Category: Communication Theory

When Your Punctuation Says It All (!) – NYTimes.com

When Your Punctuation Says It All (!) – NYTimes.com.

He didn’t just use the lazy singular dash (“-”) as a pause between his thoughts, or even the more time-consuming double-dash (“–”). Nope. This man used a proper em dash.

That is, the kind that required him to hold down the dash button on his iPhone for that extra second, until the “—” appeared, then choose it from among three options. I don’t remember what his messages actually said. But he obviously really liked me.

I’m a writer; it’s natural I’d have a thing for grammar. But these days, it’s as if our punctuation is on steroids.

The Classics: ‘Solaris’ | The Verge

“In American sci-fi, the aliens were always weird, but recognizable as either allies or enemies. Lem wanted to imagine an encounter with something truly alien. How would human beings react to a life-form so foreign as to be beyond comprehension? He imagined a planet-wide sentient ocean so frustratingly non-communicative that scientists would spend their lives trying to unlock its secrets.”

via The Classics: ‘Solaris’ | The Verge.

 

Get Mesmerized Watching All of Twitter in Realtime With TweetPing | GeekDad | Wired.com

Get Mesmerized Watching All of Twitter in Realtime With TweetPing | GeekDad | Wired.com.

The TweetPing dashboard.

The idea is pretty simple: a live feed of all of Twitter, graphically placed on a map of the world, with stats per continent in a HUD that can be pushed down to allow for what feels like a god’s-eye view of the chatter. The execution is simple, elegant, and will suck you in. Go lose some time watching right now.

Turing test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Turing test is a test of a machine‘s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing’s original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine’s ability to render words into audio.[2]

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which opens with the words: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?'” Since “thinking” is difficult to define, Turing chooses to “replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.”[3] Turing’s new question is: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”[4] This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that “machines can think”.[5]

In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.[1][6]

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a pioneering English computer scientist,mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.[2][3][4] Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science andartificial intelligence.[5]

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Turing machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a computer.

The “Turing” machine was described by Alan Turing in 1936,[1] who called it an “a(utomatic)-machine”. The Turing machine is not intended as a practical computing technology, but rather as a hypothetical device representing a computing machine. Turing machines help computer scientists understand the limits of mechanical computation.

Turing gave a succinct definition of the experiment in his 1948 essay, “Intelligent Machinery”. Referring to his 1936 publication, Turing wrote that the Turing machine, here called a Logical Computing Machine, consisted of:

…an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.[2] (Turing 1948, p. 61)

A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a universal Turing machine (UTM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically oriented definition with a similar “universal” nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Turing’s in a formal theory ofcomputation known as the Church–Turing thesis. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in logic and mathematics, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or ‘mechanical procedure’.