms made use of androgynous character and their gender were never revealed to the users. This resulted in a number of awkward situations and tech firms decided to away with such things completely for some time. Secondly the brains behind the development of the technology or the robot never cared about specifying the gender to their product but it was the users who did it.

Furthermore during the development process of any new technology or android researchers tend to refer such things as ‘it’ while the users prefers using the term ‘he’ or ‘she’ while referring to it. An example can help in illustrating this point where the Google has simply gives the name Digital Assistants to its AI but the distinctively feminine voice of the AI has led to people referring to it as she.

Scarcity of Gender neutral voice

It has also been found people are less likely to accept a genderless voice and even more disturbing thing is that getting ‘genderless voice’ is extremely hard. Naunce Communications has made a name for itself by providing voices to the companies for their speech interfaces and Digital Assistants. They provide this for large variety of products which includes the cars, TVs, smartphone and a number of other products better left unsaid.

Quite interestingly they also doesn’t have any stock for gender neutral voice which means we have to stick with the feminine voice for AI or digital assistants in future. Or in case some tech firm makes a bold move and brings ludicrous male voice to its AI for a change.

Mission Impossible movies have made the self destruction options quite popular in the modern age but we still don’t have that luxury. Soon we will have such gadgets like laptops and smartphones which can self destruct on its own but this technology will only be made available to corporate employees and government officials. The new self destruct mechanisms possess the ability to destroy the electronic gadgets within 10 seconds by receiving the wireless commands triggered by the sensors.

Arabian researchers had made the impossible possible

This technology has been developed by a team of researchers at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. It works swiftly and can effectively work across a variety of common semiconductor technology which is usually used in the most electronic devices. Researchers have stated that first customers are expected to be those who are in need of data protection such as the intelligence communities, hedge funds, social security administration, large corporations and all those who handles massive data.

How This Self Destruct Technology Works?

The self destruct mechanism developed by the team works on making the expandable polymer found in the modern electronics to their own benefit. When this polymer is heated over 80 degrees Celsius then it tends to expand to seven times more than its original volume. The trigger mechanism introduced in this technology helps in the polymer expansion which comes right from the heather electrodes drawing power from the battery of either Smartphone or laptop. They are making study available for the wider audience by publishing it in the upcoming issue of the journal called Advanced Materials Technologies.

The Testing Scenarios Conducted for Self Destruct

The researchers at KRAUT have tested this self-destruct mechanism for variety for scenarios where the self destruct can be triggered remotely. In the first testing a GPS sensor was utilized to trigger the device in case they move more than 50 meters away from their starting point. In the second testing researchers made use of the light sensor to automatically trigger the self destruct mechanism. This mechanism will helpful in such scenario where a top secret device is moved out of the box and placed under the light. The third scenario made use of the pressure sensor to cause the self destruction of the device in case it meets with any kind of unwanted force. This means if anyone tries to get into the device by forcefully opening the casing then device can be triggered to explode in order to safeguard it from being compromised.

In the fourth scenario researchers tested the compromising of the device or self-destruct functionality to its core. It was ensured that no one else expect the rightful person is able to trigger the self-destruct command making use of a smartphone app. Researchers has found the right way to ensure that this functionality only worked when a particular password is entered into the chip for destroying the device on demand. Very soon we will living in exciting times where espionage and intelligence will look just like the movies in real life.