Transcurve

Two years ago Stanford professor Andrew Ng joined Google’s X Lab, the research group that’s given us Google Glass and the company’s driverless cars. His mission: to harness Google’s massive data centers and build artificial intelligence systems on an unprecedented scale.

He ended up working with one of…

Michael Archer, currently a Professor and head of the Evolution of Earth & Life Sciences Research Group at University of New South Wales, became obsessed with fossils at the age of 11. His previous education and accomplishments include receiving his undergraduate education at Princeton University, then receiving his PhD in the University of Western Australia,…

Computational intelligence is the manifest destiny of computer science.

- Ed Feigenbaum

Is the mind computable? Can we build sentient machines? What are the implications for humanity if we can?

The human race may be singular, unique across all of time and space. It may be just one of multitudes. Most likely, however, it is an extremely rare…

Janna Levin on her book Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the story of two great mathematicians, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. They were men who had the capacity to think about the most abstract of mathematical truths but had very limited abilities when it came to confronting the mundane aspects of life. Both committed suicide.

HAZEL – as we'll call her – knew something was wrong when, in her mid-50s, she started to feel short of breath at the slightest exertion. Over the next few months, she felt increasingly achy, but several medical visits and an X-ray suggested only arthritis. More troubling symptoms appeared: a…

A provocative new paper is proposing that complex intelligent behavior may emerge from a fundamentally simple physical process. The theory offers novel prescriptions for how to build an AI — but it also explains how a world-dominating superintelligence might…

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work, SURFACES AND ESSENCES: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Working from the simplest forms to infinitely complex constructions, they show how analogies are the tools our…

A team led by the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger has now carried out an experiment with photons in which they have closed an important loophole. The researchers have thus provided the most complete experimental proof that the quantum world is in conflict with our everyday experience.

The…

For the first time, a kidney grown in a lab has been transplanted into the body of a living rat and begun to function normally. That makes the lucky recipient rat the home of the world's most complex lab-grown organ to date.

The story of how the kidney was created reads like something out of a science fiction novel. First, scientists at Boston's Massachusetts…