Tuesday 26 September 2017
Sunday 24 September 2017
Saturday 23 September 2017
Friday 22 September 2017
Thursday 21 September 2017
Wednesday 20 September 2017
Tuesday 19 September 2017
Monday 4 September 2017
Scientists throw a challenge for building a computer programme to solve the Queens Puzzle, winner to get a million dollars
Building a computer programme to solve a chess problem called the Queens Puzzle could win you a prize of million dollars, say scientists who have thrown open a challenge that they claim is impossible to crack.
Representational image. Reuters.
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 are in the same diagonal.
Although the problem has been solved by human beings, once the chess board increases to a large size no computer programme can solve it. Researchers from the University of St Andrews in the UK believe any programme that can crack the famous "Queens Puzzle", would be so powerful that it could solve tasks currently considered impossible, such as decrypting the toughest security on the internet.
They found that once the chess board reached 1,000 by 1,000 squares, computer programmes could no longer cope with the vast number of options and sunk into a potentially eternal struggle.
The struggle is akin to the fictional "super computer" Deep Thought in Douglas Adams popular sci-fi series the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which took seven and a half million years to provide an answer to the Meaning of Everything, researchers said.
"If you could write a computer programme that could solve the problem really fast, you could adapt it to solve many of the most important problems that affect us all daily," said Ian Gent, professor at St Andrews.
"This includes trivial challenges like working out the largest group of your Facebook friends who do not know each other, or very important ones like cracking the codes that keep all our online transactions safe," Gent added.
The reason these problems are so difficult for computer programmes, is that there are so many options to consider that it can take many years, researchers said. This is due to a process of "backtracking" an algorithm used in programming where every possible option is considered and then "backed away" from until the correct solution is found, they said.
"However, this is all theoretical, in practice, nobody has ever come close to writing a programme that can solve the problem quickly. So what our research has shown is that for all practical purposes it can not be done," said Peter Nightingale, a senior research fellow at St Andrews.
The prize money of one million USD, awarded by Clay Mathematics Institute in the US is available to anyone who can solve the puzzle.
Samsung J7 Plus launches in the Thailand market with dual camera, MediaTek Helio P20 and Bixby
Samsung has launched its latest smartphone, the Samsung J7+ in the Thailand market. According to a report by GSMArena, this launch comes days after it was rumoured that the company is likely to launch the newest iteration of the J series. One on the key highlights of the smartphone is the dual camera setup on the back of the device with a 13 MP camera module and a 5 MP camera module.
Image Credit: Samsung
Interested users in Thailand can pre-order the device for 12,900 THB which amounts to be around Rs 25,000 at the time of writing. The device is expected to go on sale starting 17 September and the company has not announced any pricing and availability details for any other market. Users who will pre-book the device will also get Samsung U Flex as part of the launch offer.
The Samsung J7+ packs a 5.5-inch FHD AMOLED screen wrapped in an aluminium body. One thing to notice is that this smartphone does not pack a Qualcomm or Exynos chipset. Instead, it is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Helio P20 clocked at 2.4 GHz. The company has not explicitly stated that it is the P20 but the report is fairly certain about the chipset.
Image Credit: Samsung
It also comes with 4 GB RAM, 32 GB internal storage with a dedicated microSD card slot to expand the storage up to 256 GB. Moving back to the dual camera setup, the 13 MP sensor sports a wide f/1.7 aperture while the 5 MP sensor comes with a f/1.9 aperture. The 5 MP camera sensor is dedicated to capture the depth data so that users can change the depth of the image after it is shot for the bokeh effect.
Image Credit: Samsung
Samsung has also packed a 16 MP camera sensor with f/1.9 aperture on the front of the device for better selfies. The device comes with a 3,000 mAh battery which is smaller than the usual J series smartphone.
Last but not the least, the smartphone also packs a fingerprint sensor embedded in the Home button along with an always on display and Bixby Home app. Samsung has also added the ability for users to use multiple instances of apps like WhatsApp or Facebook for multi-account operation.
Peggy Whitson and crewmates touchdown in Kazakhstan; return after setting a 665 days record in orbit
NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and two crewmates made a parachute touchdown in Kazakhstan on Saturday, capping a career-total 665 days in orbit, a US record.
Member of the International Space Station crew Peggy Annette Whitson gets medical treatment shortly after the landing of the Soyuz MS-04 capsule. REUTERS/Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool
Whitson, 57, ended an extended stay of more than nine months aboard the International Space Station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. "I feel great,” the biochemist said during an in-flight interview on Monday. “I love working up here. It’s one of the most gratifying jobs I’ve ever had.”
During her third mission aboard the station, Whitson spent much of her time on experiments, including studies of cancerous lung tissue and bone cells. She also completed four spacewalks, adding to her six previous outings, to set a record for the most time spent spacewalking by a woman.
Two crewmates who launched with Whitson in November returned to Earth three months ago. She stayed aboard to fill a vacancy after Russia scaled down its station staff from three to two cosmonauts. Whitson returned to Earth with Jack Fischer, also with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, who had been aboard the station since June.
The crew’s Russian Soyuz capsule touched down in Kazakhstan at 9:21 pm EDT Saturday. "I’m looking forward to seeing friends and family,” Whitson said during another interview.
“But the thing I’ve been thinking about the most, kind of been fantasising about a little bit, are foods that I want to make, vegetables that I want to sauté, things that I’ve missed up here.”
In April, Whitson broke the 534-day US record for cumulative time in space. Only seven Russian men have logged more time, including Gennady Padalka, the world record-holder with 878 days in orbit.
Whitson, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, said she was inspired by the US Apollo program that landed men on the moon, but it was not until later, when the first women become astronauts, that she set her sights on joining them.
Whitson, who became an astronaut in 1996, was the first woman to command the space station and also the first woman and first non-pilot to serve as chief of the NASA Astronaut Corps.
“I am working on paying forward some of the advice and mentoring that I received on my journey, in hopes that one day those young people will do the same and look back on a life in which they leaped at the opportunities and broke their own records,” she said.
First Windows 10 PC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset to come to market soon
Microsoft and Qualcomm are coming with a year-end launch of the Windows 10 PC supported by ARM based chipset. Qualcomm gave a confirmation about it at the ongoing IFA.
Representational image. Reuters.
According to a report by GizmoChina, the PC would be powered by Windows 10 and supported by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 SoC.
The ARM-based PC is expected to be thin and light-weight with a longer battery life and LTE connectivity. It is expected to be launched the fourth quarter this year. In terms of the price point, it is expected that the Microsoft made PC will not come cheap. However, OEMs such as HP, ASUS, Lenovo are expected to release it at affordable price points.
Last year itself, Microsoft had announced that Windows 10 would be introduced to the ARM ecosystem. Matt Barlow, the corporate vice president, Windows marketing had said, “We are thrilled that OEMs are sharing our vision to bring the Windows 10 experience to the ARM ecosystem, powered by the Qualcomm Technologies. This collaboration offers consumers something news and that they have been craving — the best of mobile computing experience with the best of Windows 10, all in one thin, light, connected device.”
In May, at Computex 2017, Microsoft had unveiled that ASUS, Lenovo, and HP would be launching laptops which would be powered by Snapdragon 835. Moreover, it was also revealed that the laptops would come with LTE connectivity.
As per previous reports, even though the PC space seems permanently on the verge of dying out, nobody seems to be able to make that killing blow.
Sunday 3 September 2017
Millions of Instagram accounts hacked, personal details including phone numbers and email address leaked
Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram is under attack as hackers steal personally identifiable information for thousands of accounts.
Representational Image.
According to a report on The Daily Beast the hackers, after stealing the data, launched a website and made a searchable database to provide the leaked information. The hackers were charging $10 per search to give access to the information from the hacked accounts. According to the report, the hackers also claim to have the access to six million Instagram accounts.
The report mentions that a sample of data shared by the hackers contains email addresses, phone numbers of famous politicians, sports stars and media companies. The hackers shared a list of 1,000 hacked accounts, the list also contain the details of many of the top 50 most-followed profiles on the Instagram.
The website launched by the hackers went offline on Friday, but there is no confirmation whether Instagram is responsible for the action.
Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger in a blog post said that the company has fixed a "bug" that "could be used to access some people's email address and phone number even if they are not public". According to the blog, the social media platform is not able to determine the accounts affected but believes that "it was a low percentage of Instagram accounts".
The company also asked users to follow steps to protect their information on the platform and said that it is "working with law enforcement on that matter".
Recently, private pictures of singer Justin Bieber were leaked from the Instagram account belonging to ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez. Her Instagram account was taken down soon after the leak.
Google Nexus 6P expected to get Android Oreo update on 11 september
According to an OS Upgrade list on Canadian website Rogers, the Huawei Google Nexus 6P is expected to get the Android Oreo update on 11 September.
Huawei Google Nexus 6P
The website has also listed the names of the phones that currently run on the Android Oreo. Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL recently received the update. The website also mentions that the date might change too.
Good news! #AndroidOreo superpowers have begun rolling out to Nexus & Pixel devices. Open Wonder with new features: goo.gl/pwKvx3
Google also announced the roll out of the Android Oreo on the Nexus and Pixel devices in a tweet on the official Twitter handle. The twitter handle, in a previous tweet, mentioned the rolling out of the latest Android OS for the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C tablet, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P and Nexus Player.
#AndroidOreo will start rolling out in phases soon to Pixel & Pixel XL phones, the Pixel C tablet, & the Nexus 5X, 6P & Nexus Player.
There is no official update on the date of the Android OS coming to Nexus devices.
Android Oreo (8.0) features an ultra power saving mode, centralised media control, fingerprint-based user auto-switching, one-handed mode and a list showing the usage of the battery by different apps on the device. The new OS comes with much more, but these are just few of the attracting features that might attract the attention of users.
Google Launched the Nexus 6P in 2015. The smartphone comes with a 5.7-inch WQHD AMOLED display with a 2560x1440 resolution. It has a 2 GHz octa core processor and a 3,450 mAh battery. The device originally launched with a price tag of Rs 39,990 in India.
Researchers have developed an Alexa-like digital assistant for robots with the help of Artificial Intelligence
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed an Alexa-like system that allows robots to understand a wide range of commands that require contextual knowledge about objects and their environment.
Image Courtesy: Amazon
Alexa is Amazon's Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that powers Echo smart speaker, provides capabilities, or skills that enable customers to interact with devices in a more intuitive way using voice.
Today's robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests. For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox and ask a robot to "pick it up," it would be completely lost.
With the new system dubbed "ComText," for "commands in context", if someone tells the system that "the tool I put down is my tool," it adds that fact to its knowledge base. One can then update the robot with more information about other objects and have it execute a range of tasks like picking up different sets of objects based on different commands.
"Where humans understand the world as a collection of objects and people and abstract concepts, machines view it as pixels, point-clouds, and 3-D maps generated from sensors," said Rohan Paul from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "This semantic gap means that, for robots to understand what we want them to do, they need a much richer representation of what we do and say," Paul said in a statement released by MIT.
The team tested ComText on Baxter, a two-armed humanoid robot developed for Rethink Robotics by former CSAIL director Rodney Brooks. With ComText, Baxter was successful in executing the right command about 90 per cent of the time, according to a paper presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Australia.
In the future, the team hopes to enable robots to understand more complicated information, such as multi-step commands, the intent of actions, and using properties about objects to interact with them more naturally.
For example, if you tell a robot that one box on a table has crackers, and one box has sugar, and then ask the robot to "pick up the snack," the hope is that the robot could deduce that sugar is a raw material and therefore unlikely to be somebody's "snack."
The researchers believe that by creating much less constrained interactions, this line of research could enable better communications for a range of robotic systems, from self-driving cars to household helpers.
Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 likely to come with Snapdragon 836, Android Oreo 8.0 and 4,400 mAh battery
Xiaomi will launch its much awaited Mi Mix 2 at a launch event on 11 September 2017. Mi Mix 2 one of the most awaited smartphones in 2017 as it is likely to improve on its nearly ‘bezel-less’ design that Xiaomi showed off with the Xiaomi Mi Mix last year.
Image Credit: Xiaomi
This design caught the fancy of smartphone makers across the globe and most companies are busy copying the ‘bezel-less’ design in their flagships. This is not limited to Android device makers like Samsung, LG or HTC but according to rumours and leaks, Apple will also adapt the bezel-less design in its upcoming flagship.
According to a report by GSMArena, alleged leaked images of Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 hint that the smartphone may run Android Oreo 8.0 while being powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 836. Other details point towards a 6.2-inch screen with a 2960x1440 pixel resolution along with 3D facial recognition and 4,400 mAh battery. The screenshots also hint that Xiaomi will launch 256 Gb internal storage variant.
The leaked images seem to be originated from Chinese microblogging website points towards a redesigned settings interface, more likely in the ‘About Phone’ section of the phone where you will find almost everything related to the phone. This comes days after it was reported that Mi Mix 2 will come with a 3D-face scanning technology, MIUI 9, dual camera setup along with a curved AMOLED display.
Image Credit: GSMArena
Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 is likely to be an improvement over the Mi Mix 1 as the first generation of the smartphone packed a 6.4-inch display with an edge to edge design, meaning there are no bezels at the top and sides.
Weibo
Mi Mix 1 packed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chipset (Daydream compatible) with 4GB/6GB RAM and is available in both 128GB and 256GB options. It came with a 16MP PDAF rear camera and 5MP front facing camera. Apart from the usual Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, there was also full NFC functionality with a high-precision GPS module.
The Most Significant Digital Cameras of History
In our last article, we gave you a look at some of the most significant film cameras of history. While reading up on ideas for this article, a friend summed up the state of the photography industry in a simple line: digital cameras are purely clinical, precise instruments compared to film cameras: a mechanical form of art.
Representational image. Reuters.
Digital cameras indeed don’t have the charm that film cameras once harboured in their day. But they’re an art form of a different kind: the precision and speed at which digital could deliver was and is still unparalleled. Today, we’ll be looking at some of the journey of digital cameras to this day, with a peek at some of the more noteworthy models out there.
1. Kodak’s first camera prototype
As always, the very first invention of something will never look like its current iteration. That couldn’t be more apparent in the case of Kodak’s first “camera”. It used a 100x100 pixel array to capture light and record it to a tape cassette.
Kodak Ektaprint 100. Kodak.
If you wanted to see the picture, you had to play it back on a television with a special player (similar to audio cassettes). That first camera was made with spare items the makers found in their labs: the lens was from a cinema camera, the sensor was a CCD sensor and the whole thing ran on 16 batteries. According to PetaPixel, each image took around 23 seconds to process!
2. Nikon D1
When the D1 was launched in 2000, SLR cameras were not a new thing. Kodak already had a major share in the camera market and they continued to do so until the Nikon D1 came around and shook it. The D1 is one of the first DSLR cameras designed and produced entirely by Nikon from the ground up, which obviously involved a lot of effort. It housed a 3 MP sensor, could shoot at 4.5 fps (which was great for sports shooting.. Back then) and something more unusual: ditching Adobe RGB and sRGB and going for a color space known as NSTC, which wasn’t what most cameras used. However, it changed the industry anyway, being a camera that was far more affordable than what Kodak was selling at the time, and therefore being a game changer in its own league.
Nikon D1. Nikon.
3. Contax N Digital
The Contax N Digital is a far leap from that first Kodak. It was introduced in 2002, nearly 26 years after the Kodak concept. Twenty-six years was enough for cameras to involve into mainstream consumer products by then, but the N Digital stepped up the game a notch: it was the first Full-Frame DSLR camera in the consumer market. Sporting a 6 MP 35mm equivalent sensor, the full frame sensor meant that people could now take higher quality prints without having to compensate for the crop factor.
Contax N Digital. Contax.
While SLR and DSLR cameras were already fast becoming a more viable option for consumers, this was the first sensor that housed a full 35mm sized sensor in it. The N Digital was also among the only manufacturers to still use CCD-based sensors (CCD: Charge Coupled Device) when everyone was already moving to CMOS based sensors.
4. Minolta DiMAGE A1
The Minolta A1 changed the world of shaky images forever: it was the first camera to have two-axis image stabilisation. Two-axis meant that the X-axis, or horizontal shake, and Y-axis, or vertical shake, were reduced.
Minolta DiMAGE A1.Konica.
The whole system worked with sensors: motion sensors captured any shake made by the user and transferred it to the CCD where the shake was compensated for. Apart from that, the Minolta A1 is also one the older cameras that used a CCD sensor and also let users switch off image stabilisation if they wanted to (in case they were shooting on a tripod, the IS would just be redundant and waste battery).
5. Canon EOS D30
The EOS D30 is truly the game changer in this roundup for a very small reason: it was the first prosumer DLSR that people could buy without breaking their wallets. Like the Nikon D1, the Canon D30 was Canon’s first home-grown DSLR (as in, designed and built from the ground up by Canon) and catered to a market that wanted a powerful imaging device but couldn’t shell out the big bucks for professional systems.
Canon D30.Canon.
Indeed, the D30 and similar devices can be considered the beginning of the prosumer era, and the point where cameras started getting more and more affordable. They don’t hold a candle to today’s systems, even entry level ones, but the D30, in particular, was a king in its own right back in the day, because everyone could buy it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
