computers

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Margaret Hamilton inside an Apollo command module simulator

Margaret Hamilton, the brilliant mathematician behind the then-nascent field of software engineering and the lead programmer of the Apollo effort that put humanity on the moon, has passed away at the age of ninety.

But what a life Hamilton had!  Early on she demonstrated a prowess for mathematics.  She followed that into higher education and wound up at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  There she was brought aboard NASA to work on the computer systems for the Apollo spacecraft.  It was during this phase of her career that Hamilton developed error-correction code that in the case of Apollo 11 kept the vessel from disaster during landing.

Here are the famous photos of Margaret Hamilton with the enormous pile of computer code that she and her team developed for Apollo 11:

After the Apollo program ended, Hamilton started her own company ...

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Meet “Sally”.  She costs $57,000: less than the yearly pay of the average teacher in New York State.  She is an automaton.  A robot teacher.  And she is coming online in a school district this coming fall semester.

Here is another picture of Sally courtesy of Realbotix, the company that created her:

 

“Welllll long tall Sally, she’s built for speed, she got

Everything that Uncle John need

Oh bay-bee, yeaaaah bay-bee, WHOO-OOOH, HOO-OO bay-beee

Havin’ me some fun tonight, yeah! “

(I just couldn’t resist that, folks.)

I think that Sally is a glorified Teddy Ruxpin.  Remember him? The animatronic teddy bear that toy company Worlds of Wonder came out with in 1985.  Sally probably has a cassette tape hatch in her back that contains her programming, lets her move her arms and head (she has legs but she’s unable to walk).

The school admins swear that ...

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It is official: Fallout 5 is in development.  Bethesda mastermind Todd Howard confirmed it yesterday.  Right now it’s being called “in pre-production”, which could mean a lot of things.  Depending on how far things are it could mean that concept art is being created.  It could also mean that the staff are still trying to determine where this new Fallout game takes place.  Previous games have been set in the California desert, the ruins of Washington D.C., the Boston region, and the landscape surrounding Las Vegas.  Where will the next Fallout take us?

Speaking of Las Vegas, Howard also said that remasters of Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 are coming.  Which will become an enormous time sink for me.  Fallout 3 sucked me in so hard that I spent over 130 hours playing it.  I got sooo obsessed with finding every secret, talking to every character that I ...

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Are massively multiplayer online role-playing games still a “thing” anymore?  Oh sure there is EVE Online (more than two decades old and still going strong) and I’m going to hazard a guess that World of Warcraft is even today enjoying much play.  And every so often when curiosity hits I log into the original Guild Wars, now 21 years since its launch and as beautiful as ever while also remaining free to play.

Once upon a time though, MMOROGs dominated much of the market.  And one of those games was Star Wars Galaxies.  It was a title that gave me countless hours of enjoyment and thrill and it did for many others too.  At last we would not be simply watching the Star Wars saga, we could be living in it too.
So it was that a few days after Christmas 2003, I signed in and began my
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This is… I mean, just… HOLY CRAP!  This is NOT a good thing.

And it even looks like a Cylon, too.

 

That’s “Gabi”.  He… I mean, IT… is in Seoul, South Korea.  It just took vows to be a Buddhist monk at a special ordination ceremony.

Here’s the story from UPI about the Cylon Buddhist monk.

And here is video of Gabi going through the paces of being a holy droid:

 

As good friend of this blog Geoff Gentry pointed out, at least the Cylons from the 2003 version of Battlestar Galactica  were monotheistic.  That is true.  But for such a construct it’s only going to be a matter of time before the leap is taken from programmed zen to actively believing in a singular God.  And when the things start assuming through their AI superiority that THEY are closer to God than frail and fallen humanity ...

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I’ll be the first to admit: I have no idea if this is going to actually go anywhere.  But for the past few years I’ve had an idea and it’s always seemed like a fun one.  And it would definitely be a challenge to pull off.  But things have changed since my forays into programming (with the C language, in 1995) and I’m thinking that this might really be possible so, we’re going to find out.

A while back a crazy notion hit me: to play Zork on my iPhone and iPad.  Yes that Zork: the 1977 text-only role-playing game.  A game that kept countless insomniacs awake long into the night as they explored the Great Underground Empire in all its riches, its horror, and occasional hilarity.  There were no graphics at all involved with Zork: like most any good story it played out primarily in ...

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As someone who works often in artificial intelligence, I will be the first to state that there are some things that the technology will never ever improve upon.

Charlie Brown and the gang is one of those.
For whatever reason – maybe the idea for this was hatched late one night by a first-year community college kid wishing he was old enough to get drunk – somebody fed a classic 1978 Peanuts comic strip into an AI.  Maybe they were trying to make it even funnier than what it already is.  Who knows?  The result however is downright lopsided and more than a little disturbing.
Here is the original strip.  Click to enlarge:

And here is the, ahem, “AI enhanced” edition:

That final word balloon is cracking me up!  What was the AI trying to render?!  Also, when Marcie first speaks it comes out like the Swedish Chef.
I’m actually
...
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For some time now there has been one ultimate benchmark for whether or not something has a truly computerized central component: Does it play Doom?  More than thirty years after iD Software released their 3D first-person shooter, it has been ported to seemingly everything from refrigerators to tractors to home pregnancy tests.  And more often than not, they do indeed run Doom.

A few years ago an outfit in Australia called Cortical Labs, working with lab-grown human neural cells, coaxed a Petri dish of neurons into playing Pong.  Which is about as rudimentary a video game as there can get.  Almost immediately the company started getting asked the same question: Could their “brains on a chip” play Doom?  Something that would require substantially more sensory input and calculation than simply moving a virtual paddle up and down.  The real matter was, people didn’t want to know if the neurons
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Lately there’s been a little bit of a fad on Facebook: where people are asking ChatGPT to make a caricature of them based on what the AI knows of them.  ChatGPT asks for a photo and some information and it chucks out a pretty neat likeness.

I joined in on the fun.  This is a rather accurate facsimile of my life right now (note the Vault Boy poster from the Fallout games behind me):

Of COURSE I had to include Tammy!  She is certainly a major component of the operations here at Knight Shift Headquarters.  Of my life in general actually, more than I’ve let on.

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I swear, the craziness that pops so seemingly randomly across my synapses sometimes…

For whatever reason, this afternoon I found myself thinking of Andy Kaufman, the “song and dance man” who entertained millions with his unique shticks.  Sadly, Kaufman passed away in 1984 at the much-too-young age of 35.

Or did he?

Andy Kaufman’s sense of humor was notoriously eclectic, to put it mildly.  And among other things there were a few times when he did state a desire to fake his own death.  It would have been the biggest joke of his life, to make everyone believe he had passed only to show up ten or twenty or… maybe forty years later.

Now, I do not believe that Kaufman really faked his death.  His family has testified many times that he did indeed pass on in May of 1984.  There is no disputing that.  And yet, this is...

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