Hulleye Comes By!

Via The New Yorker

Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment.

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won’t say how many books are in its database, but the site’s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.

Keep reading.

The next time you’re looking for an interesting read, pick an unusual Wikipedia article from Wikipedia’s article on Wikipedia’s Unusual Articles.

This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a bit unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are somewhat odd, whimsical, or something you wouldn’t expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add articles to this list, a broad consensus amongst contributors has identified two main guidelines. If the article in question meets one or both of these categories then it could possibly be deemed “unusual”:

1. The article is something you would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
2. The article contains some form of juxtaposition that most people would find unusual. eg Killer Cockroach, Henry VIII in Space, edible computers.

Note that this is a broad definition. Some articles may still be considered “unusual” even if they don’t fit the guidelines above.

For unusual contributions that are not so valuable, see Wikipedia:Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.

back in 1997, one of the greatest artificial intelligence feats took place. a computer beat a human (one of the greatest players of our time, garry kasparov) at the game of chess. that day was a leap forward for computers and they have undoubtedly excelled since. since then, things have only gotten simpler with faster processing power and greater advances in artificial intelligence. who knows, one day we may even reach the level of HAL 9000.

The Economist has a great article this week on A.I., describing how, when it comes to Othello and backgammon, computers now have the upper hand. Today they are creeping up on all board games, Scrabble, poker and bridge will be theirs, as well soon enough. The only tough challenge remaining? Go.

Go was invented more than 2,500 years ago in China (Confucius considered it a waste of time). It is a strategic contest in which two players take turns to place stones on the intersections of a grid with 19 lines on each side. Each player tries to stake out territory and surround his opponent. The rules are simple but the play is extraordinarily complex. During a game, some stones will “die”, and some will appear to be dead but spring back to life at an inopportune moment. It is often difficult to say who is winning right until the end.

Check out the article for the rest of the scoop on how computer scientists are using new algorithms that “teach” the computer to play a large number of random games and make educated moves based in the outcome so that in the very near future, even Go will be gone.