Amazing lecture: Combined human-computer intelligence

Amazing lecture, on how to combine human & computer intelligence through games.
a new novel idea that can have so much effect.

Checker is SOLVED! and a robotic fly spy!

Scientists have created a tiny fly robot for surveillance purposes.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19068/


The Checkers game is pronounced DEAD! It's SOLVED. There's a book of moves now (well, a computer program), that is guaranteed not to lose. How did they do it? they ran the program for 18 years!
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn12296-checkers-solved-after-years-of-number-crunching.html

Some Interesting new Technologies

Interesting news to share:

1- Solar Cells' efficiency is up to from 28% to 40% and the cost is lowered considerably (i.e. 40% of the light that falls onto the cell is turned into electrical energy)
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196602149

2- A breakthrough in nano-tubes manipulation techniques. Nano-tubes are expected to become the main material of choice for making almost any product - from blood-cell-size robots to computers to finger-tip size cameras to car bodies.
http://www.physorg.com/news84116089.html

3- Pocket Projector: a laser technology that would allow embedding a whole projector inside a cell phone.
http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/17860/

4- A new record was set for Machine Translation Quality (using the BLEU test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilingual_evaluation_understudy). This goes to Meaningful Machines, a score of .65. I have to admit that the advancements in this field will still take a while to materialize in realistic usable products.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/translate_pr.html