Lifeboat Foundation

Theoretical chemists at Princeton University have pioneered a strategy for modeling quantum friction, or how a particle’s environment drags on it, a vexing problem in quantum mechanics since the birth of the field. The study was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (“Wigner–Lindblad Equations for Quantum Friction”). “It was truly a most challenging research project in terms of technical details and the need to draw upon new ideas,” said Denys Bondar, a research scholar in the Rabitz lab and corresponding author on the work.

Researchers construct a quantum counterpart of classical friction, a velocity-dependent force acting against the direction of motion. In particular, a translationary invariant Lindblad equation is derived satisfying the appropriate dynamical relations for the coordinate and momentum (i.e., the Ehrenfest equations). Numerical simulations establish that the model approximately equilibrates. (© ACS)

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An algorithm developed by Google is designed to encode thought, which could lead to computers with ‘common sense’ within a decade, says leading AI scientist.

If you’ve ever seen a “recommended item” on eBay or Amazon that was just what you were looking for (or maybe didn’t know you were looking for), it’s likely the suggestion was powered by a recommendation engine. In a recent interview, Co-founder of machine learning startup Delvv, Inc., Raefer Gabriel, said these applications for recommendation engines and collaborative filtering algorithms are just the beginning of a powerful and broad-reaching technology.

Raefer Gabriel, Delvv, Inc.

Gabriel noted that content discovery on services like Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify are most familiar to people because of the way they seem to “speak” to one’s preferences in movies, games, and music. Their relatively narrow focus of entertainment is a common thread that has made them successful as constrained domains. The challenge lies in developing recommendation engines for unbounded domains, like the internet, where there is more or less unlimited information.

“Some of the more unbounded domains, like web content, have struggled a little bit more to make good use of the technology that’s out there. Because there is so much unbounded information, it is hard to represent well, and to match well with other kinds of things people are considering,” Gabriel said. “Most of the collaborative filtering algorithms are built around some kind of matrix factorization technique and they definitely tend to work better if you bound the domain.”

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If you’ve ever tried to learn how to spin a pencil in your hand, you’ll know it takes some concerted effort—but it’s even harder for a robot. Now, though, researchers have finally built a ‘bot that can learn to do it.

The reason that tasks like spinning a stick are hard is that a lot happens in a very short time. As the stick moves, the forces exerted by the hand can easily send it flying out of control if they’re not perfectly co-ordinated. Sensing where the stick is and varying the hand’s motion is an awful lot for even the smartest algorithms to handle based on a list of rules.

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QC meets Blockchaining; nice.

CoinFac Limited, a technology company, has recently introduced the next generation quantum computing technology into cryptocurrency mining, allowing current Bitcoin and Altcoin miners to enjoy a 4,000 times speed increase.

Quantum computing is being perceived as the next generation of supercomputers capable of processing dense digital information and generating multi-sequential algorithmic solutions 100,000 times faster than conventional computers. With each quantum computing server costing at an exorbitant price tag of $5 Million — $10 Million, this revolutionary concoction comprising advanced technological servers with a new wave of currency systems, brings about the most uprising event in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

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Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a set of algorithms that will help teach computers to process and understand human languages.

Whilst mastering natural language is easy for humans, it is something that computers have not yet been able to achieve. Humans understand language through a variety of ways for example this might be through looking up it in a dictionary, or by associating it with words in the same sentence in a meaningful way.

The algorithms will enable a computer to act in much the same way as a human would when encountered with an unknown word. When the computer encounters a word it doesn’t recognise or understand, the algorithms mean it will look up the word in a dictionary (such as the WordNet), and tries to guess what other words should appear with this unknown word in the text.

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Hmmm; my verdict is out for now because I haven’t seen anything showing me that IBM is a real player in this space.

IBM is bringing quantum computing to a device near you by delivering its IBM Quantum Experience through the IBM Cloud. The platform is part of IBM’s Research Frontiers Institute and could be a data scientist’s newest tool and a data junkie’s dream come true.

The platform is available on any desktop or mobile device. The tech allows users to “run algorithms and experiments on IBM’s quantum processor, work with the individual quantum bits (qubits), and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing,” the press release noted.

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A new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets, plus a revised Drake’s equation, produces a new, empirically valid probability of whether any other advanced civilizations have ever existed.