An Art Movement Where Art and Science Collide

Science Friday is one of my favorite podcasts. Filled with tons of interesting interviews, comments and reports, this is my weekend "radio station."

In last Friday's, one of the topics was "An Art Movement Where Art and Science Collide". The part that totally baffled me was the two tunes: one is from Johann Sebastian Bach, the other was generated by an algorithm written by David Cope (here are some other references: 1, 2 and 3). While I had no difficulties identifying the "real" Bach (I know that piece for having played it), I was really impressed by the likeliness to the real works composed by JS Bach.

I do remember, in the olden days of the 3DO, a program by Sid Meyer called "CPU Bach" that composed works "in the style of" Johann Sebastian Bach. This one goes a step further. I wonder if we should create a "Music Turing Test"

There is another piece on David Cope's page on the USCS website. Though I think that some parts would not have been written that way by Johann Sebastian Bach, the end result is truly amazing.

AstroViz - Colliding Galaxies

If you don’t know the American Museum of Natural History, now is a good tile to be acquainted. Among the various research groups, the astrophysics, led by Dr. Tyson, is very active and has a nice visualization section.

Recently, it has been announced that our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course. While this is the correct technical term, the result will mostly be that the 2 galaxies will go through each other a few times before merging and creating an even bigger galaxy. That is in about 3 billion years.

The AMNH has created a nice visual on this: Colliding Galaxies. Enjoy!

IBM to invest some serious money into Watson

Do you remember Watson, IBM's Jeopardy winner? Well, after its triumphal apparition in the game show, IBM tried to place it as a medical advisor, but so far, success hasn't been there.

Recently, the (big) blue company announced it would pour $1 billion into the business development, to help place the cyber doctor/advisor. A few reasons are presented for why sales have not skyrocketed.

This is interesting, as there were a number of initiative to bind machine learning with medicine. In several cases, the machine was able to find a better, i.e. more efficient or cheaper, than its flesh-and-bone counterpart. The underlying, unsaid reason (in my views) is that a machine doesn't partake in "sales" politics: it doesn't favour a specific brand nor does it try to "treat without curing".

Anyways, I really wish Watson become more of a success: with the explosion of diseases, such as autoimmune diseases or cancers, we really need to have all the brainpower we can have, both hardware and wetware.

Researchers develop new method for understanding network connections

This is interesting: a team of researchers at MIT have designed a way to find the underlying network under an observed network.  This allows to find the direct dependencies in a network, separating in the process the indirect links, or elements that just "tag along" other elements.

The paper is here, but behind a paywall.

Quark quartet opens fresh vista on matter

This could have a deep impact on our knowledge of the physical world: http://www.nature.com/news/quark-quartet-opens-fresh-vista-on-matter-1.13225.

SIAM News - Editor names the best 10 algorithms of the 20th century

An interesting reading - SIAM's editor has picked his ten best algorithms developed during the 20th century.

Scientists Extend Einstein’s Relativity to the Universe’s First Moments

When one tries to apply Einstein's equations to very small spaces or times, the whole stuff breaks down and makes weird predictions. So, for the last decades, astrophysicists have been looking to unify Einstein's and quantum theories.

About 30 years ago, Ashtekar managed to do so and made Einstein's equation "quantum certified." A number of surprising results came out ... One of them is that the early universe was made of discrete cells that could assume multiple simultaneous states. Another prediction is that the Big Bang was rather a Big Bounce of a previous universe, that would have endured a Big Crunch!

The theory also predicts that there should be imprints. If found, it would confirm the Quantum Loop Theory, and possibly give other challenges to the astrophysicist: what was there before? How did the whole universal cycle started? Will it end?

Largest structure challenges Einstein's smooth cosmos

Slowes and his team have discovered a group of quasars that challenges Einstein's Large Scale Homogeneity Principle. This principle is simply the expression that, at large scales, the universe looks homogeneous.

However, going through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, he and his team found a group of quasars that is above the limit generally admitted to be "large scale", meaning that in order to maintain the principle as valid, its lower limit has to be increased dramatically.  Which also means that Astrophysics just got a bit harder ;-)

Here is the link to the article in the New Scientist and the published paper on Arxiv.

California Meteor Broke Speed Record for Atmospheric Entry

That meteor would have got a huge ticket for its high speed upon entry.

Potty-mouthed Watson!

Do you remember Watson, IBM's super AI which socked two human players at Jeopardy? Well, it seems that an experimenter played Frankenstein and let the beast awakens after a visit to Urban Dictionary. A now potty-mouthed Watson had to be piped down and refrained from going on curse parades. Other reference and here.

Maybe a new AI test is needed: after the Turing test, let's have the Tourette test!

CS191x - Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation

BerkeleyX has a few new courses available, among which an introduction to Quantum Computations. In a few words, Quantum Computation is the application of Quantum Mechanics to computer science, of which searchers say that it may revolutionize that field and and especially the way we see NP-Algorithms.

The course is scheduled to start on 02/06/2013, the duration is not yet known. Registration is open.

People interested in a text book can have a look at the excellent Yanofsky & Mannucci's Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists.

18.330 Introduction to Numerical Analysis (MIT)

On its http://ocw.mit.edu, the MIT has published the new version of the undergraduate course 18.330 Introduction to Numerical Analysis, dated of Spring 2012.

A good grasp of calculus, differential equations and linear algebra is required to fully enjoy it.

The topics covered are:

• Series expansions: from calculus to computation
• Integrals as sums and derivatives as differences
• Interpolation, splines, and a second look at numerical calculus
• Numerical methods for ODE, initial-value problems
• Root finding, Newton's method, boundary-value problems
• Fourier transform, Fourier series, Shannon sampling theory
• Bandlimited interpolation, spectral methods
• Least-squares approximation
• Principal component analysis

Numerical Analysis is the underpinning of modelisation and simulation ,  at the heart of modern physics and engineering fields.

Microbial life at -13C

Was Arthur C. Clarke right in his 2010: Odyssey 2? Biologists have found a life form that thrives in a cold sealed lake that would be toxic for us.

Mathematical proof reveals magic of Ramanujan's genius

A cool article on the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. It seems some of his contributions could lead to a better understanding of black holes, a celestial body not even known during his time.

Swarm Robots Cooperate with AR Drone

This is really top cool! The principle behind the election is simple but elegant. And I can see a ton of applications in SAR missions, with a drone that has a global view of the terrain, while rescuer bots can evolve and negotiate obstacles.


 

Astrophysicists spot the earliest galaxy yet

Very interesting: astrophysicists from the Hubble Team used the massive galaxy cluster MACSJ0647.7+7015 as a gravitational lens to detect a very early galaxy. This hit the jackpot and the team got a glimpse at the earliest galaxy yet, which appeared a mere 425 million years after the Big Bang.

You may find the official paper from the Hubble Team here.

zBox4 Construction: a supercomputer in 24 hours

What happens when you have a herd of turbonerds, 24 hours and the need to crunch lots of numbers? You get a cool video of a number crunching cluster being built!

The Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich needed an upgrade to the existing zBox cluster and the decision was taken to built the zBox4. Several details on the construction can be found here.


This monstrous beast is running Scientific Linux, a distribution oriented towards labs and universities and specially designed for clusters. With a theoretical value of 282 GFLOPS per CPU, this has a peak performance around 108 Teraflops, an impressive number that would be a candidate for the top500 list.

On not proving the twin prime conjecture with AutoCAD

A nice hack with AutoCAD on visualizing prime numbers.

On not proving the twin prime conjecture with AutoCAD:

As an HVAC engineer by trade, [Carlos Paris] spends a lot of time in AutoCAD designing all those hidden pipes, tubes, and ducts hidden in a building’s rafters. One day, [Carlos] read of an open contest – the prize was over a million dollars – to generate a prime number with a billion digits. [Carlos] misheard this as, ‘a prime number greater than one billion’ and of course said this was a trivially easy task and opened up his favorite tool – AutoCAD – in an effort to discover the largest prime ever. [Carlos] never generated a remarkably large prime, but he did come up with a very, very cool visualization of prime numbers on a number line, as well as a great justification of the twin prime conjecture, a problem in mathematics that has remained unsolved for several generations.
[Carlos] started his investigations into the properties of prime numbers by drawing a series of circles on a number line in AutoCAD. These circles were of diameters of all the integers, and going down the number line, these circles started to have an interesting, chaotic pattern (see above picture). [Carlos] found that whenever two circles intersected, that position was a prime number. It’s really nothing more than a Sieve of Eratosthenes, but it’s a very cool-looking visualization nonetheless.
Looking deeper into his graph, [Carlos] discovered there were certain primes that had another prime number just two places down the number line. For example, the numbers 3 and 5, 29 and 31, and 41,and 43 are twin primes, as the difference between the primes is only 2. The idea there are infinitely many twin primes is a famous unsolved problem in mathematics – it’s obvious it must be true, but no mathematician has yet come up with a proof of this conjecture.
[Carlos] looked at his number line and simplified it to a generic prime number. By taking a generic number line and overlaying the multiples of other prime numbers on this graph, [Carlos] had a very, very clever way of understanding exactly how twin primes come into existence.
In the end, [Carlos] is no closer to proving the twin prime conjecture than anyone else. We’ve got to hand it to him, though, for nerding out with an engineer’s favorite tool – AutoCAD – and managing to derive some fairly obscure mathematics on his own.
After the break you can see [Carlos]‘s videos describing the though process that went into his creation. Very, very cool work.

A cool article on Oliver Heaviside

Most of us know Oliver Heaviside through the function that bears is name. There is a nice article on the man behind that function on Physics Today.

Bananas have gone nuclear!

So it seems that potassium-40 (⁴⁰K) is naturally occurring in bananas and that it can undergo a disintegration, emitting a positron in the process. This positron can then interact with an electron, emitting 2 photons around 511 keV, in the gamma ray portion of the EM spectrum. This is of course assuming that the pair electron-positron have a low kinetic energy.

As said, bananas have gone nuclear!