I've always been curious about this incident. If the coffee was so hot that it caused third-degree burns and required reconstructive surgery, wouldn't that cup of coffee have been a cup of steam? Maybe it's just me but this whole case seems to ignore basic properties in chemistry (i.e. evaporation). Coffee should not be able to reach temperatures of more than 100 degrees celcius (I'm talking SI units here) or the boilling point of water. I have spilled boilling watter (accidentally) on myself before, I've never had third-degree burns however. The only way this would make sense to me is if the cup was full of grease or something. In any case this is probably not the correct forum to bring up such questions, but since we're discussing it...my curiosity is peaked:-P.
What about making a replica Zero and crashing it into a ship? (I know...what a waste of an RC plane) Or better yet, what if someone were to build a submarine? I guess it might be difficult to figure out wether or not it sank though (you'll have to see if it will float back up).
There's just one problem? Wouldn't distributing the code violate the DMCA?
In anycase, if this really was possible, given a scanner with a high enough resolution, wouldn't the reproduction be relatively faithful? I mean if you can figure out how to decode the bumps in the groove, I would imagine that generating excessive noise would not be a problem. In my opinion, the problem would lie along the lines of parts of the song missing...or in other words: you would lose music, not gain noise. Or alternatively, mis-interperet bumps etc...why am I even thinking about this:-(
For one thing, I think this story has more to do with psychology than AI. The goal is to study how people will react. The technology to model the behaviour of basic life forms has existed and been used for quite some time now. A cool, more AI-ish project would be to see how (if) these artificial life forms could adapt with changes to environments; i.e. the emergence of unexpected behaviours.
I'm curious to know what your standards for a "pretty" user interface is. As far as PDA's go, it doesn't look that much different from PalmOS or Windows CE to me. I'll take something that's functional and easy to use over a UI that's bubbly and cute anyday...but I guess that might be the dirty tree-hugging linux lover in me talking.
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I've always been curious about this incident. If the coffee was so hot that it caused third-degree burns and required reconstructive surgery, wouldn't that cup of coffee have been a cup of steam? Maybe it's just me but this whole case seems to ignore basic properties in chemistry (i.e. evaporation). Coffee should not be able to reach temperatures of more than 100 degrees celcius (I'm talking SI units here) or the boilling point of water. I have spilled boilling watter (accidentally) on myself before, I've never had third-degree burns however. The only way this would make sense to me is if the cup was full of grease or something. In any case this is probably not the correct forum to bring up such questions, but since we're discussing it...my curiosity is peaked :-P.
What about making a replica Zero and crashing it into a ship? (I know...what a waste of an RC plane) Or better yet, what if someone were to build a submarine? I guess it might be difficult to figure out wether or not it sank though (you'll have to see if it will float back up).
There's just one problem? Wouldn't distributing the code violate the DMCA? In anycase, if this really was possible, given a scanner with a high enough resolution, wouldn't the reproduction be relatively faithful? I mean if you can figure out how to decode the bumps in the groove, I would imagine that generating excessive noise would not be a problem. In my opinion, the problem would lie along the lines of parts of the song missing...or in other words: you would lose music, not gain noise. Or alternatively, mis-interperet bumps etc...why am I even thinking about this :-(
For one thing, I think this story has more to do with psychology than AI. The goal is to study how people will react. The technology to model the behaviour of basic life forms has existed and been used for quite some time now. A cool, more AI-ish project would be to see how (if) these artificial life forms could adapt with changes to environments; i.e. the emergence of unexpected behaviours.
I'm curious to know what your standards for a "pretty" user interface is. As far as PDA's go, it doesn't look that much different from PalmOS or Windows CE to me. I'll take something that's functional and easy to use over a UI that's bubbly and cute anyday...but I guess that might be the dirty tree-hugging linux lover in me talking.