The author of the book Online Afterlives describes the unusual projects of people like Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of Luka, an AI-powered chat simulator that books restaurant reservations and makes recommendations. Kuyda worked with computer scientists to convert several thousand text messages between deceased tech entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko and his friends and relatives into a chatbot simulation: “How are you there?” asks…
Tag: Simulator
AWS Introduces New Chaos Engineering as a Service Offering
When large companies like Netflix or Amazon want to test the resilience of their systems, they use chaos engineering tools designed to help them simulate worst-case scenarios and find potential issues before they even happen. Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduced the company’s Chaos Engineering as a Service offering called AWS Fault Injection Simulator. From a report: The…
Researchers achieve quantum advantage
University of Copenhagen researchers have advanced their quantum technology to such a degree that classical computing technology can no longer keep up. They have developed a chip that, with financial backing, could be scaled up and used to build the quantum simulator of the future. Their results are now published in Science Advances. …
Is Microsoft’s ‘Find Your Joy’ Holiday Ad Sad?
There’s a zany twist at the end, because “This year more than ever, we felt that it was important to give people a little lift, to remind them that while we are facing a lot of challenges, there are many ways we can connect, be productive and enjoy the time we have at home,” Microsoft’s VP of brand, advertising, and research…
The Audacious Plan to Launch a Solar-Powered Rocket Into Interstellar Space
Ars Technica glimpsed a possible future at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory: a solar simulator “that can shine with the intensity of 20 Suns…” “They think it could be the key to interstellar exploration.” “It’s really easy for someone to dismiss the idea and say, ‘On the back of an envelope, it looks great, but if you actually build…
IBM Apologizes For Firing Computer Pioneer For Being Transgender… 52 Years Later
On August 29, 1968, IBM’s CEO fired computer scientist and transgender pioneer Lynn Conway to avoid the public embarrassment of employing a transwoman. Nearly 52 years later, in an act that defines its present-day culture, IBM is apologizing and seeking forgiveness. Jeremy Alicandri writes via Forbes reports: On January 2, 1938, Lynn Conway’s life began in Mount Vernon, NY. With a…
Gamers Are Replacing Bing Maps Objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator With Rips From Google Earth
Microsoft’s flagship 2020 game Flight Simulator was supposed to showcase Bing Maps and Azure’s streaming capabilities. There’s just one small problem: gamers are overwriting Bing’s in-game 3D photogrammetry with entire cities ripped from Google Earth. From a report: “When playing the game, you’re essentially looking at an extremely high resolution image of the entire globe in 3D — think Google Earth…
Columbia leads effort to develop a quantum simulator
Quantum technologies—simulators and computers specifically—have the potential to revolutionize the 21st century, from improved national defense systems to drug discovery to more powerful sensors and communication networks. …
New Blender Add-On Accurately Models Subatomic Particles, Involves Community with Contest
BlenderArtists.org writes:
To build and model the universe from the Planck scale to galactic scales requires an incredible number of mathematical computations to simulate particles and their interactions, yet the framework of nature and the physics of these interactions should be simple. Blender’s physics engine provides a good base to begin this project, but it will take work from the community to…
Flight Simulator 2020 Is Finally Out, But Many Can’t Install It
SmartAboutThings writes: Microsoft released Flight Simulator 2020 but many people who bought it online are having problems downloading it, installing it, or simply running the new game. Some users simply didn’t get to download the game even if they tried several times to do so. When the download was finally complete, they received an error while trying to install it. Even…