Procedural Polymatheia

Peeqo - The GIF Bot

Open source robotic assistant project by Abhishek Singh can take voice instructions and express itself using GIF animations:

The world’s first and (currently) only robot to respond entirely through GIFs, this little bot is a fun desktop assistant for those who spend way too many hours in front of the computer and often need some delight and entertainment to get through the day. 

     No cockpit demands as much intense focus as an SR-71 Blackbird’s, and in frustrating irony, no cockpit offers a better view. There was no time to look out the window. The plane knew when your eyes started to wander to the spectacle of earth from 85,000 feet; that’s when something would go wrong. There was much to monitor. The many “steam gauge” instruments reflect a bygone era, giving the pilot information ranging from heading to compressor inlet temperature, each dial representing a critically important system.

      Even though this cockpit was operated through 2,854 flight hours, it looks brand new. That’s because it was only ever flown using the gloved hands of a crew member wearing the essential high altitude pressure suit. Every control is large enough to be adjusted with those bulky pressure suit gloves. 

     You sit atop your throne, the SR-1 ejection seat, which carries a rare 100% success rate. To operate the circuit breakers, you must reach beside and behind your seat, outside your field of view through the pressure suit helmet. To make sure you actuate the correct breaker, you count down the rows and columns by feel.

Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests.

The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details. This suggests there are real and widespread barriers to communicating mathematical work, and that this is not because of poor training in mathematical skills, or because there is a social stigma about doing well in mathematics.

Dr Tim Fawcett and Dr Andrew Higginson, from the University of Exeter, found, using statistical analysis of the number of citations to 2000 articles in a leading physics journal, that articles are less likely to be referenced by other physicists if they have lots of mathematical equations on each page.

Dr Higginson said: “We have already showed that biologists are put off by equations but we were surprised by these findings, as physicists are generally skilled in mathematics.

“This is an important issue because it shows there could be a disconnection between mathematical theory and experimental work. This presents a potentially enormous barrier to all kinds of scientific progress.”

The research findings suggest improving the training of science graduates won’t help, because physics students already receive extensive maths training before they graduate. Instead, the researchers think the solution lies in clearer communication of highly technical work, such as taking the time to describe what the equations mean.

Dr Fawcett said: “Physicists need to think more carefully about how they present the mathematical details of their work, to explain the theory in a way that their colleagues can quickly understand. It takes time to scrutinise the details of a technical article–even for the most distinguished physics professors–so with many competing demands on their time scientists may be choosing to skip over articles that take too much effort to digest.”

“Ideally, the impact of scientific work should be determined by its scientific value, rather than by the presentational style,” said Dr Higginson.

“Unfortunately, it seems valuable papers may be ignored if they are not made accessible. As we have said before: all scientists who care about the dialogue between theory and experiment should take this issue seriously, rather than claiming it does not exist.”

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Comment on ‘Are physicists afraid of mathematics? by Andrew D. Higginson and Tim W. Fawcett is published in New Journal of Physics.

“Mr John Shaw was flogg’d in Wall Street by Col. Mansfield–the occasion of it was this – a few days after the news of General Washington’s death arriv’d, Mr. Shaw said, in the presence of a number of gentlemen in the Coffee House, that “it was a pity, General Washington had not died five and twenty years ago”– he repeated the expression in the evening in the Insurance Room in the presence of Colonel Mansfield, who, having serv’d under Washington, could scarce refrain from drubbing him at the time, but considering himself as only a visitor in the room, & unwilling to make any disturbance, he took no notice of it– Mr. Shaw’s speech was soon spread about, and he was universally censur’d for it – this evening in coming down Wall Street, he met Col. M., & stopping him, said he had understood he had been telling tales of him - Col. M. reply’d he only mention’d what he heard him say – Mr S. said it was a d____d lie, the words were scarcely utter’d, ere Col. M had his arum up, and the great the mighty Mr John Shaw fell–some persons coming up, interpos’d, & Col. Mansfield left him, after having severely bruis’d him, & given him a pretty black eye”  —Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker, Friday, December 27, 1799

given any loop (of any shape), are there four points that, when connected, form a square? (unsolved) or a rectangle? (solved and proved in this video)

Mechanical Turks: Alexis Kennedy on storytelling AI

Will AI replace narrative designers?

Alexis Kennedy knows a thing or two about writing for games, so his answer the question is informed and informative.

I’m not terribly worried. Procedural content generation can do a lot of things that writers and designers would otherwise have to do manually. But spreadsheets can do a lot of things that accountants and project managers would otherwise have to do manually. Spreadsheets haven’t yet made accountants and project managers obsolete. I mean in the end we’ll likely all of us become obsolete - machines will end up doing accountancy and project management and writing and neurosurgery - but we’re a long way from that.

More interestingly, he goes into detail about why he thinks that question gets asked, and what it can tell us about the value of writing. I’ll let you read it for yourself–its definitely worth it–but the key bit I want to focus on here is this:

So when a player wants more story in a game, what they actually often want is more interesting and novel things in the game. That’s not just a resource problem. It’s also a design problem.

This is a key insight.

Personally, I’m less interested in procedural generation that attempts to generate new content endlessly and more interested in tools that make it easier for designers to create flexible and expressive results.

The plot generators built for NaNoGenMo will continue to get more sophisticated, and may even be able to sustain an entire, readable novel someday soon…but even then, it will still be easier for a writer to seed an entirely different generator than it will be to adjust the first generator to output two kinds of ideas.Novelty is basically the inverse of pattern recognition, and humans are good at pattern recognition. Thus, humans do randomness badly, but novelty pretty well.

I’m more interested in procedural generation that acts as a support structure for that novelty. For example, if adding a new character to an interactive story means writing a lot of boilerplate reactions, a system that automates some of that detail or prompts the writer to fill it in will make it easier to make more characters in greater depth.

For that matter, a tool that detects obscure but valid configurations of the story elements and prompts the writer to expand them (or directs them to areas that need the most fleshing out) would be really useful.

Look at what we’ve found so far. 

Is your favorite Star Wars planet a desert world or an ice planet or a jungle moon?

It’s possible that your favorite planet exists right here in our galaxy. Astronomers have found over 3,400 planets around other stars, called “exoplanets.”

Some of these alien worlds could be very similar to arid Tatooine, watery Scarif and even frozen Hoth, according to NASA scientists.

Find out if your planet exists in a galaxy far, far away or all around you.

Planets With Two Suns

Were you going to the Tosche station to pick up some power converters? Hold on a minute and learn about Kepler-16b, 200 light-years from Earth. It’s the first honest-to-goodness planet ever found where you could watch two suns set like Luke. George Lucas himself even blessed its nickname ‘Tatooine.’ It’s not a perfect comparison: Kepler-16b is a cold gas giant roughly the size of Saturn. But don’t worry, kid.

The best part is that Tatooine aka Kepler-16b was just the first. It has family. A LOT of family. Half the stars in our galaxy are pairs, rather than single stars like our sun. If every star has at least one planet, that’s billions of worlds with two suns. Billions! Maybe waiting for life to be found on them.

Desert Worlds

If you’re like Finn and want to know why everyone wants to go back to Jakku desert planets, get this: Star Wars may be reflecting the real universe. Desert worlds are not only a very real possibility, but we think they are probably very common. They can be hot, like the fictional Tatooine and Jakku, or cold, like Jedha in “Rogue One” or our real planet Mars.

Perhaps it’s not so weird that both Luke and Rey grew up on planets that look suspiciously like each other. If you’re scouring the universe for a place to settle, you have a good chance of finding a desert planet.

Ice Planets

There is a Hoth in our galaxy! Though not the same Hoth from “The Empire Strikes Back” (no invading Imperials, for one). The icy super-Earth reminded scientists so much of the frozen Rebel base they nicknamed it “Hoth.” The planet’s real name is OGLE 2005-BLG-390L.

Our galaxy’s Hoth is too cold to support life as we know it. But life may evolve under the ice of a different world, or a moon in our solar system.

We’re currently designing a mission to look for life under the crust of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. We’re pretty sure ity won’t look like tauntauns, if it exists.

Forest worlds

Both the forest moon of Endor and Takodana, the home of Han Solo’s favorite cantina in “Force Awakens,” are green like our home planet. But astrobiologists think that plant life on other worlds could be red, black, or even rainbow-colored!

In August 2016, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of Proxima Centauri b, a planet only four light-years away from Earth, which orbits a tiny red star.

The light from a red star, also known as an M dwarf, is dim and mostly in the infrared spectrum (as opposed to the visible spectrum we see with our sun). And that could mean plants with wildly different colors than what we’re used to seeing on Earth. Or, animals that see in the near-infrared.

And Beyond

The next few years will see the launch of a new generation of spacecraft to search for planets around other stars. TESS and the James Webb Telescope will go into space in 2018, and WFIRST in the mid-2020s. That’s one step closer to finding life.

You don’t need to visit a galaxy far, far away to find wondrous worlds. Just visit this one … there’s plenty to see.

Discover more about exoplanets here: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/

Working Lego Piranha Plant

Check out the video of it in action. 

An android is entertaining passengers at a Scottish airport