What do we mean by AI? By the start of the 21st century it was clear that encoding a set of behavioral rules did not constitute intelligence. Despite the increasingly complex decision trees built into expert systems, and the variety of responses that could simulate human interaction, nothing even close to resembling a thinking machine was on the horizon; the claims of prominent researchers in the mid-20th century that the problem was substantially solved were proved optimistic. It was not until the middle part of the 21st century that meaningful progress was made, enabled by the convergence of three critical disciplines. The final scaling of planar semiconductor technology reached its zenith, culminating in trillion transistor chips with thousands of processor cores and gigabytes of on-board memory. Coupled with unprecedented data storage capacity, entire simulated 3D worlds were being created across the connected globe, building the fledgling infrastructure that would eventually…
Mars Science Laboratory
With its rover, Curiosity, MSL is enroute to Mars, due to land this coming summer on August 5. This lander is the most sophisticated robot ever designed to move around on Mars. The size of a small SUV and equipped with a host of science instruments and cameras, it promises to return a wealth of data about the red planet, and the prospects it may have had for microbial life in the past, or perhaps even now. So where is the Mars Science Laboratory now? The image below is from a NASA site that keeps track of how far the mission has traveled. It’s arcing its way toward Mars now, but still has quite a distance to cover. Mars Science Laboratory location as of this post The landing zone was chosen as a prime location for discovering clues of a wetter martian past. The picture below shows the expected touchdown…
A Little White Lie
As anyone who has ever seen the movie Spinal Tap will tell you, musicians can be an odd bunch. Whether it’s trying to hit 11 on your amplifier, or wandering clueless backstage to find your way to a performance, there’s always a story to tell at any given show. One such night happened at Rosa’s in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (or The Rosa, officially, although no one I knew ever called it that) when White Lies played. People would come to us between sets to say how much fun we were to watch, but we always felt the same the other way around: the audience was at least as much fun to watch as we were. You just never knew what was going to happen, especially when playing in a bar and the evening wore on. The tiny dance floor was packed shoulder-to-shoulder one Friday night, when a couple of guys threw…