computers

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CAPTCHA Variants: KittenAuth

Over the coming weeks, I'll highlight a few of the best (and weirdest) CAPTCHA systems available on the web. CAPTCHAs are those "type this word" or "answer this question" tests you see on many web forms -- they're there in an attempt to prove that the entity filling out the form is not a spambot. The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." (The subject of Turing tests deserves its own blog entry, but let's just summarize here by... READ ON

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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

Danny Hillis is best known for his Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer that led to breakthroughs in computational science and parallel computing. (It also was the subject of Hillis's book The Connection Machine, which was a highly technical but fascinating version of his thesis paper on parallel computing. If you want the only halfway mind-blowing version, check out The Pattern on the Stone.) Hillis later led R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, but in my book the Connection Machine was... READ ON

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Nicholas Negroponte On the Future: Predictions From 24 Years Ago

Nicholas Negroponte is best known today for his work with the One Laptop Per Child project, but he's been doing interesting and pioneering technological work for a long time. In 1984, Negroponte gave a talk at the very first TED conference. His talk was about how people interact with computers, both in the present (in 1984!) and his hopes for the future. Negroponte's discussion is surprisingly relevant to modern technology; his view of technology from the very early days of the personal computer focuses... READ ON

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Documentaries I Like: Connections

Connections was a documentary series produced for the BBC in 1978. It sought to explain human history through an "alternative view of change" in which multiple aspects of history, including technology, religion, and finance combine to bring about social change. This mode of analysis moves beyond conventional linear narrative, and as a result embraces complexity. Each episode is an essay connecting several seemingly disparate events or technologies through an extended web of logic -- it's great fun to... READ ON

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Gaming History: Discovering Deep Ms. Pac-Man Secrets

I played a fair amount of Ms. Pac-Man in my youth, sometimes plugging my entire $3 allowance into the machine at the movie theater, or the one at the pizza parlor near my grandmother's house. I was never any good at it -- never much good at any arcade games, really -- but my father and brother were skilled Ms. Pac-Man gamers. They preferred Ms. Pac-Man to the original Pac-Man, but I don't recall ever getting an answer about why. (I must have assumed that her little red bow was the killer feature.)... READ ON

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Don't Panic: The Infocom Drive Surfaces

Programmer Andy Baio has gotten his hands on a piece of computer gaming history: a backup of game publisher Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. What's Infocom, you ask? (At least, you ask this if you're under a certain age and/or leaned left-of-nerdy in the 80's....) Infocom is the game company behind classic text adventure like Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a little game called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- which was written with the help of Douglas Adams. A whole generation... READ ON

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The Most Heavily Annotated Flickr Photo

I'm not exactly a Flickr power user -- I've never left a photo note, though I've read lots of them. On Flickr, when a photo note is made, the user specifies a zone of the photo and types in a comment. The zone is then marked on the photo with a little box. Mousing over the box shows the note. Okay, simple enough. But what happens when users add 271 notes to a Flickr photo? Sheer... READ ON

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Ray Kurzweil's Pill Habit

Ray Kurzweil is probably best known for his 70's era reading machines -- early speech synthesizers that could optically scan printed words, recognize them (despite being in multiple typefaces), and speak them back. (We had one of these gizmos at my public library when I was a kid -- it was an amazing piece of gear.) He's also famous for inventing music synthesizers, and it's not unusual to see the name Kurzweil emblazoned on a digital piano. These days he's typically referred to as a "futurist"... READ ON

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How Electronic "20 Questions" Games Work

It was about four years ago when I first saw a 20Q ball. The tiny handheld device scrolled text across its meager one-line screen, inviting me to challenge it in a game of 20 Questions. I immediately thought of an object I figured it wouldn't guess ("iPod") and began to play the game. After a series of slightly odd questions -- including "Does it bring joy to people?" -- the little ball gave its guess: "MP3 player." Wow. It was right. So how does this 20Q device work? The short answer is... READ ON

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New Stretchy Circuits Coming to a Computer Near You!

New Scientist, easily our favorite science magazine, has a fascinating piece on how scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have come up with a genius new way of building circuits. While still built from the same old materials (plastic and silicone), these new circuits can both stretch and bend (it's like your motherboard on yoga!). In fact, they can even be folded around coins. Of course, why the scientists chose to bend them up against coins, the article refuses to reveal. What the... READ ON