Archives
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COMPUTERS 
January 5, 2018 Artificial intelligence eats chess computers for lunch
After 25 years of intermittent seriousness, I’m a mediocre tournament chess player. Grandmasters play at a level that beggars my comprehension. But grandmasters, since the second Clinton administration, have looked like clowns against chess computers. Now AlphaZero, a digital doohickey from DeepMind—Google’s AI operation—has made a fool of Stockfish, the strongest “traditional” chess program. Four […]
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COMPUTERS 
October 4, 2017 ARTIFICIAL SYNAPSES COULD LEAD TO BRAINIER, SUPER-EFFICIENT COMPUTERS
BRAINS, BEYOND THEIR signature achievements in thinking and problem solving, are paragons of energy efficiency. The human brain’s power consumption resembles that of a 20-watt incandescent lightbulb. In contrast, one of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers, the K computer in Kobe, Japan, consumes as much as 9.89 megawatts of energy—an amount roughly equivalent to the […]
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COMPUTERS 
March 28, 2016 Why Google’s New Quantum Computer Could Launch an Artificial Intelligence Arms Race
Ever since the 1980s, researchers have been working on the development of a quantum computer that would be exponentially more powerful than any of the digital computers that exist today. And now Google, in collaboration with Nasa, says it has a quantum computer – the D-Wave 2X – that works. Google claims the D-Wave 2X […]
