The Turing Enigma, “a dark thriller, commemorating the tragic death of Alan Turing,” is available to view for free online. First, here’s a trailer:
[vimeo 25774798]
The Turing Enigma, “a dark thriller, commemorating the tragic death of Alan Turing,” is available to view for free online. First, here’s a trailer:
[vimeo 25774798]
This is the best video about frequentist statistics I’ve ever seen. Watch and enjoy:
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVMVGHkt2cg]
Found on youtube’s math blog. If that blog really is automatically generated, I think we need to reject the null hypothesis that Google hasn’t invented strong AI. Am I doing it right? brb, going to watch the video again.
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week is a 100th episode/2nd birthday celebration. Samuel and Peter discuss the last year in mathematics, then introduce and discussion contributions from 11+ special guests answering the question ‘What’s your current project?’ featuring: Alex Bellos; Dave Gale; Noel-Ann Bradshaw; Edmund Harriss; Keith Devlin; Tony Mann; Colm Mulcahy; Peter Krautzberger; Katie Steckles and Christian Perfect; Marianne Freiberger. They end with a special preview trailer of Samuel’s project Relatively Prime.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 100: 2nd Birthday Spectacular – What’s your project?
via Olivier Gerard on Google+:
12th Forum of Young (Wo)men Mathematicians
Will take place in Paris in November. All mathematicians (of all ages and genders) welcome to attend. Starting keynote by Claire Voisin. Young women and young men starting their mathematics career can submit a talk. The particularity is that all organization, referring and invited lectures are by established women mathematicians.
Nao robots are a programmable standard model of small scale humanoid robot by French firm Aldebaran Robotics, and they are used for, among other things, the RoboCup soccer tournament to provide a standard platform to compare programming skills. Anyone paying attention to robot/dancing-related news on the internet will be aware that Nao robots have been trained to do synchronised dance routines, although such routines are usually pre-programmed.
Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine, from MIT, have developed a means to link a group of robots, using coupled oscillators, so that a dance routine can be followed and synchronised – so a robot which gets disturbed during the piece can rejoin at the right point, as demonstrated beautifully in the video below. The robots use Network Time Protocol to synchronise their clocks, and while other co-operative programs have been seen before (not least, in the RoboCup where the team works together), this new work involves strong synchronisation, which means even if there’s a delay in loading the programme or transmitting between robots, or if a new robot is added during the choreography, they are still all in time with each other. Plus, they’re pretty cute.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTeTI0H6M6s]
Source: Robot Choreography on MetaSD
Paper: Synchronization and quorum sensing in a swarm of humanoid robots
A paper in the arXiv, discussed on the Physics arXiv Blog, investigates what the blog post called “one of the more intriguing conundrums in fluid dynamics”: why bubbles in Guinness appear to sink as the drink settles and the head forms.
Something that whipped round Twitter over the weekend is an early version of a paper by Francisco Aragón Artacho, David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein, investigating the usefulness of planar walks on the digits of real numbers as a way of measuring their randomness.
A problem with real numbers is to decide whether their digits (in whatever base) are “random” or not. As always, a strict definition of randomness is up to either the individual or the enlightened metaphysicist, but one definition of randomness is normality – every finite string of digits occurs with uniform asymptotic frequency in the decimal (or octal or whatever) representation of the number. Not many results on this subject exist, so people try visual tools to see what randomness looks like, comparing potentially normal numbers like $\pi$ with pseudorandom and non-random numbers. In fact, the (very old) question of whether $\pi$ is normal was one of the main motivators for this study.