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Alphabet is looking to sell off Boston Dynamics
Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc, has decided to put its robotics division, Boston Dynamics, up for sale, according to a report from Bloomberg News. Per a pair of anonymous Google employees familiar with the matter, Alphabet executives are apparently no longer willing to invest in a division that does not have an immediate revenue stream.
It's 'Blade Runner' android Roy Batty's birthday
Back to the Future isn't the only big sci-fi movie whose memorable dates are cropping up in real life -- January 8th, 2016 marks the "birthday" of Roy Batty, the leader of the rogue Replicants in Blade Runner. He wouldn't have much to celebrate if he were real (an artificially short life of servitude is nothing to crow about), but it's big for us humans who still want to know what it was like to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Moreover, it's notable that a few elements of Ridley Scott's classic (and by extension, Philip K. Dick's original story) are already surfacing in reality -- although it's very much the product of its time, it's not as outlandish a vision as you might think.
Free Software Foundation drives fundraising effort for 'fully free' Replicant Android fork
Android variants come in various guises, some liberating, some a bit cheeky, and others, entirely free. Free, as in free to you, and free from any kind of licensing issues -- and Replicant is one such example. The project has been around since 2010, but a new fundraising initiative by the Free Software Foundation promises to give it a vital boost. The key difference with Replicant and many other Android spin-offs is that it doesn't rely on proprietary software for it to play nice with vendor hardware. While most of Android is free, it's at this hardware interface level that things get a bit more complex. The FSF hopes that by driving investment towards Replicant more hardware can be supported, in turn opening the OS up to even more users. Sound like something you can get behind? Head over to the source and show your support.
Stanford program cracks text-based CAPTCHAs, shelters the replicants among us
CAPTCHAs. In the absence of a Voigt-Kampff apparatus, they're what separate the humans from the only-posing-to-be-human. And now three Stanford researchers have further blurred that line with Decaptcha, a program that uses image processing, segmentation and a spell-checker to defeat text-based CAPTCHAs. Elie Bursztien, Matthieu Martin and John Mitchell pitted Decaptcha against a number of sites: it passed 66% of the challenges on Visa's Authorize.net and 70% at Blizzard Entertainment. At the high end, the program beat 93% of MegaUpload's tests; at other end, it only bested 2% of those from Skyrock. Of the 15 sites tried, only two completely repelled Decaptcha's onslaught -- Google and reCaptcha. So what did the researchers learn from this? Randomization makes for better security; random lengths and character sizes tended to thwart Decaptcha, as did waving text. How long that will remain true is anyone's guess, as presumably SkyNet is working on a CAPTCHA-killer of its own.
Actroids go on sale in Japan, John Isidore not impressed
Alright, you already have a robot dancer, some robot housecats, and you even acquired a Roomba to protect your child from poisonous snakes -- what's next for your futuristic replicant menagerie? Starting in January 2010, the Japanese department store Sogo & Seibu will accept pre-orders for Actroid life-sized, animatronic female robots. Unlike some available models, these ones can't walk (or do a two-step, for that matter) but they will sit still and smile politely -- which might be all you really want in a robotic companion anyways. That's OK, we're not here to judge you. Quantities are extremely limited: only two will be sold, at a price of $225,000 each. Get a closer look after the break. Update: One of our friends at Engadget Japanese has filled in a few more of the details: Apparently the robots will only be manufactured in the likeness of the purchaser, so if you were hoping that this would be a good way to get started on populating your own Hall of Presidents, it looks like you're out of luck. Unless, of course, you happen to have a strong resemblance to Chester A. Arthur.
New material could make robot muscles better, faster, stronger
There's already been countless advances in the always exciting field of robot muscles, but a team of researchers from the University of Texas have now made what appears to be a considerable leap forward, which they say could allow for "performance characteristics that have not previously been obtained." The key to that is an entirely new material comprised of ribbons of tangled nanotubes, which can expand its width by 220% when a voltage is applied and return to its original shape in just milliseconds when the voltage is removed. What's more, the material is not only "stronger than steel and stiffer than diamond," but it's able to withstand an extreme range of temperatures from -196 °C to 1538 °C, which could allow robots equipped with the muscles to operate with ease in a wide variety of off-world colonies, er, "harsh environments." Head on past the break for a demonstration of the material in its non-robot form.[Image courtesy NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory]
Cognition Technologies' Semantic Map paves the way for the robot uprising
Cognition Technologies' new Semantic Map lets computers -- and, conceivably, evil robots -- "understand" the English language in much the same way humans do, based on word tenses and context in a sentence. With this technology, a computer or search engine can understand virtually every word in the English language -- for a vocabulary about ten times that of a typical American college graduate. The system is already being employed in search engines, allowing people to ask questions in human-phrasing instead of unnatural, machine formatted word strings. Researchers say the ability to understand language is an important building block of the nascent Semantic Web, and will make the Replicants of the future extremely difficult to detect.
