Lifeboat Foundation

In research published in Science Advances, a group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) have used the principle of magneto-rotation coupling to suppress the transmission of sound waves on the surface of a film in one direction while allowing them to travel in the other. This could lead to the development of acoustic rectifiers—devices that allow waves to propagate preferentially in one direction, with potential applications in communications technology.

Devices known as rectifiers are extremely important in technology development. The best known are electronic diodes, which are used to convert AC into DC electricity, essentially making electrification possible.

In the current study, the group examined the movement of acoustic surface waves—movements of sound like the propagation of earthquakes over the surface of the Earth—in a magnetic film. There is interplay between the surface acoustic waves and spin waves, disturbances in magnetic fields within the material that can move through the material.

Can a Quantum Strategy Help Bring Down the House?

In some versions of the game blackjack, one way to win against the house is for players at the table to work as a team to keep track of and covertly communicate amongst each other the cards they have been dealt. With that knowledge, they can then estimate the cards still in the deck, and those most likely to be dealt out next, all to help each player decide how to place their bets, and as a team, gain an advantage over the dealer.

This calculating strategy, known as card-counting, was made famous by the MIT Blackjack Team, a group of students from MIT, Harvard University, and Caltech, who for several decades starting in 1979, optimized card-counting and other techniques to successfully beat casinos at blackjack around the world — a story that later inspired the book “Bringing Down the House.”

A quantum-mechanical version of the ancient board game go has been demonstrated experimentally by physicists in China. Using entangled photons, the researchers placed go pieces (called stones) in quantum superpositions to vastly increase the complexity of the game. They foresee the technology serving as the ultimate test for machine players that use ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI).

Time travel movies have different rules about what happens when you start messing around with the timeline. If you’ve ever wondered which ones make the most sense, we may now have an answer. According to experiments using a quantum time travel simulator, reality is more or less “self-healing,” so changes made to the past won’t drastically alter the future you came from – at least, in the quantum realm.

The classic Back to the Future rules of time travel say that whatever you change in the past can have huge effects on the future. That’s why Marty McFly can almost erase his own existence by accidentally stopping his parents from meeting, and why Biff Tannen can get rich by giving his younger self a book of sports scores to bet on.

Other movies handle things differently. In Avengers: Endgame, the superheroes travel back in time to steal versions of the Infinity Stones out of different time periods to revive their fallen friends (look, it doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve seen all 20-something movies). Anyway, they can dabble in the past without ruining the future because the universe has a knack for correcting those paradoxes so that both versions of events did happen.

face_with_colon_three yay closer to foglet bodies: 3.

Is the T-1000 no longer science fiction?

It is a human dream to realize a robot with automatic mechanical functions similar to the robots presented in several science-fiction movies and series such as “Ex Machina”, “Black Mirror”, “The Terminator”, etc.

Continue reading “Liquid-Metal-Driven Micromachines for the Next Cutting-edge Technology” »

In a new paper, researchers at DeepMind propose using the game Diplomacy as an environment for training reinforcement learning agents.

Just recycle the hydrogen and bring to another layer in the sun :3.

Remember the movie Sunshine, where astronomers learn that the Sun is dying? So a plucky team of astronauts take a nuclear bomb to the Sun, and try to jump-start it with a massive explosion. Yeah, there’s so much wrong in that movie that I don’t know where to start. So I just won’t.

Continue reading “How Can We Save The Sun?” »

“Just the nature of the AI that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” Musk told The New York Times in an interview published on Saturday. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’”

DeepMind declined to comment when contacted by CNBC.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says DeepMind is his ‘top concern’ when it comes to A.I.” »

Here is my research dissertation M.Sc. in Neural Computation, CCCN Uni Stirling. A variety of net architectures were trialed for specific use in Enochian Chess software, and the commercial version is now in its 3rd edition over 26 years on. The first section consists of a literature review of artificial neural nets and their application to a variety of classic boardgames. Although quite old now, there haven’t been any or many other papers on nets and divination games. This paper has proved very prescient! Today neural nets are commonly used by game developers. The race amongst super computer developers to ‘predict’ stock markets, or weather systems, or winners of horse races, is fierce. MVT unconstrained hardware may offer some synergies when used in conjunction with nets or trad AI.

My interest in active divination (rather than passive divination) goes back a bit now. Enochian Chess software is one example, but Tsakli can also be used in divination. Passive forms of fortune-telling rely on pure chance without any skill or judgement asked of the questioner. Astrology is a good example. You cannot change or ameliorate your date and time of birth or effect the course of the stars. It is essentially fatalistic. What is the point trying to discern information about which you can do absolutely nothing? Brainstorming and the jumping up and down excitement generated by unexpected game episodes, plus the many ideas generated by the move by move conversation and thrown up by wide consideration of the particular divination question, can be of real psychomorphological value in helping plan your future life moves.