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Domain: st-andrews.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to st-andrews.ac.uk.
Stories · 4
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Solve a 'Simple' Chess Puzzle, Win $1 Million (st-andrews.ac.uk)
An anonymous reader brings an important announcement: Researchers at the University of St Andrews have thrown down the gauntlet to computer programmers to find a solution to a "simple" chess puzzle which could, in fact, take thousands of years to solve, and net a $1 million prize. Computer Scientist Professor Ian Gent and his colleagues, at the University of St Andrews, believe any program capable of solving the famous "Queens Puzzle" efficiently would be so powerful, it would be capable of solving tasks currently considered impossible, such as decrypting the toughest security on the internet. In a paper [PDF] published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research today, the team conclude the rewards to be reaped by such a program would be immense, not least in financial terms with firms rushing to use it to offer technological solutions, and also a $1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in America.
Devised in 1850, the Queens Puzzle originally challenged a player to place eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no two queens could attack each other. This means putting one queen in each row, so that no two queens are in the same column, and no two queens in the same diagonal. Although the problem has been solved by human beings, once the chess board increases to a large size no computer program can solve it. -
Internet of Seals: Vodafone Connects Marine Mammals To IoT (techweekeurope.co.uk)
Mickeycaskill writes: Researchers in Scotland claim to be the first to connect marine mammals to the Internet of Things (IoT) as part of a study into declining populations of harbor seals in the north and east of the country. Several seals in Orkney, an archipelago off the north cost, will be tagged and their behavior monitored by scientists at the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) at the University of St Andrews. The data is transmitted using Vodafone's M2M network and the tags are designed to simply fall off when seals molt. Researchers say the use of cellular networks will greatly improve their data gathering capabilities. The data collected will be used to help form Scottish marine policy in areas such as offshore wind farms and unexplained seal deaths. -
Scientists Create 'Fastest Man-Made Spinning Object'
dryriver sends this news from the BBC: "A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object. They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute. This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill. The work by the University of St Andrews scientists is published in Nature Communications. Although there is much international research exploring what happens at the boundary between classical physics and quantum physics, most of this experimental work uses atoms or molecules. To do this they manufactured a microscopic sphere of calcium carbonate only four millionths of a meter in diameter. The team then used the minuscule forces of laser light to hold the sphere with the radiation pressure of light — rather like levitating a beach ball with a jet of water. They exploited the property of polarization of the laser light that changed as the light passed through the levitating sphere, exerting a small twist or torque. Placing the sphere in vacuum largely removed the drag due to any gas environment, allowing the team to achieve the very high rotation rates. In addition to the rotation, the team observed a 'compression' of the excursions or 'wobble' of the particle in all three dimensions, which can be understood as a 'cooling' of the motion. Essentially the particle behaved like the world's smallest gyroscope, stabilizing its motion around the axis of rotation." -
Crystal Of Green Light Bends Matter
Jens Lönn writes: "The Kapitza-Dirac effect is the diffraction of a beam of particles, electrons in particular, by a standing wave of light. One can interpret it as waves of matter diffracted from "crystals" made of light, it's like matter and light swap roles. It was predicted in 1933 by a pair of future Nobel Prize winners, Russian Peter Kapitza (1894-1984) and Englishman P.A.M. Dirac (1902-84), but the technology needed to demonstrate it didn't exist at the time. It wasn't until April 11, 2001, when it was observed for the first time in Herman Batelaan's lab in the Behlen Laboratory for Physics at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. This is the first time _ever_ that scientists have shown that light can bend matter, not just the opposite."