The Phosphorous Atom Quantum Computing Machine | MIT Technology Review -
An Australian team unveils the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer that could be embedded in today’s silicon chips.
Google may chuck Spanner into Datastore • The Register -
The Spanner database* is the successor to the BigTable/Megastore architecture on which Google’s just-announced Cloud Datastore is built, and has some more-advanced features, such as snappy access from anywhere in the world for replicated datasets due to its ability to write locally and sync globally without being crushed by latency.
Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons That Don't Exist at the Same Time - ScienceNOW -
Now they’re just messing with us. Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or “state,” of another particle—even if it’s light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don’t even exist at the same time.
Inside Google's Secret Lab - Businessweek -
Page approved Google X’s acquisition of Makani, which was being completed for an undisclosed amount at press time. He also had a demand. “He said we could have the budget and the people to go do this,” Teller says, “but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”
High Scalability - High Scalability - Strategy: Stop Using Linked-Lists -
Big-O notations tells nothing about how one (data structure with algorithm) fare against another. Big-O will only tell you how performance will degrade as n increases. So comparing one a data structure that is RAM intensive to another data structure that is cache friendly from an abstract Big-O point-of-view is just pointless.
Quantum Or Not, New Supercomputer Is Certainly Something Else : NPR -
The quantum computer is a giant black box, or more precisely, a black cube approximately 10 feet on a side. Inside is a refrigeration system that chills the guts to near absolute zero, and shields the workings to protect them from external radiation.
Google's Impressive "Conversational Search" Goes Live On Chrome -
Actually, both Google and Bing do have some “history smarts.” Google has been doing “Previous Query” since 2008; Bing has been doing “Adaptive Search” since 2011. With both, what you searched for before is sometimes effectively added to your subsequent search. For example, a search for “new york” followed by a search for “travel” might cause some of the searches for travel to be about New York travel.
UnQLite - An Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine -
UnQLite is a in-process software library which implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL database engine. UnQLite is a document store database similar to MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB etc. as well a standard Key/Value store similar to BerkeleyDB, LevelDB, etc.
The Weil conjectures did for mathematics what quantum theory and Einstein’s relativity did for physics, and what the discovery of DNA did for biology. Alas, we don’t hear much about this story or about the fascinating drama of ideas unfolding in modern math. Mathematics remains, in the words of poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “a blind spot in our culture—alien territory, in which only the elite, the initiated few have managed to entrench themselves.” And this despite the fact that math is so deeply woven in the fabric of our lives and is becoming, more and more, the engine of our power, wealth, and technological progress.
However, the speech recognition doesn’t have that much of an accuracy. In order to address that - we compare the recognized text with each of available commands using Levenshtein distance. By doing this and increasing distance threshold, we’re able to significantly increase the command recognition accuracy. Try moving the slider in order to change the threshold on the demo page and see what happens.
Long story short: it’s easy to write in Go, applications are fast and beautiful. :) Other things being equal it’s usually around 1.5x-2x slower than GNU grep (it’s not recent test but I’m not really worried about such speed difference). But it uses patterns from .hgignore and .gitignore of your repository to skip files and skips binaries, so usually it’s faster. :) And you get normal regexp syntax instead of POSIX’ kind of grep/sed.
Heinrich Rohrer, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, dies at 79 - The Washington Post -
The device Dr. Rohrer created at an IBM laboratory in 1981 with Gerd Binnig was called the scanning tunneling microscope, and they shared half of the physics Nobel in 1986. (German scientist Ernst Ruska also received a physics prize that year for unrelated work on the electron microscope.)