Arnold Nordsieck's Synchro Operated Differential Analyzer →
Ladies and Gentlemen, Girls and Boys Behold: The Nordsieck Synchro Operated Differential Analyzer.
"As with other analog computers, each calculation required its own setup. You plugged in the tangle of patch cords to the left in a particular pattern. The cords served as the computer’s control program, with other parts of the program embodied and executed by the spinning disks, gears, rotating shafts, cranks, and the like. (You can read Nordsieck’s early description of the computer here [PDF] and his written instructions here [PDF]." - via IEEE Spectrum Magazine
50 Qubits →
An astounding image (some might call it a percolator of the multiverse), and announcement via IBM (NYSE: IBM) of the company's newly minted 50 Qubit Processor. Today's Must Read.
"The first IBM Q systems available online to clients will have a 20 qubit processor, featuring improvements in superconducting qubit design, connectivity and packaging. Coherence times (the amount of time available to perform quantum computations) lead the field with an average value of 90 microseconds, and allow high-fidelity quantum operations. IBM has also successfully built and measured an operational prototype 50 qubit processor with similar performance metrics. This new processor expands upon the 20 qubit architecture and will be made available in the next generation IBM Q systems." - via
Community Memory →
via IEEE's Spectrum Magazine, comes this oddity of computational flotsam in the guise of an early terminal, which permitted reading messages on a bulletin-board-like system in San Francisco, California.
"Among the volunteers who made up Loving Grace Cybernetics and Resource One was Lee Felsenstein, who would go on to help establish the Homebrew Computer Club and who played a number of other pioneering roles in the nascent personal computing industry." - via via IEEE's Spectrum Magazine writer David C. Brock (David C. Brock is Director of the Center for Software History at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California)
Brain Meet Internet →
Superlative study (funded by the Department of Defense - Army Research Office) - via Duke University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Durham, Nort Carolina and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies - Integrative Biology Laboratory in La Jolla, California - targeting the apparent similarities between artifical and biologic network implementations. Today's must read!
“The founders of the Internet spent a lot of time considering how to make information flow efficiently,” says Salk Assistant Professor Saket Navlakha, coauthor of the new study that appears online in Neural Computation on February 9, 2017. “Finding that an engineered system and an evolved biological one arise at a similar solution to a problem is really interesting.”
Steam Computation, Polynomial Edition
Constructed by Dr. Piers Plummer and Team (Dr. Doron Swade, Professor Adrian Johnstone and Professor Elizabeth Scott), direct from the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway University of London comes this superlative steam driven compute device... Eagle-eyed readers may note the brass bits dropping onto the floor plate of the device (due to the gear-teeth grinding against the opposing gear's cog-teeth). H/T
Machine-Based Investigation: Fully →
via Motherboard writer Michael Byrne, comes this well-wrought piece on the apparent proliferation of 'bots on Twitter, ie., the implications of algorithm-driven entities on the Twitterverse. The fascinating component to this study by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Clayton A. Davis, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini, was the utilization of a machine-learning apparatus (and the feature-sets therein) to tease out the truth. Additional documentation (in the form of the paper) is available on arXIv. Today's MustRead.
"Part of what makes the new research interesting is the sheer number of features used in the classification model..." - Motherboard's Michael Byrne
Lightly... Squeezed →
News via the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of NIST physicists efforts to cool down a component has yeilded an unexpected result. The effort utilized squeezed light (microwaves within an electromagnetic cavity, if you will) to cool the apparatus below the theoretical limit, in this case, below the so-called quantum limit.
Amazon Snowmobile →
When you've got 100 Petabytes of data burning a big hole in your datacenter's front pocket, and you just have to import said data into Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier storage... Whom - shall we say - are you going to call?