You may not need to pay that parking fine!

The Guardian reports that a free online chatbot called DoNotPay has reportedly helped appeal over $4 million in fines. "Dubbed as "the world's first robot lawyer" by its 19-year-old creator, London-born second-year Stanford University student Joshua Browder, DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat-like interface."

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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A tricky puzzle from the past

My colleague, Bob Doran, recently ran across a link to some 1950s technology advertisements. It is noticeable that the advertisements are positive as well as being striking designs. There are not many computing ads. in the set. We have some nice examples of these on our own dept. website. One of the 1950s set, shown to the right sets a very attractive-looking puzzle. That's the kind of thing that is worth spending a few minutes with for the pleasure of figuring it out. But, be warned, this is a particularly tricky puzzle and the minutes can turn into many hours. Have a go, but in order to not waste your time and make you feel cheated, there are some clues given following the image.
The "icons" are completely misleading – the colour and glyph have no meaning. It is equivalent to the puzzle:

x40x
xxx ) xxxxxxx
xxx
xxx
xxx
xxxx
xxxx
0

where each x can be any decimal digit. There are no leading zeroes and the fine-print clues are needed to solve the puzzle. Mean eh? Many thanks to Lloyd Thomas for figuring it out and providing a link to the solution.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Limits of Quantum Computing: A Sceptic’s View

Quantum computing isn't an easy subject to understand - let's  be honest nothing quantum really makes sense. As Neils Bohr famously said: "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet." Fortunately two of my colleagues, Cris Calude and Alastair Abbott, do understand it and they've recently published a post on the Quantum for Quants website titled "Limits of Quantum Computing: A Sceptic's View". Highly recommended.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Viv, the next-generation AI assistant built by Siri creator

Happy solstice everyone. My colleague, Mark Wilson, found this interview on TechChrunch with the inventor of Apple's Siri who has been working on an even better AI assistant. It's very interesting, clear progress has been made.


from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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An AI wrote this short film

Ars Technica has an interesting piece on a short movie that was written by an AI. "In the wake of Google's AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays. They created "Jetson" and fueled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts. Shortly thereafter, Jetson announced it wished to be addressed as Benjamin. Building a team including Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO's Silicon Valley, they gave themselves 48 hours to shoot and edit whatever Benjamin (Jetson) decided to write."


from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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