As an example, look at what the AI consensus might have been 30 years ago for championship chess programs, and compare it to the massive database searches used by Deep Blue to pummel human opponents. I think you’ll find that things haven’t worked out quite the way they were expected to.

The feeling of the hoi polloi, of course, is that Artificial Intelligence is dead, and that’s probably the best thing that could happen to what is still a pretty exciting field. But it’s quite a rarity for the public to get a hands-on look at exciting developments in AI.

Unfortunately, the public beta of the Swingly search engine is not going to be the exception to this rule.
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In the case of New Zealand developer Philip Whitley, not understanding the Pigeonhole Principle led to a $NZ 5.3M fine, and up to five years in jail.
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These days the stakes are much higher when it comes to calculating the values of constants. Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo have just announced the calculation of pi to 5 trillion digits. And oddly enough, this was accomplished on a desktop machine running Windows server, not the Linux cluster I would have expected.

Here are some of key stats:

Operating System

Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64

Software

y-cruncher

Processor

2 Intel Xeon X5680 @3.33 GHz offering 24 hyperthreaded processors

Disk Space

The computation required roughly 22TB of disk space, and the compressed result takes another 3.8TB

Time

The task took 90 days to complete, and 66 hours to verify

The y-cruncher software package that broke this record also holds records for several other constants, including one trillion digits of e. So in 30 years, more or less, the desktop PC has gone from constant calculations under a million digits to over a trillion digits. That growth rate of 1.7x per year maps pretty well to Moore’s Law, suggesting that we can expect these numbers to continue climbing for at least a few more years.

Kudos to Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo on a smashing accomplishment!

The loose version of this principle says “After placing n pigeons into m compartments, if n is greater than m, you will find that some compartment must contain more than one pigeon.”

Seems obvious, and perhaps it is, but at least in the world of data compression it must be trotted out from time to time in order to bludgeon dreams back to reality.
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A term meant to convey a person’s inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives. Innumeracy was coined by cognitive scientist Douglas R Hofstadter in one of his Metamagical Thema columns for Scientific American in the early nineteen eighties. Later that decade mathematician John Allen Paulos published the book Innumeracy. In it he includes the notion of chance as well to that of numbers.

The example of innumeracy found in this post is somewhat more interesting than most, because it comes from a source that really should know better: Discover Magazine.
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A while back, they apparently lost their Explainer and asked for applications for a replacement. As part of the application, they requested that you submit a list of 10 sample questions to be explained.

Now, I have no real general journalism experience - most of what I’ve done is technical writing of one form or another. So I’m not a particularly good candidate for this position. But I thought I’d give it a shot. Here is the list of 10 sample questions I submitted on March 17, all based on topical news items:
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Monday, November 17, 2008 8:00 AM

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Maxine Perkins and for the next six weeks, I will be either your best friend or your worst enemy.

Most of you are probably wondering “Why am I here? What have I done? Are these restraints really necessary?”

The answer is quite simple. As you might recall, two weeks before the presidential election, in an attempt to distract the populace put the minds of the voting public at ease, President Bush issued an executive order making English the official language of the United States. Originally titled the “Speak American Act” but now popularly known as the Jules Winnfield Law , it insures that attempts by foreign terrorists to corrupt our voting process will be nipped in the bud. 2008 marks the year that we made sure election fraud will only be committed by decent American citizens.
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Of course, it’s not particularly unusual for companies like Google, Adobe, and Apple to try to sneak their software onto your system using somewhat deceptive practices. Last time I checked up on my Dad’s PC his browser had Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar,  AOL Toolbar, and a Toolbar from his ISP. The actual browser window was a miserable little ribbon a few hundred pixels high. Dad had no idea how the toolbars got installed, but I have no doubt they were all stealthily piggybacked on one piece of software or another.

But Mozilla CEO John Lilly seems to think this use of the update feature to promote a web browser goes beyond aggressive marketing and into the depths of evil. His angry blog post basically says that using an update/patch service to load new software violates some sort of basic compact between users and providers:

It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice and should stop. 

John goes on to say that he doesn’t condemn the common practice of using installed software to push your other products – he seems to be saying that the update program is a special case.

Things get really interesting when you start reading the comments to his post. As is often the case with All Things Apple, the issue seems to have caused extreme polarization.  A selection of anti-Apple comments include:

This is disgraceful. It fails the user in favor of serving Apple. It is, in fact, malware-level tactics. 

This is just a sick way of tricking users to download their browser by making it seem as if an update if available for a piece of software already installed. I bet it even takes over as the default browser afterwards, which would look very bad on Apple.

Right on, John Lily. “Update” means “update,” not “Give me your other products.”

But predictably, the Apple apologists insist that Cupertino can do no wrong:

You Windows users are not only paranoid, but so anti-Apple that your comments are hysterical. This is the biggest NON-ISSUE yet – and anyone using a computer that can’t use that screen and make a good decision should go back to a typewriter. 

The consumer has already trusted Apple (or any company) by downloading one of their pieces of software already. There is already a placement of trust in Apple (or other company). If they trust Apple enough to install one of their apps, then extending that to another one of their programs seems to make sense to me.

Some of the complaints here are over the top. Pushing Safari with a iTunes update is “Malware”? Please. Sure, it’s marketing, but it is utterly benign, other than using a little disk space that is trivial by modern standards. … Compared to all the real malware issues faced by Windows users, this is not worth notice. And, most of all, compared to the execrable practices of Microsoft and other PC software vendors, this is a tempest in a teapot.

I think one thing we can agree on is that there are tens of millions of Windows users with iTunes installed, and the vast majority of them are going to be clueless about what Safari is and whether they should uncheck that radio box.Does this mean Apple is preying on the ignorant? Are they in fact somewhat evil? Or is this just the way the world works now?

Use the comment box to let me know what you think. Inquiring minds want to know.

(By the way, I should note that in the past I’ve always used Firefox on OS/X - Safari 2.0 was lame, unstable, your basic piece of crap. I’m writing this on Windows using Safari 3.1, which is surprisingly fast and seemingly bug free. Quite an improvement!)