“A supercomputer that soundly thrashed two of humankind’s most successful players at their own game.” “What is Watson?” Yes, after taking a strong lead after day two, IBM’s machine took a resounding win at the end of the third and final day of its Jeopardy challenge. Final score: Watson $77,147, Ken Jennings $24,000, Brad Rutter […]
The IBM computer “Watson” has established a clear lead after two days of its gameshow challenge against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But thankfully for those fearing 2011 may be the year the machines take over, it has made a couple of flubs. The three-episode challenge is an attempt to test IBM’s abilities […]
I didn’t know that people still used Netscape. Or IE. Whatever, Chrome FTW! [Via Imgur]
“It’s a cross between a beeper and a car phone.” Oh my grok. And it’s only $3300!! [via]
Apparently, that water-powered jetpack we reported on about 2 years ago is about to go on sale to the public, but behold, if you want one, it’ll cost around 136 grands. It’s taken over 10 years for its Canadian inventor, Raymond Li, to realize his dream and see his jetpack go on sale, but judging […]
This week, an episode of NOVA covered Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed to interpret and understand natural human language, with all its ambiguity: wordplay, puns, double-meanings, intuitive differentiations and subtlety. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is the result of the DeepQA Project, the goal of which is to create a computer system […]
Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino, a trio of Italian designers, have come up with an ingenious way to generate energy without consuming valuable real estate. Between the pillars of a long-expanse bridge, a multitude of turbines capture wind energy from the faster-moving high-altitude currents. In addition, the (currently theoretical) road is paved with a […]
The Internet has finally run out of addresses. Well, sort of. As we noted last year, the issue involves public IP addresses, which points to a physical computer or server that stores a website, rather than the domain names (such as geeksaresexy.net) that most human users type in. The current system, Internet Protocol version 4 […]
February 3, 1966: The first spacecraft to land on any non-Earth planetary body, the Soviet Union’s unmanned Luna 9 reaches the Moon. Equipped with radio and television capability, heat control system, power sources and a radiation detector, the payload touched down in Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”). Immediately thereafter, the four-panel seal opened and Luna […]
This video popped up on YouTube last month, but has been making the blog rounds in the past few days. It’s a clip from a 1994 episode of The Today Show, featuring Brian Gumbel trying his best to wrap his head around this “Internet” thing (and that weird little @ symbol). “What, do you write […]