computers

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Conway's Game of Life

In 1970, mathematician John Horton Conway invented a game called Life. Conway was intrigued by John von Neumann's theories about self-replicating automata: simple mathematical formulae representing virtual "life forms" that could be depicted in a virtual world. Of course, in von Neumann's day the "virtual world" was a piece of graph paper with some squares filled in (squares being the life forms), but still, it was a pretty cool idea. Conway took von Neumann's ideas a step further, creating a computer... READ ON

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Early Bird Gets the Internet Worm

When Robert Tappan Morris was a graduate student at Cornell in 1988, he had a clever idea: he would release a self-replicating program (or "worm") onto the Internet, reportedly in an effort to highlight security problems in computer networks. Morris's worm exploited vulnerabilities in common computer systems, allowing it to propagate at will onto new computers via the Internet. The worm was designed to use minimal computer resources, but in the wild its effect proved to be devastating. Morris... READ ON

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Wikipedia for Schools

The Wikipedia for Schools project is an effort to distill the vast content of Wikipedia onto one DVD. This single-DVD version is very portable, and can be used in schools worldwide, though its focus on articles written in English probably limits its global appeal. The project focuses on children, and what's most interesting (and appropriate) for them in a school environment; project volunteers selected articles for quality and appropriateness, then manually reviewed them for content (avoiding "adult"... READ ON

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How the Obama Campaign Makes "Two Minute Volunteers"

The Obama presidential campaign made waves last week when it announced Obama '08: The Official iPhone Application. This free application hit the iTunes App Store Top 10, and has generated nearly 700 reviews so far. Whether you're an Obama supporter or not, it's an interesting move: the campaign is using technology to decentralize the campaign effort, effectively turning thousands of individuals across the nation into micro-call centers. This effort is likely to be mirrored by future campaigns, and I... READ ON

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Evolving New Ways to Walk

Darwin@Home is a computer program created by Gerald de Jong to model evolution. While it aspires to be a general-purpose evolution platform, at the moment it does something pretty remarkable: it takes virtual creatures designed by humans and evolves them until they can walk. Because Darwin@Home's creatures are non-biological, they can have all kinds of strange body plans -- they aren't limited to the bodies we're familiar with in Earth-based biology. In the video below, de Jong shows a series of... READ ON

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Rodney Brooks Shows Off Awesome Robots

Rodney Brooks is one of my favorite scientists: he's brilliant, accomplished (his research led to the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot), and full of predictions. Brooks is a master of robotics, having designed a wide variety of robots over the years, and he also made a memorable appearance in one of my favorite documentaries (the title Fast, Cheap and Out of Control came from a research paper of his). So it's fair to say that I'm a fan. Brooks gave a TED Talk on robotics in 2003, and it's just been posted... READ ON

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Search Google From January 2001

In honor of Google's tenth birthday*, the search engine has posted a version of itself as it appeared in January 2001 (the earliest available index). It was a simpler time: only 1,326,920,000 web pages were in the index. Today it's over 8 billion, though Google stopped revealing the exact number in 2005, saying the index size was "meaningless." Doing a search on the 2001-era index reveals how much the web has changed since then. For one thing, there's no mental_floss blog! There is a mention of the... READ ON

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How "Tom's Diner" Tuned the MP3

Suzanne Vega's catchy tune has made her "Mother of the MP3" -- though it took a while. Vega wrote "Tom's Diner" as an a cappella song way back in 1982. By 1984 it has been released on an obscure folk compilation, and didn't appear on Vega's studio albums until 1987's Solitude Standing. In 1990, the song was remixed by The DNA Disciples, adding a danceable beat and instrumentation -- this version hit the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #5 in the... READ ON

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Students + LittleBigPlanet + 24 Hours = Amazing

What can a team of design students create in just 24 hours? How about a complete video game level, crammed with animation, danger, and innovative art? Last weekend, students from New York City's slightly awkwardly-named Parsons The New School for Design divided themselves into teams to design levels for an upcoming PlayStation 3 game called LittleBigPlanet. In the game, the player controls a little "sackboy" (with what appears to be a hacky sack for a head) as he runs around levels that are designed... READ ON

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Marvin Minsky on Emotion

Can we stop epidemics by stopping people from shaking each others' hands? Can we solve global overconsumption by making people smaller, or just getting rid of mostly everybody? If a "one child per family" policy means children's families are small, why not add dozens more parents to each family? Artificial intelligence maven Marvin Minsky tackles these "solutions" in a tongue-in-cheek TED Talk from 2003. Minsky makes an interesting point (in a roundabout way) about the nature of emotion and its role... READ ON