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santecarloni

Magic: the Gathering is Turing Complete - 1 views

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    so happy that the times of ACT magic are over ... or are they?
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    of course not !!!! :) The ACT Magic nights are alive and well, and getting crazier all the time. And I'm happy to say, no blood has been spilled yet... though at times we've come close :).
Dario Izzo

Italy and its TG4 middle ages news chanel - 6 views

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    Its in italian sorry ... but its worth trying to understand ..basically its how an important italian news channel (TG4) gave the rosetta news ... WOW ... middle ages Basically they say ESA spoilt the magic of comets (jesus birth and similar stuff) revealing to the world that it is just a rock and nothing more spending 100 Meuros in the process.
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    A pearl of the italian national news channels. A comet is nothing more than a dusty rock. Wow, brilliant, such level of understanding of what is happening! Can we use the typhoon control or some other project to get rid of them? They're so confused and ignorant that it's not even clear what their point is, apart from "spoiling the magic of comets", which is not the case.
Marcus Maertens

Magic tricks created using artificial intelligence for the first time - 3 views

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    Let an AI develop your magic tricks! (The one with the smart phone is actually neat)
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    They published it in Frontiers of Psychology...?
LeopoldS

Particle self-bunching in the Schwinger effect in spacetime-dependent electric fields - 3 views

shared by LeopoldS on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
pacome delva liked it
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    magic :-)
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    "self-bunching effect" haha
Alexander Wittig

Picture This: NVIDIA GPUs Sort Through Tens of Millions of Flickr Photos - 2 views

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    Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!
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    and here comes my standard question: how can we use this for space? fast detection of natural disasters onboard?
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    Even on ground. You could for example teach it what nuclear reactors or missiles or other weapons you don't want look like on satellite pictures and automatically scan the world for them (basically replacing intelligence analysts).
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    In fact, I think this could make a nice ACT project: counting seals from satellite imagery is an actual (and quite recent) thing: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092613 In this publication they did it manually from a GeoEye 1 b/w image, which sounds quite tedious. Maybe one can train one of those image recognition algorithms to do it automatically. Or maybe it's a bit easier to count larger things, like elephants (also a thing).
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    In HiPEAC (High Performance, embedded architecture and computation) conference I attended in the beginning of this year there was a big trend of CUDA GPU vs FPGA for hardware accelerated image processing. Most of it orbitting around discussing who was faster and cheaper with people from NVIDIA in one side and people from Xilinx and Intel in the other. I remember of talking with an IBM scientist working on hardware accelerated data processing working together with the Radio telescope institute in Netherlands about the solution where they working on (GPU CUDA). I gathered that NVIDIA GPU suits best in applications that somehow do not rely in hardware, having the advantage of being programmed in a 'easy' way accessible to a scientist. FPGA's are highly reliable components with the advantage of being available in radhard versions, but requiring specific knowledge of physical circuit design and tailored 'harsh' programming languages. I don't know what is the level of rad hardness in NVIDIA's GPUs... Therefore FPGAs are indeed the standard choice for image processing in space missions (a talk with the microelectronics department guys could expand on this), whereas GPUs are currently used in some ground based (radio astronomy or other types of telescopes). I think that on for a specific purpose as the one you mentioned, this FPGA vs GPU should be assessed first before going further.
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    You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.
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    The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.
LeopoldS

Macroscopic invisibility cloaking of visible light : Nature Communications : Nature Pub... - 3 views

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    and all this without magic metamaterials ...
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    Wellwellwell! I don't know how I have to complain, since I could not yet read the full article, but I'm sure I will :-).
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    It's funny to see how people get more and more humble in the desperate attempt to save their stupid ideas... At the beginning was the brave and bold aim to cloak something in free space (in a sphere or a cylinder). This requires inhomogeneous, anisotropic, magnetic materials; hopeless!! So one reduces to one polarization, now we have inhomogenous, anisotropic materials; still hopeless! At this point one downgraded the pretension: instead of cloaking in free space, we make a "carpet cloak" and hide an object behind an invisible dent in a mirror. But if that shall be continuous, we still need inhomogeneity and this is very hard. So now instead of a dent we take a cone and then it is claimed to work ... for ONE polarization. But of course the cloak can't work at all incident angles... irony of fate: everything is now made from birefringent media, the antithesis of what the metamaterials dogma was at the beginning!
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    Hi Luzi, can you please send me the paper. We are writing a project based on sulfates and carbonates, and all this BS sounds great for the introduction (The authors used Calcite as birefringent material)
Dario Izzo

Elon Musk describes AI as 'summoning the devil' - 4 views

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    A good idea for a card in one of our ACT magic decks!!! In his words AI is "our biggest existential threat" - lol
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    Discussing with myself :) .... He must have forgotten climate change .... or maybe not?
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    Well, I have to quote one of the 21st century classics on this one: "I'm sorry mr Musk I can't hear you because of all the Latin chanting. In the meanwhile can you hand me another goat to drain? I'm quite behind on my blood pentagram drawing" - Paul N., AD 2014.
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    Mr. Musk declined to comment :P
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    given that they apparently can't decide between two moral options (probably such as humans), should we be more concerned about their stupidity or their intelligence http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2842
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    I personally don't even trust people to make "moral" choices in conditions of warfare. History is way too full of examples.
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    the "even" in your comment is the key word
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    Edge.org recently had an interesting piece that ties into all of this recent AI fear mongering: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai
Annalisa Riccardi

The Computer That Stores and Processes Information At the Same Time | MIT Technology Re... - 3 views

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    The human brain both stores and processes information at the same time. Now computer scientists say they can do the same thing The human brain is an extraordinary computing machine. Nobody understands exactly how it works its magic but part of the trick is the ability to store and process information at the same time.
Luís F. Simões

Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body Problem - ScienceNOW - 1 views

  • The discovery of 13 new families, made by physicists Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinović at the University of Belgrade, brings the new total to 16.
  • All the solutions can be viewed online
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    They search numerically for initial conditions resulting in periodic orbits. Reminds to me the methods we employed for the "search for invariant relative motion" and which brought us to discover the magic inclinations (47.9 degrees). I wonder what are the implications. In any case nice plots :)
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    Haven't read in detail, but it's not clear to me what it means exactly. If they were discovered numerically (I assume it means via numerical integration), how can they be sure the orbits are truly periodic?
Luís F. Simões

Alice and Bob in Cipherspace » American Scientist - 1 views

  • A new form of encryption allows you to compute with data you cannot read
  • The technique that makes this magic trick possible is called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. It’s not exactly a new idea, but for many years it was viewed as a fantasy that would never come true. That changed in 2009, with a breakthrough discovery by Craig Gentry, who was then a graduate student at Stanford University. (He is now at IBM Research.) Since then, further refinements and more new ideas have been coming at a rapid pace.
Luís F. Simões

The Duel: Timo Boll vs. KUKA Robot - YouTube - 3 views

  • Man against machine.The unbelievably fast KUKA robot faces off against one of the best table tennis players of all time.
  • More: www.kuka-timoboll.com
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    As people point out in the comments: a bit fake. But nevertheless a good production and a definitely cool advertisement for KUKA! I enjoyed it!
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    yeah check out the making of, it's a nice movie and what would robotics movies be without movie magic :) somewhere they mentioned a vision system, which I think based on the making-of video they haven't really used for the video shoot
Thijs Versloot

Black metals - 3 views

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    Using random nanostructuring highly absorptive materials were made which are of interest for photovoltaic or thermovoltaic applications
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    Yes, Black Metal is very good - pure hate! \m/
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    Yes! Black Metal... definitely something the ACT should look into
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    Black Metal...sounds like something for the ACT Magic Cards. But apart from that - is it possible to shift the PV type of absorption into gamma ray spectrum?
Thijs Versloot

Hydrocoating - water transfer painting - 1 views

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    Never knew they could paint this way
Thijs Versloot

Time 'Emerges' from #Quantum Entanglement #arXiv - 1 views

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    Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first exprimental results to prove it
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    I always feel like people make too big a deal out of entanglement. In my opinion it is just a combination of a conserved quantity and an initial lack of knowledge. Imagine that I had a machine that always creates one blue and one red ping-pong ball at the same time (|b > and |r > respectively). The machine now puts both balls into identical packages (so I cannot observe them) and one of the packages is sent to Tokio. I did not know which ball was sent to Tokio and which stayed with me - they are in a superposition (|br >+|rb >), meaning that either the blue ball is with me and the red one in Tokio or vice versa - they are entangled. So far no magic has happened. Now I call my friend in Tokio who got the ball: "What color was the ball you received in that package?" He replies: "The ball that I got was blue. Why did you send me ball in the first place?" Now, the fact that he told me makes the superpositon wavefunction collapse (yes, that is what the Copenhagen interpretation would tell us). As a result I know without opening my box that it contains a red ball. But this is really because there is an underlying conservation law and because now I know the other state. I don't see how just looking at the conserved quantity I am in a timeless state outside of the 'universe' - this is just one way of interpreting it. By the way, the wave function for my box with the undetermined ball does not collapse when the other ball is observed by my friend in Tokio. Only when he tells me does the wavefunction collapse - he did not even know that I had a complementary ball. On the other hand if he knew about the way the experiment was conducted then he would have known that I had to have a red ball - the wavefunction collapses as soon as he observed his ball. For him it is determined that my ball must be red. For me however the superposition is intact until he tells me. ;-)
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    Sorry, Johannes, you just develop a simple hidden-parameters theory and it's experimentally proven that these don't work. Entangeled states are neither the blue nor the red ball they are really bluered (or redblue) till the point the measurement is done.
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    Hm, to me this looks like a bad joke... The "emergent time" concept used is still the old proposal by Page and Whotters where time emerges from something fundamentally unobservable (the wave function of the Universe). That's as good as claiming that time emerges from God. If I understand correctly, the paper now deals with the situation where a finite system is taken as "Mini-Universe" and the experimentalist in the lab can play "God of the Mini-Universe". This works, of course, but it doesn't really tell us anything about emergent time, does it?
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    Actually, it has not been proven conclusively that hidden variable theories don' work - although this is the opinion of most physicists these days. But a non-local hidden variable would still be allowed - I don't see why that could not be equivalent to a conserved quantity within the system. As far as the two balls go it is fine to say they are undetermined instead of saying they are in bluered or redblue state - for all intents and purposes it does not affect us (because if it would the wavefunction would have collapsed) so we can't say anything about it in the first place.
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    Non-local hidden variables may work, but in my opinion they don't add anything to the picture. The (at least to non-physicists) contraintuitive fact that there cannot be a variable that determines ab initio the color of the ball going to Tokio will remain (in your example this may not even be true since the example is too simple...).
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    I guess I tentatively agree with you on both points. In the end there might anyway be surprisingly little overlap between the way that we describe what nature does and HOW it does it... :-D
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    Congratulations! 100% agree.
santecarloni

[1010.3437] Dynamical mass generation via space compactification in graphene - 0 views

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    Is it really possible?
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    The affiliation is Saudi Arabia and Marocco, not countries famous for their contributions to physics... But nonetheless, yes this is possible, to me it even looks very plausible! But you should know that the term "mass" in this context just means a certain parameter in the dynamical equations and only has a loose relation to what we usually call "mass" in the macroscopic world.
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    ok - admit that I only read the abstract but to me the seems to be a little bit of magic happening ... even if "mass is only a certain parameter in the dynamical equations" ... I assume it still bears some "heavy" consequences in terms of their speed, interactions etc, no? and assuming that you gradually bend such a structure from a 2D to a 1D one ... does it "gain" mass gradually? all very strange to me ...
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    I think the problem is in the boundary conditions... the issue is that if you use and infinite sheet or a cylinder in the equations you always take cyclic boundary condition. If this guys are right then the mass of the quasi-particles in a crystal depends on its topology... this is a major thing...
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    BINGO!! It's almost like good ol' Kaluza-Klein...
Juxi Leitner

Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition - 3 views

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    pretty impressive stuff!
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    Amazing how some guys from some other university also did pretty much the same thing (although they didn't use the bidirectional stuff) and published it just last month. Just goes to show you can dump pretty much anything into an RNN and train it for long enough and it'll produce magic. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1090v1.pdf
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    Seems like quite the trend. And the fact that google still tries to use LSTMs is even more surprising.
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    LSTMs: that was also the first thing in the paper that caught my attention! :) I hadn't seen them in the wild in years... My oversight most likely. The paper seems to be getting ~100 citations a year. Someone's using them.
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    There are a few papers on them. Though you have to be lucky to get them to work. The backprop is horrendous.
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