MachineMachine /stream - tagged with programming https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[The Quietus | News | Alan Turing's First Computer Music Restored]]> http://thequietus.com/articles/21011-alan-turing-s-first-computer-music-restored

Researchers based in New Zealand say they have restored the first known recording of computer-generated music which dates back to 1951 and was produced on a contraption made by Alan Turing.

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Wed, 28 Sep 2016 01:38:18 -0700 http://thequietus.com/articles/21011-alan-turing-s-first-computer-music-restored
<![CDATA[When Robots Are An Instrument Of Male Desire - The Establishment]]> http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/04/27/when-robots-are-an-instrument-of-male-desire/

By the time she started saying “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” people had started to realize that there was something wrong with Tay.

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Mon, 09 May 2016 01:16:30 -0700 http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/04/27/when-robots-are-an-instrument-of-male-desire/
<![CDATA[Move over, chatbots: meet the artbots | Technology | The Guardian]]> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/15/move-over-chatbots-meet-the-artbots

At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines.

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Sun, 17 Apr 2016 06:02:37 -0700 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/15/move-over-chatbots-meet-the-artbots
<![CDATA[How to Make a Bot That Isn't Racist | Motherboard]]> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot

Really, really racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far below the baseline of ethical botmaking.

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Thu, 31 Mar 2016 02:36:50 -0700 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot
<![CDATA[The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go | WIRED]]> http://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadness-beauty-watching-googles-ai-play-go/

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.” It’s a word he keeps repeating. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

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Fri, 11 Mar 2016 16:09:56 -0800 http://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadness-beauty-watching-googles-ai-play-go/
<![CDATA[Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history]]> http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

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Wed, 29 Apr 2015 16:19:44 -0700 http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx
<![CDATA[Artificial stupidity can be just as dangerous as artificial intelligence.]]> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/artificial_stupidity_can_be_just_as_dangerous_as_artificial_intelligence.single.html

The day that science fiction writers have feared for so long has finally come—the machines have risen up. There is nowhere you can run and nowhere you can hide.

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Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:14:30 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/artificial_stupidity_can_be_just_as_dangerous_as_artificial_intelligence.single.html
<![CDATA[It took 2 years to build this functioning word processor in Minecraft]]> http://www.dailydot.com/geek/word-processor-built-in-minecraft/?fb=dd

If it exists in the real world, you can be someone has figured out a way to build it in Minecraft. A Minecraft builder has created a word processor, complete with keyboard and monitor, entirely in the game. And it isn't just for show.

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Fri, 09 Jan 2015 02:46:05 -0800 http://www.dailydot.com/geek/word-processor-built-in-minecraft/?fb=dd
<![CDATA[Scientists “upload” a roundworm brain to a LEGO robot - SlashGear]]> http://www.slashgear.com/scientists-upload-a-roundworm-brain-to-a-lego-robot-15359456/

It sounds like a scene from a sci-fi flick. Or a horror film. Take your pick. Scientists of the future have finally found a way to digitize our brains and store them in storage disks (or Dilithium crystals for more capacity).

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Thu, 18 Dec 2014 01:48:01 -0800 http://www.slashgear.com/scientists-upload-a-roundworm-brain-to-a-lego-robot-15359456/
<![CDATA[Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history]]> http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

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Sun, 08 Jun 2014 10:11:13 -0700 http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx
<![CDATA[Chessmate]]> http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/the-case-for-computers-at-top-chess-tournaments/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&

LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the Israeli Boris Gelfand, 43. Gelfand, perhaps buoyed by his success in Game 7, had chosen an unexpectedly sharp line against Anand, who is renowned for his ability to calculate quickly on the board.

The screen of Deep Junior, the computer that the chess champion Gary Kasparov faced in 2003. Chip East/Reuters The screen of Deep Junior, the computer that the chess champion Gary Kasparov faced in 2003. Commenting live, the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko, a challenger for the world title in 2005, preferred Gelfand’s position. But just as he was expressing surprise at Anand’s strategy, Anand’s 17th move brought the game to a sudden close. Anand had deceived both his challenger and one of the strongest players in the world.

But many lesser players watching the game live with specialized computer chess engines weren’t flummoxed by Anand’s play; programs like Houdini had flagged Anand’s trap a few moves earlier. Computers have so flattened the game of chess that even novices like me can make some sense of the moves being played at the highest level.

Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made it much more so and have thereby changed the nature of the game. Now risky plays are almost inevitably punished because they’ve been anticipated, making Anand’s play in Game 8 of the recent championship a rare exception.

Computers don’t play chess perfectly — the game is far too complicated for that — but they play in a way that’s more exciting and more decisive. They also play better than humans. Which is why since chess is no longer about just two humans facing each other anyway — thanks to pre-game computer-assisted preparation — it makes sense to allow the use of computers during competitive games. (Of course, for the sake of fairness, the two players would have equal access to the same computer engine.) This idea, known as “advanced chess,” has been endorsed by the former chess champion Gary Kasparov.

So far, experiments with advanced chess suggest that the powers of man and machine combined don’t just make for a stronger game than a man’s alone; they also seem to make for a stronger game than a machine’s alone. Allowing chess players the assistance of the best computer chess engine available during top tournaments would ensure that the contests really do showcase the very best chess being played on earth.

It would also teach us important things about the world.

Take, for example, a game that’s winding down with this particular configuration: rook and a bishop versus two knights. This situation came up in a world championship qualifying game in 2007, and the match concluded in a draw. But computer analysis showed that the game was really a forced win for black in 208 moves. This revealed not just a strategic truth about chess, but also a phenomenological truth, a truth about reality, that would otherwise have remained inaccessible.

Computers have made possible a famous proof in mathematics — the four-color theorem — but most mathematicians continue to hope the proof can be found without the assistance of computers. With chess, though, some truths are simply unknowable without a computer. As computers get better at chess, letting the best chess players work with them more would give us a better understanding of the game, our own limits and the world.

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Thu, 01 May 2014 13:40:48 -0700 http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/the-case-for-computers-at-top-chess-tournaments/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&
<![CDATA[Robot Odyssey: The hardest computer game of all time.]]> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/robot_odyssey_the_hardest_computer_game_of_all_time.html

My first computer was an Apple IIe with 128KB of RAM, no hard drive, and a 5¼ inch floppy drive. One of the top educational games back then was Rocky’s Boots, an inventive game that taught the basics of formal logic to kids. I loved it when I was 6.

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Wed, 26 Feb 2014 09:06:52 -0800 http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/robot_odyssey_the_hardest_computer_game_of_all_time.html
<![CDATA[Eterni.me - Become Virtually Immortal]]> http://eterni.me/

Submitted w/out comment: "Simply Become Immortal" http://t.co/vT48jQ1KZT (via @therourke) http://t.co/sTbOFQHGfg – Chris Lindgren (lndgrn) http://twitter.com/lndgrn/status/431445405440569347

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Thu, 06 Feb 2014 07:34:48 -0800 http://eterni.me/
<![CDATA[If The Internet Is Your Canvas, You Paint In Zeros And Ones : All Tech Considered : NPR]]> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/29/241645097/when-the-internet-is-your-canvas-you-paint-in-zeros-and-ones

That Benjamin Palmer dropped $3,500 at Phillips auction house in New York is not surprising. The 217-year-old company, headquartered on Park Avenue, regularly sells artwork for tens — and often hundreds — of thousands of dollars. What is surprising, however, is that he took nothing home.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 05:12:56 -0800 http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/29/241645097/when-the-internet-is-your-canvas-you-paint-in-zeros-and-ones
<![CDATA[Codecs and Containers - the wonderful world of video files]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpBjGUlBTHU&feature=youtube_gdata

Many people I meet in forums don't know that there is a difference between video codecs and containers. The confusion is so widely spread that I decided to make an explanatory video on it. With a German accent. And my very first animation. Maybe it still helps...

Here are some useful software links on the topic.

Handbrake, a great tool to convert video codecs: http://handbrake.fr/

A little tool I programmed to change video containers without reencoding: http://sourceforge.net/projects/containerswitch/

The video was animated in Apple Motion 5. The graphics included are from openclipart.org, thanks a lot to them.

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Thu, 14 Nov 2013 03:45:19 -0800 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpBjGUlBTHU&feature=youtube_gdata
<![CDATA[Artist Profile: Alex Myers]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/3/artist-profile-alex-myers

Your work spans several distinct, but overlapping areas of discourse. We could start by talking through design, animation, glitch art, code, game play or the interface. I want to start right from the bottom though, and ask you about inputs and outputs. A recent work you collaborated on with Jeff Thompson, You Have Been Blinded - “a non-visual adventure game” -  takes me back to my childhood when playing a videogame often meant referring to badly sketched dungeon maps, before typing N S E or W on a clunky keyboard. Nostalgia certainly plays a part in You Have Been Blinded, but what else drives you to strip things back to their elements? I’ve always been interested in how things are built. From computers to houses to rocks to software. What makes these things stand up? What makes them work? Naturally I’ve shifted to exploring how we construct experiences. How do we know? Each one of us has a wholly unique experience of… experience, of life.. When I was a kid I was always wondering what it was like to be any of the other kids at school. Or a kid in another country. What was it like to be my cat or any of the non-people things I came across each day? These sorts of questions have driven me to peel back experience and ask it some pointed questions. I don’t know that I’m really interested in the answers. I don’t think we could really know those answers, but I think it’s enough to ask the questions. Stripping these things down to their elements shows you that no matter how hard you try, nothing you make will ever be perfect. There are always flaws and the evidence of failure to be found, no matter how small. I relish these failures. Your ongoing artgame project, Writing Things We Can No Longer Read, revels in the state of apophenia, “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”. [1] The title invokes Walter Benjamin for me, who argued that before we read writing we “read what was never written” [2] in star constellations, communal dances, or the entrails of sacrificed animals. From a player’s point of view the surrealistic landscapes and disfigured interactions within your (not)(art)games certainly ask, even beg, to be interpreted. But, what role does apophenia have to play in the making of your work? When I make stuff, I surround myself with lots of disparate media. Music, movies, TV shows, comics, books, games. All sorts of stuff gets thrown into the pot of my head and stews until it comes out. It might not actually come out in a recognizable form, but the associations are there. A specific example can be found in a lot of the models I use. I get most of them, or at least the seed of them, from open source models I find on 3D Warehouse. Because of the way that website works, it’s constantly showing you models it thinks are similar for whatever reason. Often I’ll follow those links and it will take me down symbolic paths that I never would have consciously decided to pursue. This allows a completely associative and emergent composition to take form. I’d like to paraphrase and link up your last two answers, if I may. How do “relishing failures” and “allowing things to take form” overlap for you? I know you have connections with the GLI.TC/H community, for instance. But your notgames Me&You, Down&Up, and your recent work/proposition Make Me Something seem to invoke experiments, slips and disasters from a more oblique angle. All are a means of encouraging surprise. In each piece it’s not about the skill involved, but about the thrill of the unknown. In all of my projects I try to construct a situation where I have very little control over the outcome. Glitch does this. But within the glitch community there’s a definite aesthetic involved. You can look at something and know that it’s glitch art. That’s not true for everything, but there is a baseline. For my notgames work I embrace the practice, not necessarily the look. I want irregularity. I want things to break. I want to be surprised. Your work in progress, the Remeshed series, appears to be toying with another irregular logic,  one you hinted at in your comments about “associative and emergent composition”; a logic that begins with the objects and works out. I hear an Object Oriented echo again in your work Make Me Something, where you align yourself more with the 3D objects produced than with the people who requested them. What can we learn from things, from objects? Has Remeshed pushed/allowed you to think beyond tools? That’s a tricky question and I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer. Both projects owe their existence to a human curatorial eye. But in both I relinquish a lot of control over the final object or experience. I do this in the spirit of ready-to-hand things. By making experiences and objects that break expectations our attention is focused upon them. They slam into the foreground and demand our attention. Remeshed, and to an extent, Make Me Something, allows me to focus less on the craft of modeling and animation and more on pushing what those two terms mean. As Assistant Professor and Program Director of the Game Studies BSc atBellevue University you inevitably inhabit a position of authority for your students. Are there contradictions inherent in this status, especially when aiming to break design conventions, to glitch for creative and practical ends, and promote those same acts in your students? Yourecently modified Roland Barthes’ 1967 text ‘The Death of the Author’ to fit into a game criticism context. It makes me wonder whether “The Player-God” is something you are always looking to kill in yourself? Absolutely. When teaching I try break down the relationship of authority as much as possible. I prefer to think of myself as a mentor, or guide, to the students. Helping them find the right path for themselves. Doing this from within a traditional pedagogical structure is difficult, but worthwhile. Or so I tell myself. In terms of the Player-God, I think yes, I’m always trying to kill it. But at the same time, I’m trying to kill the Maker-God. There is no one place or source for a work. There’s no Truth. I reject the Platonic Ideal. Both maker and player are complicit in the act of the experience. Without either, the other wouldn’t exist.

Age: Somewhere in my third decade. Location: The Land of Wind and Grass / The Void Between Chicago and Denver How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? Oof, for as long as I can remember. When I was 13 I killed my first computer about 4 days after getting it. I was trying to change the textures in DOOM. I had no idea what I was doing. Later, in college I was in a fairly traditional arts program learning to blow glass. At some point someone gave me a cheap Sony 8mm digital camcorder and I started filming weird things and incorporating the (terrible) video art into my glass sculptures. After that I started making overly ambitious text adventures and playing around with generative text and speech synthesizers. Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study? I use Unity and Blender primarily right now. They’re the natural evolution of what I was trying to do way back when I was using Hammer and Maya. I did my MFA in Interactive Media and Environments at The Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, NL. I started working in Hammer around this time making Gun-Game maps for Counter-Strike: Source. During the start of my second semester of grad school I suffered a horrible hard drive failure and lost all of my work. In a fit of depression I did pretty much nothing but play CS:S and drink beer for three months. At the end of that I made WINNING. What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I’m not sure how to answer this. About the most traditional thing I do anymore is make prints from the results of my digital tinkering. Object art doesn’t interest me much these days, but it definitely influenced how I first approached Non-Object art. Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? I’m involved with a lot of local game developer and non-profit digital arts organizations. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? I’m an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at Bellevue University. The job and my work are inexorably bound together. I enjoy teaching in a non-arts environment because I feel it affords me freedom and resources I wouldn’t otherwise have. I actually hate the idea of walled-disciplines in education. Everyone should learn from and collaborate with everyone else. Who are your key artistic influences? Mostly people I know: Jeff Thompson, Darius Kazemi, Rosa Menkman, THERON JACOBS and some people I don’t know: Joseph Cornell, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, most of Vimeo. Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? Yes. Definitely. Most recently I’ve been working with Jeff Thompson. We made You Have Been Blinded and Thrown into a Dungeon, a non-visual, haptic dungeon adventure. We’ve also been curating Games++ for the last two years. Do you actively study art history? Yep. I’m constantly looking at and referencing new and old art. I don’t limit it to art, though. I’m sick of art that references other art in a never ending strange loop. I try to cast my net further afield. Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? Definitely. In no particular order: Dr. Seuss, Alastair Reynolds, Alan Sondheim, Dan Abnett, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Mother Goose, Jacques Lacan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Jung, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Hickman, Brandon Graham, John Dewey, Umberto Eco... the list goes on and on. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? I think we’ve partially reached an era of the ascendant non-object. That is, an art form, distinct from performance and theatre, that places an emphasis wholly on the experience and not on the uniqueness of the object. Because of this move away from a distinct singular form, there’s no place for it in the art market. Most artists that work this way live by other means. I teach. Others move freely between the worlds of art and design. Still others do other things. The couple of times I’ve had solo exhibitions in Europe, I’ve almost always been offered a livable exhibition fee. Here in the States that’s never been the case. When I have shows stateside, I always take a loss. The organizer may cover my material costs, but there’s no way I could ever live off of it. Nor would I want to. I think the pressures of survival would limit my artistic output. I’m happier with a separation between survival and art.

[1] “Apophenia,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopaedia, March 21, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apophenia&oldid=545047760.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schoclen Books, 1933), 333–336.

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Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:28:28 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/3/artist-profile-alex-myers
<![CDATA[Computer glitch may have led to Deep Blue's historic win over chess champ Kasparov | The Verge]]> http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/29/3426484/computer-glitch-deep-blue-garry-kasparov

Earlier this year, IBM celebrated the 15-year anniversary of its supercomputer Deep Blue beating chess champion Garry Kasparov. According to a new book, however, it may have been an accidental glitch rather than computing firepower that gave Deep Blue the win. At the Washington Post, Brad Plumer high

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Sat, 29 Sep 2012 07:09:00 -0700 http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/29/3426484/computer-glitch-deep-blue-garry-kasparov
<![CDATA[Lies, Damn Lies, and Twitter Bots]]> http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Cascio201209

I’m particularly interested in the political uses of technology-enabled deception—uses that I suspect are likely to become more prevalent in the near future.

Two of my rules for constructing useful and interesting scenarios are to (a) think about what happens when seemingly disparate changes smash together, and (b) imagine how new developments might be misused. In both cases, the goal is to uncover something unexpected, but (upon reflection) disturbingly plausible. I’d like to lay out for you the chain of connections that lead me to believe that we’re on the verge of something big.

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Tue, 18 Sep 2012 06:18:00 -0700 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Cascio201209
<![CDATA[Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/12/magic-the-gathering.html

Alex Churchill has posted a way to implement a Turing complete computer within a game of Magic: The Gathering ("Turing complete" is a way of classifying a calculating engine that is capable of general-purpose computation). The profound and interesting thing about the recurrence of Turing completeness in many unexpected places -- such as page-layout descriptive engines -- is that it suggests that there's something foundational about the ability to do general computation. It also suggests that attempts to limit general computation will be complicated by the continued discovery of new potential computing engines. That is, even if you lock down all the PCs so that they only play restricted music formats and not Ogg, if you allow a sufficiently speedy and scriptable Magic: The Gathering program to exist, someone may implement the Ogg player using collectible card games.

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Sun, 16 Sep 2012 04:35:00 -0700 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/12/magic-the-gathering.html
<![CDATA[Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/creating-artificial-intelligence-based-on-the-real-thing.html

For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”

Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity.

The physical limits of conventional computer designs are within sight — not today or tomorrow, but soon enough. Nanoscale circuits cannot shrink much further. Today’s chips are power hogs, running hot, which curbs how much of a chip’s circuitry can be used. These limits loom as demand is accelerating for computing capacity to make sense of a surge of new digital data from sensors, online commerce, social networks, video streams and corporate and government databases.

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Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:44:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/creating-artificial-intelligence-based-on-the-real-thing.html