The first very simple Quantum Computer Calculation has been made using room temperature silicon rather than ultra-cold superconductors. This was done by a team lead by Andrew Dzurak of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it could mean true Quantum Computing is almost here. If that is the case, the world is about to go through another paradigm shift just as intense as the personal computer revolution itself. You can read about it at the New Scientist Basic Quantum Computation article.
This weekend is World Maker Faire hosted by NYSCI, the New York Hall of Science. Don’t let the name make you think this is the big one; they call it World Maker Faire to honor the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York where NYSCI was founded. It is still large, since last year they had 85,000 visitors to the event. These things are a lot of fun, as creative people show off what they have been coming up with and inspire others to make things as well. There are close to a hundred different Maker Faire’s around the world, if you can’t make this one look at the Maker Faire web site and find one near you.
Over at the official site the headline reads Cassini Finds Global Ocean In Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, which isn’t an overnight discovery. They had to go back over images takes across the past seven years and carefully measure the wobble it goes through in its orbit to prove the liquid water below its ice shell pretty much covered the globe, instead of being confined to the southern pole as they had originally thought. Now the mystery is what keeps it liquid, and what do the simple organic molecules contained in the water vapor being vented at the south pole indicate about the possibilities of its evolving life of some kind.
Long time educational service Discovery Channel now has Discovery VR, and I am sure it is no accident that the first show at the top of the page is Mythbuster’s Shark Dive. Combining two of Discovery Channels audience favorites in this fully immersive 360 degree virtual reality environment is a great way to introduce it. And of you don’t have a VR headset you can enjoy it on any computer, tablet, or smart phone using a web browser or the App. They threw in some of their other Shark Week programming, as well as a number of adventure and environment shows. This is the first set of Network TV shows created specifically for Virtual Reality, but with more shows and hardware coming like Samsung’s Milk VR or Comcast’s AltspaceVR, you can expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
When it comes to programming a swarm of robots, the question has always been do you program from the top down or the bottom up? According to the Technology Review, you no longer have to decide between programming each robot individually or programming the flock as if it were a single entity. Carlo Pinciroli and a collection of his friends and colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal have come up with Buzz, a programming language that allows you to combine both kinds of commands into a single language. It allows you to tweak the two kinds of command structures to any level of detail you feel is required, and it scales easily to control any size of swarm. If that weren’t enough, they have started building and collecting libraries of program modules of common swarming behavior that researchers and hobbyists can drop into their own programming projects. That means for the first time swarm programmers can actually share their work in a common environment, and not have to be constantly reinventing the wheel someone else already solved.
According to the article Pinciroli did at RoboHub the language syntax was inspired by JavaScript and Python, meaning it should be instantly familiar to any programmer, cutting down on the learning curve involved. And the base run time platform itself is so lean it only takes 12KB, so you can do meaningful programming in the smallest of robots. It also interfaces nicely with other types of languages, such as the ROS, or Robot Operating System. The most exciting part? They released it as open-source software under the MIT license. It can be downloaded at The Swarming Buzz, so you can start programming your hoard of Evil Robot Overlords today!
SIGGRAPH is going on right now, from August 9th to the 13th, and many of us are missing it. Here are a few videos explaining a couple of the tracks. While it isn’t as good as being there, a number of these individual programs will hopefully be captured and uploaded to their official SIGGRAPH You Tube Channel soon. While we wait for that, enjoy these teasers.