Google learns human language

Technology, Science, Language – And Google, Yees!

Has anyone tried to make a phonecall to one of those automatic machines that try to assist you in buying train tickets, for example? These friendly little voices do their best to please by repeating “I did not understand, please say again” and “You wanted to go to Brahmaputra via Leipzig on the 10th of november 2056. Is this correct?” When You tried to book a Train to the neighbour city for next tuesday (Which unless you live in some of Brahmaputra’s neighbouring cities, is completely wrong)

Now Google plans to teach the big computer park to understand content it has collected. Not only list keywords, but understand the semantics. This virtually means that it would have to understand human language. Probably different languages. If Google pulls this off it’s one big “Yay, hooray for technology, groovy!” But it also posts some serious questions like what types of information retreival should be automated, and who should be given access to this huge pile of information. It’s hard not to think about user tracking and surveillance and monitoring and all kinds of privacy concerns.

However, Google primarily wants to open Pandora’s box for human language comprehension by machines to make their search engine better. This of course is a good thing. They also want to include and activate the user in the search process, by enabling the searcher (me, you) to share searches with others (me, you). Let’s say I search for technology and behavioural Science Blogs, and I come up with this blog, Singularity and Beyond, (and like it naturally). Now, I might choose to share this search result with others and tell them this is a good find. Somehow this will be incorporated into the search system, some sort of “Look, Christina searched for the same thing as You and she really liked THIS page, check it out” . I assume

Great, fine, way to go Google. Isn’t it a marvellous company? No really, i mean it. It’s quite astonishingly clever. Peter Norvig is said to begin his CV with the line “Please do not offer me any new jobs, i have the greatest job in the world at the best company in the world” -And probably, I suspect, a pretty “best” paycheck to go with it… If google manages to solve the problem of understanding human language, then we really are getting in to a whole new level of Artificial intelligence…

-What? Who said “Pandora’s box”? Quiet in the classroom!

Anyway, as a Cognitive Science Educated Kind of a Guy with a General Interest for Anything Regarding our Mind or Intelligence, Especially when it has Technology in it (This is my professional title, I’m a CSEKoaGwaGIfARoMoIEwiTii) , I’m going to wish Google good luck with this challenge, and Google, if You’re reading this, I have great ideas, I work hard, and I’m looking for a job with a huge paycheck! I Wonder if the serverpark will carry out the job interview? Kinda like the poor guy who mistakedly was put in a TV studio, and he thought it was a job interview…. He wasn’t talking to a server park though, but just speaking of job interviews.

Anyhow. Go google!

Console Gaming is Gaining Grounds ! (-Say that ten times fast)

I just realized something interesting in my favourite games and hardware forum at futuremark.com.

Futuremark, if you haven’t heard it before is well known for it’s computer graphics card benchmark “3DMark”. Furthermore the site contains a very large forum about everything that has to do with computer games, as well as the compulsory off-topic threads. Recently futuremark changed their forum software for a new design and all categories were starting from zero again.

The old posts, thousands and thousands are still passively accessible in the old forum, and everything works as it should. The user system was transfered so the user rank was upheld over the shift.

Now what i realized was a shift in the number of posts in the “console gaming” versus the “PC gaming” category in the forum. If i remember correctly the most visited category, that had most people browsing, had the most threads and the most posts before the forum shift was the “PC Gaming” category.

Today 20:00 CET i Realized this:
You might have to click on the picture to see better, it’s slightly altered graphically by me.

As you can see PC Gaming has 27 viewing, 302 Threads and 4.129 posts.
Console gaming has 38 people viewing, 430 Threads and 6.578 posts!

The tide has turned, Console gaming seems to have about 40% more people viewing ,42% more Threads and 59% more posts! (with PC as baseline 100%). Here You should also take into account that there ought to be a whole lot more people who have PC’s than those who have consoles. Further, Futuremark does not have a console benchmark as far as I know, and consoles are not scalable and upgradable like the PC. Futuremark is after all mostly a benchmarking and optimization forum, at least it has that “twist”.

Is this telling us that consoles are coming on the whole much more strongly now, is it because of the Playstation 3, the Xbox 360, and now the Nintendo wii ?(featured here a few days ago, se this) Or is this just a coincident?

I think a forum as big as futuremark, and as top of the line as futuremark kan tell us which way the wind is blowing. The wind is telling me people want to sit in their comfy couches in front of their 42″ plasmas and shoot the hell out of zombies after work. (both possible interpretations of that grammar work) Or perhaps play cute cuddly japanese kind of games, you know the type that are impossible to find for pc because only sony makes them…

Is this good or bad? Is it anything? Am I completely out in the blue here… Personally I don’t think so. Consoles may very well take over the world. After all, most PC games lately have been booring shooters,FPS:es. Sure, FarCry was beautiful and now comes Crysis, and i wouldn’t want to miss that for the world, but anyway. I think consoles are getting more and more interesting to “old” PC gamers as well. I sure wouldn’t back off if they threw an xbox360 at me (as long as they wouldn’t aim for the head, the big OR the small) I’d catch it and plaaaaaaaaayyyy, why yes I would!

And SO WOULD YOU!

Philosophy of mind, featured article at Wikipedia.

Everyone with some decent brainpower should have figured out that it’s not easy to figure out what the mind is about.

Philosophers try, Psychologists try, neurologists try, Cognitive Scientists (or perhaps we should be called Cognologists, or Cognitivists… or Mindlers, like the upcoming cognitive sience news portal…) try, heck even I try to get an answer to those questions “What is the mind?”, “What is Reality?”

Some languages, like swedish for example hasn’t even got a name for it. “Mind” doesn’t exist so to speak, it’s either “brain” or “sense” (as in senses, vision, touch et.c.). The mind, and consiousness is a strange property, some call it an emerged property. (I’m sure you can read all about that at wikipedia)

Just a heads up, go to the wikipedia article of the day and put things into perspective for a while.

Blogger Boosts Visitor Rate?

I Installed Statcounter, a nice little program that keeps track of visists to a website, and i was complete blown away by the amount of visits the first day of this blog. The second day was pretty good as well, but then something happened and everyone went somewhere else, it seems.

Now One wonders… Does blogger.com intentionally “promote” a new blog in the system, causing many hits, or is this just a strange fluke?

Short post this, Just a thought i wanted to add. Oh, by the way, I’m testing a new template. Tell me if it’s better or worse, and you can win a lollypop!

All the wonderful colours of warm electronics

Why do we like Saunas and steam baths so much, when computers don’t? Was Alan Turing wrong in thinking that our mind is just a computer? (Since computers don’t like saunas) Why does things go wrong with technology when it gets too hot?

The picture above is of my trusty Radeon 9700 Graphics card, that all of a sudden decided the world needed pink stripes running up and down. And so it created some, five of them to be exact. It also decided that no matter what I did, the stripes would stay. HIS, the makers of the card told me it was a memory issue, so i returned the card for a new one. One without this somewhat annoying fashion statement.

Other times, my computer has managed to produce images making you think it’s not only dust that’s being sucked through the computer’s lungs.

This picture clearly shows, the computer, or at least the graphics card is pretty high… Anyone recognize the game? It’s Microsoft Simulator’s flying Circus, it is!

So what happens with electronics when they get too warm? And how warm can they get?

A normal AMD processor has a critical point at somewhere around 90 degrees Celcius, Memory has to be cooler. GPU’s can top around the same as a CPU, but these temperatures are not recommended.

Well then, what is the recommended sauna temperature? I usually go for around 65-70 degrees C, this way the body can last a bit longer. The same with a CPU. In some saunas a temperature of 110-120 degrees is completely comfortable because of air flow! -Air flow, aha! you think, that’s why I have a big noisy fan in my computer case! -Exactly! There are a myriad of ways how to get better airflow in a computer case. Just like a human, the computer needs to be within a certain temperature to work fine, otherwise… well… the pictures above…

Finally, why does electronic equipment like to be cold? Well i honestly don’t know exactly, other than a temperature too high may cause components to behave differently, or change value causing all kinds of ruckus. In this case, beautiful art.