Grigory Perelman solved one of the hardest and a century-old problem in mathematics called the Poincare Conjecture, but declined the Fields Medal. Another winner – Terence Tao – is one of the youngest winners at the age of 31. An excerpt from an article at NewScientist says something about him – “If you’re stuck on a problem, then one way out is to interest Terence Tao”.
An excellent article by Herb Sutter that highlights the most significant learning curve for software developers – concurrency. An associated thought is promising work in the area of Software Transactional Memory, that may be the next generation solution for concurrency. Original link from a discussion thread at Lambda the Ultimate.
It seems life really is faster in the city — even for birds. Birds living in urban areas sing a faster tune than their slower country counterparts. The change in birdsong may help their calls to be heard over the howl of traffic and the wind.
India’s GDP growth in the July-September quarter rose to 9.2% year on year and this is encouraging, but there are signs of overheating – inflation has nearly doubled over the past 12 months; equity and housing markets look overbought; and the current account has moved sharply into deficit.
A wonderful documentary about the lost temples of India by the Discovery channel. It starts, of course, with the obvious choice – the Taj Mahal, but the documentary is about the Brihadeeswara temple at Tanjore, built by Raja Raja Chola. Length: 52:10 mins.
Summary suffices:
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There are two dominant opinions about the future of Artificial Intelligence and Humanity. On one hand is the optimistic view of Ray Kurzweil that increasing potency of computers and AI will aid human beings in being better at everything they do. While, on the other hand, is the camp of Hugo de Garis who is of the opinion that the emergence of new species called ‘artilects’, intellectually billion times more capable than humans, will raise a war against us and destroy humanity.
Now here’s one to get your ‘consciousness neurons’ in a frenzy… A thought provoking write-up citing how scientists are approaching the matter of understanding ‘consciousness’. As a firm believer in science, I feel this should be possible – only a matter of time.
Btw, has anyone heard of the term qualia before?!
I think there is an opportunity to do the following:
a) Expose a subset of the tuning/searching variables for a given query to the user with a simple user-interface, as a separate lab project…