Posts Tagged ‘Singularity’
Duck Hunt pinball machine unites analog and PC in a nostalgia singularity (video)
Author: Alexander McQueen
We such as pinball. We like traditional NES games. Accordingly, it doesn’t take much deduction to understand that we truly, truly like Skit-B Pinball’s Duck Quest pinball machine. It has a completely mechanical, themed pinball device below, but there’s also a PC up leading that replicates the images and noises of Nintendo’s light gun video game in sync with the analog action. The conversion of a Williams Valiant took about a year of off-hours work to finish, and it shows– the focus on information is what we ‘d expect if Gunpei Yokoi had actually put all his energy into pinball rather. Our only lament is that the Duck Quest device is a side project, and it likely won’t escape into the wild. A minimum of there’s a video (after the break) to sate our interest.
Filed under: Gaming, NintendoCommentsVia: Arcade Heroes, DestructoidSource: Skit-B Pinball
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Duck Hunt pinball machine unites analog and PC in a nostalgia singularity (video)
Author: Alexander McQueen
We like pinball. We like classic NES games. Accordingly, it doesn’t take much deduction to know that we really, really like Skit-B Pinball’s Duck Hunt pinball machine. It has a fully mechanical, themed pinball machine below, but there’s also a PC up top that replicates the images and sounds of Nintendo’s light gun video game in sync with the analog action. The conversion of a Williams Valiant took about a year of off-hours work to finish, and it shows — the attention to detail is what we’d expect if Gunpei Yokoi had put all his energy into pinball instead. Our only lament is that the Duck Hunt machine is a side project, and it likely won’t escape into the wild. At least there’s a video (after the break) to sate our curiosity.
Via: Arcade Heroes, Destructoid
Source: Skit-B Pinball
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Duck Hunt pinball machine unites analog and PC in a nostalgia singularity (video)
Author: Jamie Colby
We like pinball. We like classic NES games. Accordingly, it doesn’t take much deduction to know that we really, really like Skit-B Pinball’s Duck Hunt pinball machine. It has a fully mechanical, themed pinball machine below, but there’s also a PC up top that replicates the images and sounds of Nintendo’s light gun video game in sync with the analog action. The conversion of a Williams Valiant took about a year of off-hours work to finish, and it shows — the attention to detail is what we’d expect if Gunpei Yokoi had put all his energy into pinball instead. Our only lament is that the Duck Hunt machine is a side project, and it likely won’t escape into the wild. At least there’s a video (after the break) to sate our curiosity.
Via: Arcade Heroes, Destructoid
Source: Skit-B Pinball
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The Singularity Is Near: NYU Student Builds A Robot That Builds Burritos
Author: Alexander McQueen
Hey, Internet. Come over here. You sitting down? Cool.
So anyway, there’s this thing I need to tell you about. No no. Over here. This tab. Stay right here.
So this guy at NYU made something special. Are you listening? Put down your phone. Listen. So they made a machine that prints… no, don’t check Twitter. They made a machine that prints burritos.
It’s called BurritoB0t.
I know, right?
Seriously. Slow down with the porn for a second. This is important.
The system will let you use your iPhone to order different condiments and toppings. Sliders control the amount of salsa, guac, and crema. It uses a Thing-o-matic and is currently in beta form, so don’t expect it to make you a burrito anytime soon.
Its creator, Marko Manriquez, is a student at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and this is part of his Master’s Thesis. Remember back when you wrote your thesis? About politics or some junk? Yeah, you should have picked the “build a freaking burrito robot” major. You wouldn’t be an accountant right now.
Anyway, I just thought you should know. What? You’re still bored? Fine. Here’s this. Last time I try to show you something fun.
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Video: Kinect Controlling Windows 7, Singularity Nears
Author: Tech Blogger
Let’s start our post-WrestleMania Monday with a fun video of what could be. Here we see a gentleman, from Evoluce, controlling Windows 7 using Kinect. Minority Report, etc.
Incidentally, this is exactly what I talked about on After Dark With Bryan Alvarez a few weeks ago, people coming up with new and exciting uses for all this motion control business.
Neat in the abstract, sure, but I’m not sure how much easier a computer would be to control with a Kinect than with a proper mouse and keyboard.
We shall see, I suppose.
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O’Brien: Asking the big questions at Singularity University
Author: Melissa Shroeder
O’Brien: Asking the big questions at Singularity University
Silicon Valley is all about the future. But the stuff that we obsess about, like a new iPhone feature or a Facebook upgrade, is really just baby steps. Spending a day at Singularity University, it was thrilling to hear people tackling the bigger issues presented by innovation. And a reminder of just how quickly the things that sounded like science fiction just a few years ago have become reality.
Read more on San Jose Mercury News
Google Dabbles in Robotics With Self-Driving Cars
While it has been rumored for some time, Google announced Sunday is has been testing self-driving cars. The company equipped six Toyota Priuses and an Audi TT with technology that enabled a vehicle to drive from Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus to its Santa Monica office. It then moved on to Hollywood Boulevard. In all, Google has sent its auto-cars more than 140,000 miles.
Read more on TechNewsWorld.com
Georgia Tech researchers give robots ability to think amongst themselves
This week, at Robotics Rodeo 2010 at Fort Benning, Georgia, researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) will be showing off a system they have developed to let airborne and ground-based robots communicate and interact with one another without the need for a human intermediary.
Read more on BetaNews
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TechnoCalyps: Part ll – Preparing For The Singularity – 1/4
Author: Antonio Pierce
Synopsis: Are we prepared for dealing with the prospect that humanity is not the end of evolution? TechnoCalyps is an intriguing three-part documentary on the notion of transhumanism by Belgian visual artist and filmmaker Frank Theys. The latest findings in genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, bionics and nanotechnology appear in the media every day, but with no analysis of their common aim: that of exceeding human limitations. In TechnoCalyps the director conducts his enquiry into the scientific, ethical and metaphysical dimensions of technological development. The film includes interviews by top experts and thinkers on the subject worldwide, including Marvin Minsky, Terence McKenna, Hans Moravec, Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, Richard Seed, Margareth Wertheim, Kirkpatrick Sale, Ralph C. Merkle, Mark Pesce, Ray Kurzweil, Rabbi Youssouf Kazen, Rael and many others. Part 2: Preparing for the Singularity In this part advocates and opponents of a transhuman future are weighed against each other; prognoses are done when we can expect the transhuman revolution and how people are preparing for it already now. www.singularitysymposium.com
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Water Flute Gives a Glimpse of Future Interfaces
Author: Jack Schmidt
Next time you splash around at the Six Flags water park you may be doing some significant–like contributing to some research on computing.
A fish-shaped musical instrument that spouts water jets into which users dip their fingers is being hailed as an example of a new user interface. The instrument called hydraulophone involves putting your fingers on tiny water jets and producing a soothing, organ-like music.
It’s an example of what’s being called a “Flexible Limitless User Interface” that doesn’t demand any level of skill from its users, yet can offer an experience that’s deeply satisfying.
“What we really do with these kind of interfaces is make them as addictive as possible and to do that we have to find a way you can exert your own influence on a system,” Steve Mann, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, told attendees at the Singularity Conference in San Francisco held over the weekend. “It can be a very absorbing experience.”
Mann and his colleague Ryan Janzen gave attendees a performance of the hydraulophone.
The instrument resembles a large flute, except with water flowing through it instead of air. It has 12 holes, each of which spews out a water jet. The chords are played by blocking one or more of the water jet holes with the fingers.
Mann has been billed as the world’s first cyborg. For about 30 years now, he has been wearing some sort of wearable computing device including an Eyetap, a pair of glasses that allows the eye to function as a camera, as well as digital systems monitoring his heart and brain. These devices are part of a world he calls computer-mediated reality.
The hyradulophone is an idea that Mann started working on in the 1990s. The device blends art and technology, he says. Early versions of the device were hard to play because the water jets had to be pressed down very hard to create the musical notes. But now the instrument has been refined to respond to the slightest of touches.
“It let you express yourself in a very rich way, which is why flexible user interfaces will be important,” says Mann. “We need to get tactile information into a machine and back to the human.”
Having people in the feedback loop such that the human and computer are linked closely could lead to a new form of intelligence called ‘Humanistic Intelligence,’ says Mann. Ultimately this could lead to a reciprocal relationship, where a computer uses a person’s mind and body as as one of its peripherals, even as the human user thinks of the computer as a peripheral, he says.
The hydraulophone has been installed as a large scale public installation at the Ontario Science Center. There’s also a concert version with precise scale and range.
Mann and Janzen also recently built a hyadraulophone in a hot tub and showed it to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
“He loved it!” says Mann.
Take a closer look at the hydraulophone shown at the Singularity conference and listen to what the instrument sounds like:
The hydraulophone has 12 water jets, one for each of the 12 notes.
See Also:
- DIY Wearable Computer Turns You Into a Cyborg
- Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket
- Filmmaker Inches Closer to Bionic Eye Prototype
- Clive Thompson on the Cyborg Advantage
Photos: Priya Ganapati/Wired.com
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Water Flute Gives a Glimpse of Future Interfaces
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Tags: Apple, ATT, cyborg, filmmaker-plans, LED, miscellaneous, Music, ontario-science, Singularity, Toronto, University, Water | 
No Comments »Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020, Expert Predicts
Author: Jenny Zhao
Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may just be a decade away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.
It would be the first step towards creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.
This point where machines surpass human intelligence has been called the “singularity.” It’s a term that Kurzweil helped popularize through his book.
“The singular criticism of the singularity is that brain is too complicated, too magical and there’s something about its properties we can’t emulate,” Kurzweil told attendees at the Singularity Summit over the weekend. “But the exponential growth in technology is being applied to reverse-engineer the brain, arguably the most important project in history.”
For nearly a decade, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists have been working to simulate the human brain so they can ultimately create a computing architecture based on how the mind works.
Reverse-engineering some aspects of hearing and speech has helped stimulate the development of artificial hearing and speech recognition, says Kurzweil. Being able to do that for the human brain could change our world significantly, he says.
The key to reverse engineering the human brain lies in decoding and simulating the cerebral cortex–the seat of cognition. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses.
A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn’t exist yet. Researchers would require a machine with a computational capacity of at least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes — a scale that supercomputer technology isn’t expected to hit for at least three years, according to IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha. Modha leads the cognitive computing project at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.
By next year, IBM’s ‘Sequoia’ supercomputer should be able to offer 20 petaflops per second peak performance, and an even more powerful machine will be likely in two to three years.
“Reverse engineering the brain is being pursued in different ways,” says Kurzweil. “The objective is not necessarily to build a grand simulation — the real objective is to understand the principle of operation of the brain.”
Reverse engineering the human brain is within reach, agrees Terry Sejnowski, head of the computational neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil’s assessment that about million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Here’s how that math works, explain Kurzweil. The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, calculates Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
But even a perfect simulation of the human brain or cortex won’t do anything unless it is infused with knowledge and trained, says Kurzweil.
“Our work on the brain and understanding the mind is at the cutting edge of the singularity,” he says.
See Also:
- Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
- Darpa’s Simulated Cat Brain Project a ‘Scam’: Top Scientist
- Mouse Versus Supercomputer: No Contest
- Never Mind the Singularity, Here’s the Science
- Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live
Photo: A graphic overlay shows neural connections on a scan of IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha’s brain/IBM
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No Comments »Microsoft Menlo OS Project, from the Makers of Singularity
Author: Brandon Zimmerman
Menlo is the latest codename to be thrown in the operating system development mix reportedly being built in Redmond, adding a new twist to the cocktail already featuring labels such as Midori and Singularity. There’s little information from Microsoft on Menlo, but the moniker is mentioned on a few of the Redmond company’s web… (read more)
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