http://wysinnwyg.com/blog Dario Borghino's weblog Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:20:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [caption id="attachment_327" align="alignleft" width="266" caption="You like Rocky so much, you wish you could have him forever? Well, now there's a solution -- just clone him!"][/caption] For all you dog lovers out there, there's a bad news. Many people grow so attached to their K-9s that, one day, they may have woken ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/clone-your-dog-best-friends-forever-discontinued Lately, the media has directed a whole lot of attention to the upcoming Wolfram|Alpha, a "computational knowledge engine" that seeks to answer any factual question posed by users in the form of natural language that some say could end up competing with Google on at least a portion of user ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/wolframalpha-vs-true-knowledge Folklore has it that a big, most likely catastrophic event (i.e., the 'doomsday') has long been predicted by the ancient Mayans and is due to happen on December 21st, 2012. But how much of it is the actual Mayan prediction, and how much is mere fabrication only introduced in recent ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/whats-going-to-happen-in-2012 [caption id="attachment_109" align="alignleft" width="207" caption="Loebner Prize gold medal"][/caption] The Loebner prize is an annual competition for "chat bots" (short for "chatting robots") driven by a complex artificial intelligence that try to simulate a human chatting: the six finalists — Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Brother Jerome, Alice, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal for this ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/loebner-prize-and-the-state-of-the-art-chatbots There's been quite a lot of talk recently about the "Large Hedron Collider", or LHC, by far the largest particle accelerator in existence, which was inaugurated just a few weeks ago. I know next to nothing about quantum mechanics, but the entire scientific world seems to agree that the LHC ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/on-lhc-and-black-holes Artificial intelligence is one of my strongest interests: the ongoing research in the topic is achieving extraordinary results, and it would seem like we are now approaching a turning point that might completely revolutionize this incredibly exciting field. But when I first heard that NASA is planning to land an AI ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/solar-powered-ai-to-land-on-mars I was just watching a YouTube video the other day in which two guys are talking about politics. At one point, one looks at the other in concern, saying exactly these words: You're not a communist, are you? It's a phrase I've heard quite a lot of times, but it made ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/youre-not-a-communist-are-you While in the process of restyling my personal website, I had to decide what I wanted to do with my old blog: given my poor Web design skills, there was no hope whatsoever to get its layout to match with that of the underlying site, and since I didn't update ... http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/giving-it-another-try