Category: Calculatin’
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Why tiny helicopters are so hard to fly
Tiny remote control helicopters have become all the rage in the last few years as lightweight motors and materials have plummeted in price. But if you’ve ever played with one, you’ll know how hard they are to control. That’s not the result of poor construction. Small helicopters are harder to control than big ones because…
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Stats prove Red Baron’s WW1 victories were down to luck
Here’s a great anecdote from Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles: During the “Manhattan project” (the making of the nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what was the definition of a “great” general. Groves replied that any general who had won…
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Modelling how birds mistime egg-laying due to climate change
Many birds have to time egg-laying to coincide with a peak in food availability, for example , to match the hatching shcedule of a particular type of caterpillar. This is a tricky business because many caterpillars are available for only a few weeks and the birds must lay their eggs around a month in advance…
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Qutrit breakthrough brings quantum computers closer
The folks playing with quantum computers have been claiming for years that their gadgets will one day make today’s supercomputers look like quivering lumps of jelly. But so far, their computers have yet to match the calculating prowess of a 10-year old with ADHD. The most exciting work so far has been on universal quantum…
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Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves
Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be solved in a maximum of 26 moves. Now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has gone one better. He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be…
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Can data overload protect our privacy?
If you were chatting on MSN messenger in June 2006, your conversation was being recorded and the details (but not the content) passed to Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. Using this data, these scientists have created “the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date”. They’ve now published their…
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Holographic quantum computing
After a decade or so in the lab, holographic data storage is about to burst into the hardware market big time. Its USP is that holographic data is stored globally rather than at specific sites in the storage medium. It is written using a pair of lasers to create an interference pattern that is recorded…
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Quantum computers and the death of chemistry
When it comes to chemistry, computer simulations suck. The best they can do is simulate the electron dynamics of a helium atom, which is almost as simple as it gets. Never mind the rest of the periodic table and how the elements interact with each other. But that’s gonna change when we get quantum computers,…
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Danger Theory and artificial immune systems
In recent years, various researchers have attempted to build computer security systems modelled on the human immune system. The idea is that if the system detects an invader, this triggers an immune response that kills the foreigner. These systems don’t work terribly well, perhaps because the human immune system doesn’t work like that either. In…
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How cricketers get their eye in
It’s long been known that batsman in the venerable game of cricket are more likely to get out early in their innings, before they “get their eye in”. Various factors seem to be to blame, such as the time it takes for the batsmen’s footwork to warm up and for them to adapt to the…