Technology Info

One of the proving grounds for artificial intelligence is games. Classic games have a fixed set of rules, and these make it easier for researchers to develop new techniques and algorithms that enable computers to play (and hopefully win) various games. Tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess are all games where researchers have developed software that is capable of winning or drawing when paired off against the best human players in the world. Last weekend, researchers at the University of Alberta added another classic game to this list: poker. In a series of matches that took place over the Fourth of July weekend in Las Vegas, the researchers’ Polaris poker program won against a group of top-ranked online poker players.

The first three games mentioned above are known as perfect information games. In games of this type, each player has all the available knowledge about the current state of the game. With that information, the player can, in theory, work out every possible outcome from that point. Given a computer’s ability to evaluate hundreds of thousands (or more) of scenarios each second, they are an ideal tool for calculating probabilities in such games. Theoretically, with enough computing power, every possible outcome at each point in the game could be calculated, and a computer could never lose. (link)

Nothing irritates professors more than the thought of students lolling around the dorms, playing video games in a drunken haze, munching on Cheetos, and missing class… then showing up for the exam and doing mysteriously well—especially when the grade is a result of course notes and test answers that they purchased online. While there’s certainly a case to be made for crafting exams that can’t be aced by memorizing an answer list found on the Internet, Dr. Michael Moulton of the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida also thinks there’s something to be said for suing the companies that offer such services. Moulton’s publisher, who has turned his course lectures into e-books, is going after “Einstein’s Notes” offered online to UF students, on the grounds that they constitute copyright infringement.

The case, filed earlier this year in federal court, notes that Moulton has been at pains to copyright his lectures and other course materials (including film study questions). He scrupulously takes notes on his own lectures, records them as audio files, and seeks copyright on them. These lectures have formed the basis for the e-books Wildlife Issues in the New Millennium and Global Perspectives in Biodiversity Conservation, published by Faulkner Press, which you’ve probably read. (ArsTechnica)

An inventor has created what he claims is the world’s first motorcycle powered by fresh air.

Jem Stansfield says his converted Puch moped produces cleaner air than found in many town and city centres and so can actually reduce pollution.

“It actually fires out cleaner air,” said 37-year-old Stansfield, who used to be a sheep herder.

The University of Bristol aeronautics graduate fitted the Puch with high pressure carbon fibre air cylinders used by fire fighters as breathing apparatus in burning buildings.

The cylinders power two rotary air engines which in turn drive the chain to the rear wheel. (link)

Most people can tell you if the person they are looking at is attractive, but they can’t tell you why they think so. Now, a Tel Aviv University student has developed software to crack the age-old problem of identifying facial features that would be considered beautiful by most people.

“Until now, computers have been taught to identify basic facial characteristics - like is this a woman’s face or a man’s,” explains Amit Kagian, who developed the program for his master’s thesis in computer science.

“Our software allows the computer to complete a much more complex task of esthetic judgment, which humans cannot define exactly how they do it. Esthetic judgment is linked to sentiment and more abstract considerations, but now we have made the computer do it. This constitutes a substantial advance in the development of artificial intelligence.” (link)

Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be solved in a maximum of 26 moves.

Now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has gone one better. He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be solved in 26 moves, thereby lowering the limit to 25.

Rokicki’s proof is a neat piece of computer science. He’s used the symmetry of the cube to study transformations of the cube in sets, rather than as individual moves. This allows him to separate the “cube space” into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored.

Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz.

But Rokicki isn’t finished there. He is already number-crunching his way to a new bound of 24 moves, a task he thinks will take several CPU months. And presumably after that, 23 beckons. (link)

Windows Vista SP1 Is having a tough time getting into the Ivy League.

University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system.

The school’s Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it’s preinstalled, but added that it “strongly recommends that all other users adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude,” according to a newly published department bulletin.

Penn’s ISC department advised “continuing to use previous versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista until after the initial bugs in SP1 are identified and fixed.”

Vista SP1 users have reported numerous glitches since the operating system became widely available on Tuesday.

“I downloaded it via Windows Update, and got a bluescreen on the third part of the update,” wrote “Iggy33″, in a comment posted Wednesday on Microsoft’s Vista team blog.

Iggy33 was just one of dozens of posters complaining about Vista Service Pack 1’s effect on their PCs. “What a disaster,” wrote “SeppDietrich”, of the update. “It exiled all my Nvidia drivers to the Bermuda Triangle.” (link)

Get out your list, because you can add another application to the tally of legitimate uses of BitTorrent.

Apparently, software updates are getting so big these days that simply downloading them from a server is becoming prohibitively time consuming, especially when the same updates need to be applied to many different machines. A Dutch university has some 6,500 desktop PCs in ten locations, which on occasion need to download 3.5GB worth of different types of updates. That’s a handsome 22.2TB in total. In a traditional client-server world, that’s some modest lifting.

In fact, INHOLLAND University’s IT department used to have almost two dozen servers distributed over the university’s locations to serve up these downloads. The school was able to retire 20 of them after adopting a new way to distribute updates: BitTorrent.

The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each other—the remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.

Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs! (link)

Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University.

First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university’s senate. (link)

Accurate face recognition is critical for many security applications. Current automatic face-recognition systems are defeated by natural changes in lighting and pose, which often affect face images more profoundly than changes in identity. The only system that can reliably cope with such variability is a human observer who is familiar with the faces concerned. We modeled human familiarity by using image averaging to derive stable face representations from naturally varying photographs. This simple procedure increased the accuracy of an industry standard face-recognition algorithm from 54% to 100%, bringing the robust performance of a familiar human to an automated system. (link)

Academics have been flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology and turn these environments into educational tools. A game called Arden, the World of Shakespeare, funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and developed at Indiana University was supposed to test economic theories by manipulating the rules of the game. There’s only one problem. “It’s no fun, ” says Edward Castronova, Arden’s creator and an associate professor of telecommunications at the university. “You need puzzles and monsters,” he says, “or people won’t want to play … Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach.” Part of the problem is it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. (story)