Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production

Game developer David Braben caused geeks to get excited back in May when he announced plans to develop and release a $25 PC. It is called the Raspberry Pi, and takes the form of a USB stick that can be plugged into the HDMI port of a display ready to act as afully-functional PC.

The thinking behind the super-cheap PC is to get it into the hands of school kids and let them start experimenting and programming. The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output. It will run Linux in some form, but importantly it’s only $25 and will allow access to the wealth of free tools Linux has access to.

Two months on and the spec of the PCB layout has been finalized and an alpha release has been sent to manufacture. Any doubts this PC wasn’t going to happen should now disappear as this alpha board is expected to be almost the same as the final production unit.

(via Geek.com)

radio23:

How Big is a Yottabyte? [Infographic]

(Source: nakano)

We’re going to ignore the more sensational aspect of this news, which is that the system at the University of Texas at Austin claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.

Researchers at U. of Texas and Yale Use Computers to Simulate Schizophrenia

Computer simulations of malfunctioning brains may be the key to understanding schizophrenia and other conditions.

A research team including computer scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of psychiatry at Yale have been testing various theories of how schizophrenic brains misfire as they process information. People with schizophrenia often have trouble repeating different stories, for instance, frequently combining elements of separate stories and inserting themselves into the narrative.

“We are trying to quantify being delusional,” says Risto Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science and neuroscience at Texas, who designed the computer network on which the hypotheses were tested.

The results of their work will be published in the May 15 edition of Biological Psychology.

The team’s simulation suggested that the problem might be a phenomenon called “hyperlearning”—meaning that people with schizophrenia focus too much attention on recent pieces of information and fail to successfully integrate this information with prior learning. This results in an inability to properly identify what information is most important.

“Hyperlearning means that memory consolidation is abnormal,” says Mr. Miikkulainen. “It doesn’t form a coherent structure of the world.”

(via Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Polynomial Time Code For 3-SAT Released P==NP

Vladimir Romanov has released what he claims is a polynomial-time algorithm for solving 3-SAT. Because 3-SAT is NP-complete, this would imply that P==NP. While there’s still good reason to be skeptical that this is, in fact, true, he’s made source code available and appears decidedly more serious than most of the people attempting to prove that P==NP or P!=NP. Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures, it seems more likely to lead to new discoveries than most. Note that there are alreadyalgorithms to solve 3-SAT, including one that runs in time (4/3)^n and succeeds with high probability. Incidentally, this wouldn’t necessarily imply that encryption is worthless: it may still be too slow to be practical.

If you’re not quite sure what all this means, the accompanying comment thread provides a clear analogy that doesn’t require mathematical fluency:

NP is short for Natalie Portman, and the car analogy follows:

Adleman’s chief scientist, Nickolas Chelyapov, offered this illustration: Imagine that a fussy customer walks onto a million-car auto square and gives the dealer a complicated list of criteria for the car he wants.

“First,” he says, “I want it to be either a Cadillac or a convertible or red.” Second, “if it is a Cadillac, then it has to have four seats or a locking gas cap.” Third, “If it is a convertible, it should not be a Cadillac or it should have two seats.”

The customer rattles off a list of 24 such conditions, and the salesman has to find the one car in stock that meets all the requirements. (Adleman and his team chose a problem they knew had exactly one solution.) The salesman will have to run through the customer’s entire list for each of the million cars in turn — a hopeless task unless he can move and think at superhuman speed.

This serial method is the way a digital electronic computer solves such a problem.

The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision.

In 2010, we built a fully-functional replica out of Lego.

Sponsored by Digital Science a new division of Macmillan Publishers that provides technology solutions for researchers. Available under a CC-BY-3.0-Unported license.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Tells the Tale of the World’s First Computer

Wired: We think of the ENIAC as the first computer. But what did the team that built it copy from Atanasoff?

Smiley: In 1937, Atanasoff came up with four principles that were new: electronic logic circuits that would function by turning on and off; binary enumeration; the use of capacitors, which were needed as a kind of memory; and digital operations, which used counting to perform calculations. The calculating machines of that time were like elaborate slide rules that used measurements to compute results, but Atanasoff, who was trained as a quantum physicist, understood that this would be very unwieldy for large numbers. He didn’t want to measure, he wanted to count.

(via pcoolsongs)

pcoolsongs:

CRIRES model-based computer-generated impression of the Plutonian surface by ESO—L. Calçada, with atmospheric haze, and Charon and the Sun in the sky.

proofmathisbeautiful:

un:

notational:

devincastro:

Karsten Schmidt compiled a computational approach to color in this flickr set. These screenshots show the application of flexible color themes assembled from variable ranges for hue, saturation, brightness, and weights for each.

looks like internettubez

In the immortal words of a wise, wise Great Dane: Ruh-roh!

newsweek:

evangotlib:

stevewoolf:

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

Full article

Skynet lives.

It’s all over, people.

A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus.

Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading had a chip inserted in his hand which was then infected with a virus.

The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets.

In trials, Dr Gasson showed that the chip was able to pass on the computer virus to external control systems.

If other implanted chips had then connected to the system they too would have been corrupted, he said.

Medical alert

Dr Gasson admits that the test is a proof of principle but he thinks it has important implications for a future where medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants become more sophisticated, and risk being contaminated by other human implants.

“With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses.”

(via the BBC)