Lifeboat Foundation

A master player of the game Go has won his first match against a Google computer program, after losing three in a row in a best-of-five competition.

Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s top players, said his win against AlphaGo was “invaluable”.

The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess, and AlphaGo’s wins were seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.

Special thanks to archive.org for hosting these episodes. Downloads of all these episodes and more can be found at: http://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

It can be easy to take things like modern email for granted, and nothing highlights that more than this clip from the “Database,” an old tech show that aired in the 80s.

In the segment above, you can see what sending and receiving an email was like in 1984, back when you were greeted with prompts like “phone computer” and literally had to dial in using a rotary phone. These were the days when webpages were numbered and email was such a luxury that people would excitedly sign off on messages with phrases like “electronically yours.”

Continue reading “Video: What early email looked like” »

The futurist sat down with Neil deGrasse Tyson to discuss what it means to think and create in a near-future where knowledge and expertise are downloadable.

On January 20th, 2016, researchers Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown of Caltech announced that they had found evidence that hinted at the existence of a massive planet at the edge of the Solar System. Based on mathematical modeling and computer simulations, they predicted that this planet would be a super-Earth, two to four times Earth’s size and 10 times as massive. They also estimated that, given its distance and highly elliptical orbit, it would take 10,000 – 20,000 years to orbit the Sun.

Since that time, many researchers have responded with their own studies about the possible existence of this mysterious “Planet 9”. One of the latest comes from the University of Arizona, where a research team from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory have indicated that the extreme eccentricity of distant Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) might indicate that they crossed paths with a massive planet in the past.

Life’s chemistry, it appears, is quite kludgy. Such computer metaphors help explain Dr. Venter’s perspective on synthetic biology. Is a genomic version of Moore’s Law in the offing?

This is all the best games from every year 1952–2015.
Here is the list:

1952: Nimrod Computer Game
1958: Tennis For Two
1971: Computer Space
1972: Pong
1973: Space Race
1974: Clean Sweep
1975: Anti-Ai
1976: Blockade
1977: Indy 500
1978: Sea Wolf 2
1979: Crash
1980: Pac-Man
1981: Ms. Pacman
1982: Paratrooper
1983: Super Gridder
1983: Hunchback
1984: Sokoban
1985: Super Mario Bros
1986: Outrun
1987: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.
1988: Super Mario Bros 3
1989: Xenon 2
1990: Prince Of Persia
1991: Prehistorik
1992: Wolfenstein 3D
1993: Day of the Tentacle
1994: The Lion King
1995: Command & Conquer
1996: Tomb Raider
1997: Gta
1998: Half Life
1999: Quake 3
2000: Max Payne
2001: Gta 3
2002: Serious Sam: The First Encounter
2003: Medal Of Honor Allied Assault
2004: Half Life 2
2005: World Of Warcraft
2006: Need For Speed Most Wanted
2007: Crysis
2008: Assassin’s Creed
2009: Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2
2010: Red Dead Redemption
2011: World Of Tanks
2012: Battlefield 3
2013: Gta 5
2014: Wolfenstein The New Order
2015: Tom Clancy’s The Division

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research said that Quantum computing is “stupendously exciting right now.”

Apparently it is Microsoft Research’s largest area of investment and Lee is pretty certain it is on the verge of some major scientific achievements.