We have met our match at the genteel pastime of jigsaw puzzles. It seems an algorithm can now whiz through 10,000 pieces in 24 hours. The speedy solver could also help piece together shredded documents or archaeological artefacts.

Andrew Gallagher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, wrote the algorithm while working at photography firm Kodak. By mimicking the way a human solves jigsaws, it beat last year's record of 3300 pieces. The algorithm can even solve multiple puzzles at the same time, where the pieces have been mixed up together.

Unlike other software that only analyses the edges of the pieces, Gallagher's looks at how colour patterns spread across many pieces. For example, if one piece becomes progressively lighter from left to right, it is likely that the piece nestles between a lighter piece on the left and a darker one on the right.

The algorithm only works on jigsaws with square pieces, which are harder to solve because the shape offers no clues. The algorithm cal

The "prisoner's dilemma" is a classic psychology game used to study how collaboration evolves in animal societies. Now, a pair of mathematicians have identified a new way of playing the game that allows a player to do significantly better than their opponent. Whereas most winning strategies involve playing nice, the new method relies on playing dirty.

In the prisoner's dilemma, if both players keep quiet, each gets a brief sentence. But if one betrays the other, the snitch gets off scot-free while their partner suffers a long sentence. If both players betray each other, each gets a medium sentence. As a united pair, players do better if they both keep shtum. But crucially, if criminal A thinks B won't blab, it is in A's best interest to snitch, as he will then walk free - at B's expense.

With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the mathematician Littlewood (1953) required for an event to be surprising] are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year.

Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events. When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling.

They constructed their networks in a simple way: if one board position can lead to another, they are connected. Using a dataset of about 1,000 professional games and 4,000 amateur games, they began to construct these networks.

Of course, the Go board is very large and so you can’t compare entire board layouts. Instead, they decided to make it much more tractable and look at the board composition surrounding a newly placed piece (a move in Go consists of putting a stone on an intersection of the grid lines of the board). In this case, they looked at the pieces immediately surrounding a newly placed piece (for a 3×3 grid). They calculated that this creates 1107 possible moves, which can be connected if the moves occur one after another, and are in the same region of the board. They also examined the frequency of moves, which obeys a heavy-tailed distribution (whether or not it is a power-law as they claim seems a bit weaker).

"The calculator itself is just over 250x200x100 blocks. It contains 2 6-digit BCD number selectors, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, 6 BCD adders and subtractors, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function." Yes, someone built a working scientific calculator, in Minecraft.

Hello there! (Reddit name: MaxSGB) Here is the project I've been working on ^.^ Specs: 6 digit addition and subtraction, 3 digit multiplication, division and trigonometric/scientific functions. (The reason these are only 3 digits is because multiplication and division would take a long time to decode/complete/encode. Also, the fraction display is hard enough to build for 3 digits, let alone 6 - 6 digit RAM would not only be massive, but a bit pointless since the curves follow the same pattern surrounding the peaks.). Graphing y=mx+c functions, quadratic functions, and equation solving of the form mx+c=0.

The screen and keypad were always meant to be the main feature of this machine. The main display boasts 25 digits. Square root signs are displayed and can change to accommodate any number of digits. Square root signs, add, minus, multiply and divide signs are displayed at appropriate times, and there is a full fraction display. The 7-segments for the fractions are the smallest possible, being only 3 wide, and stackable vertically and horizontally.

I made a custom texture pack for the keypad, and made wooden pressure plates invisible in order to get the best effect.

The calculator itself is just over 250x200x100 blocks. It contains 2 6-digit BCD number selectors, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, 6 BCD adders and subtractors, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function.

Music: City of Innocence, Gem Droids, - Dan O'Connor - Royalty-Free music at http://Danosongs.com Rocketry,

    Killing Time - Kevin MacLeod - <a href="http://Incompetech.com" rel="external">http://Incompetech.com</a>

Thank you very much for watching. As you can probably imagine, this took some effort to make, and so a like would be very much appreciated. =]

Traditionally, human rights work has been more akin to investigative reporting, but Ball is the most influential of a handful of people around the world who see that world not in terms of words, but of figures. His specialty is applying quantitative analysis to mountains of anecdotes, finding the correlations that coax out a story that cannot easily be dismissed.

Could the movements of refugees have been random? No, Ball said. He had also plotted killings of Kosovars and found that both phenomena occurred at the same times and in the same places -- flight and death, hand in hand. "I remember well the moment of astonishment that I felt when I saw the killing graph for the first time," Ball replied to Milosevic. "I assumed I had made an error, because the correlation was so close."

Something had caused both phenomena, and Ball examined three possibilities. First, the surges in killings and flight did not happen during or shortly after NATO bombings. Nor were they consistent with the pattern of attacks by Albanian guerrilla groups. They were consistent, however, with the third hypothesis, that Serb forces conducted a systematic campaign of killing and expulsions.

"Infinity can violate our human intuition, which is based on finite systems..."

Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of machine intelligence. In fact, it’s hard to think of an idea that has had a bigger impact on philosophy. And yet there is an even bigger philosophical revolution waiting in the wings. The theory of computing is a philosophical minnow compared to the potential of another theory that is currently dominating thinking about computation. @ Technology Review

When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk."

In 1770, a Hungarian engineer and diplomat named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a remarkable invention to the court of Maria Theresa, ruler of Hungary and Austria. It consisted of a mechanical figure dressed in (what Europeans saw as) Oriental garb, presiding over a cabinet upon which a chess board sat. Full of gears ostentatiously placed in a front side drawer, The Turk was cranked up by hand, after which an opponent could sit down and play a game against the dummy.

"Even among the skeptics who insisted it was a trick, there was disagreement about how the automaton worked, leading to a series of claims and counterclaims," writes author Tom Standage. "Did it rely on mechanical trickery, magnetism, or sleight of hand? Was there a dwarf, or a small child, or a legless man hidden inside it?"

There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The roll call of early pioneers and prospectors is notable, but short. Fortunately, increasing numbers of researchers are now re-entering this fertile frontier.

The open secret of this emerging frontier is that we do not have a fundamental definition or understanding of life. Similarly, we do not understand life’s origins, how life emerges from chemistry. We do know that the chemistry of life on Earth, or “Terran” biochemistry for short, is rather restrictive in its molecular permutations. Unnecessarily so, it seems, given the enormous choice of good options provided by chemistry for building biological bodies and functions. However, we do not know whether nature or nurture is the reason.

Visitors enter the dark, gargantuan room and take up postures of reverence in front of a massive screen, which towers 40 feet above them. They take off their shoes at the edge of the white floor—the sort used in dance studios—laid across the room’s stripped wooden floorboards. They sit down in front of the screen with legs crossed, rapt in attention. Some lay flat on their backs. Others press their bodies up against the vertical screen and let the sound and light play over them. Strips of black and white flash across the screen in varying configurations, loosely attuned to the jumbled low and high frequency tones emanating from the loudspeakers placed, like a stone circle, around the exhibit. The other side of the screen is covered with a data feed of 0s and 1s—binary code, writing out hefty data sets culled from sources like NASA and the Human Genome Project across the blank surface. Digits burst onto, and flow across, the massive screen, flooding it to the very edge.

Old Skool article @sciam : The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation #information #data

Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies and the government, and consumer advocates instructing us on how to prevent our information from being collected and misused. But a small group of thinkers is suggesting an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with the data we generate. Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy, they say, we should be imagining data as a public resource: 

Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet's living creatures, evolution, the discovery of the gene and the structure of DNA. Now, a sixth is on its way - mathematics.

Maths has played a leading role in the physical sciences for centuries, but in the life sciences it was little more than a bit player, a routine tool for analysing data. However, it is moving towards centre stage, providing new understanding of the complex processes of life.

The ideas involved are varied and novel; they range from pattern formation to chaos theory. They are helping us to understand not just what life is made from, but how it works, on every scale from molecules to the entire planet - and possibly beyond.

Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last half-century or so. It’s a grand narrative if ever there was one, but its key moment can be pinpointed to 1948, when Claude Shannon, a young mathematician with a background in cryptography and telephony, published a paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in a Bell Labs technical journal. For Shannon, communication was purely a matter of sending a message over a noisy channel so that someone else could recover it. Whether the message was meaningful, he said, was “irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Think of a game of Wheel of Fortune, where each card that’s turned over narrows the set of possible answers, except that here the answer could be anything: a common English phrase, a Polish surname, or just a set of license plate numbers

Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke with Gleick about his unified history of the fundamental force behind life, the universe, and everything.

Kevin Kelly: What prompted you to write a whole lot of information about information?

James Gleick: I’ve been thinking of this book my whole career. 

In case you haven’t heard, the newest champion of "Jeopardy!," the popular TV game show, is a computer. Watson, an enormous computer developed by researchers at IBM, was pitted against the two previous human champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. At the end of the first round, aired on Valentine’s Day, Jennings and Watson were tied for first place. But Watson trounced both humans in the next round, despite making some odd mistakes. And he won the second game, aired on February 16, suggesting the first victory was more than just beginner’s luck. When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was not doing anything qualitatively different from an ordinary calculator. It was just calculating really quickly—running through all the possible chess moves in response to the previous move by Kasparov and picking the one most likely to succeed. That’s just the sort of problem that a fast-enough computer running the right algorithm was bound to solve.

It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire. A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fuelled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of James Shapiro’s comprehensive history of the authorship controversy, Contested Will, it is difficult for us to appreciate the depth of conviction—among writers as diverse and as distinguished as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Henry Miller, and even Helen Keller—that Shakespeare’s texts contained the secret solution