Proving we actually live in a b-movie since 2011
If there’s one mystery of the universe I’ve never fully understood, it’s what to do when I feel like giving someone a high five and no one’s around. I know I’m not alone on this, because in 1993 someone filed patent US 5356330 to answer all of my high-fiving prayers.
In the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films starring Tobey McGuire, Peter Parker’s mutation allowed him to fire webs naturally out of his wrists. This was a change from the original comics. In those, Parker created mechanical web-shooters – his mutation only brought him things like superhuman strength, the “spider-sense,” and the ability to climb walls. And, from what …
Continue reading “Inventor Creates Mechanical Web-Shooter, Does Whatever A Spider Can”
In 1990, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would win a game of chess against a human by 1998. His prediction came true on May 11, 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. More recently, Kurzweil, who now works for Google, shared a new prediction: within 15 years, computers …
Continue reading “Google’s Ray Kurzweil: Computers Will Behave Like Real People By 2029”
The Z-Machines, a three-robot band spawned by Japanese roboticists, aren’t your typical musicians. For one, they’re robots. That’s the big one. But for another, the guitarist has 78 fingers and the drummer has 22 arms.
We’ve seen robots that can do a lot of things. Chop noodles. Fly like birds. Stalk old people in nursing homes. Now we can add beat humans 100% of the time at Rock Paper Scissors to that growing list of reasons we should worry.
Boston Dynamics, with funding from DARPA’s M3 (that’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation) program, gives us a new look at their four-legged WildCat robot in the above video.
When it comes to designing the robot horde that will eventually subjugate the human race, we’re making a lot of progress. Take the above video, for example. In it, you can see the work of Aaron Becker and his team of researchers from Rice University, who created a new algorithm that enables swarms of robots …
Continue reading “Prepare for the Robot Apocalypse with SwarmControl”
