The Curiosity rover has been on Mars for one Martian year. It celebrated by taking a selfie

 

By Abby Phillip June 24 at 10:27 AM

NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover captures a selfie to mark a full Martian year — 687 Earth days — spent exploring the Red Planet. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover is celebrating its Marsiversary — one whole Martian year on the Red Planet — by taking a selfie.

Rover stretched out its robotic arm and took a series of pictures of itself Tuesday, then stitched them together to produce the photo above.

Since the rover first landed on Mars in August 2012, it has been a successful 687 Earth days on the planet for Curiosity, according to NASA.

It met its main goal of finding out whether Mars could ever have been habitable to life when it drilled into a rock near its landing site and discovered that it had once been a lake bed, with mild water.

NASA’s scientists and engineers also released a video explaining what’s next for the rover:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SSf1HenQhWs

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/06/24/the-curiosity-rover-has-been-on-mars-for-one-martian-year-it-celebrated-by-taking-a-selfie/

Strange Quarks and Muons, Oh My! Nature's Tiniest Particles Dissected (Infographic)

 

by Karl Tate, LiveScience Infographic Artist   |   April 07, 2011 01:55pm ET

The Standard Model is the collection of theories that describe the smallest experimentally observed particles of matter and the interactions between energy and matter.

Three categories of particles form the Standard Model. Matter is composed of quarks and leptons. The
fundamental bosons provide three forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. Gravity, the fourth fundamental force, is not explained by the Standard Model.
The Higgs boson, discovered in 2012, provides an explanation for how the other particles get mass.

The quark group includes six particles including: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.

The lepton group includes the electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino, electron, muon and Tau particles.

The bosons include the photon, gluon, Z particle, W particle and the Higgs.

Currently, the Standard Model is incomplete and does not explain many important features of the known universe, such as:

• gravity

• dark matter
(27 percent of the universe)

• dark energy
(68 percent of the universe)

http://www.livescience.com/13613-strange-quarks-muons-nature-tiniest-particles-dissected.html

Higgs Boson Confirms Reigning Physics Model Yet Again

 

By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer   |   June 23, 2014 12:33pm ET

An artist's conception of the Higgs boson. Credit: sakkmesterke/Shutterstock.com

For a subatomic particle that remained hidden for nearly 50 years, the Higgs boson is turning out to be remarkably well behaved.

Yet more evidence from the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, confirms that the Higgs boson particle, thought to explain why other particles have mass, acts just as predicted by the Standard Model, the dominant physics theory that describes the menagerie of subatomic particles that make up the universe.

"This is exactly what we have expected from the Standard Model," said Markus Klute, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers involved in the Higgs search.

The new results show that the Higgs boson decays into subatomic particles that carry matter called fermions — in particular, it decays into a heavier brother particle of the electron called a tau lepton, Klute said. This decay has been predicted by the Standard Model. Even so, the findings are a bit of a disappointment for physicists who were hoping for hints of completely new physics. [Top 5 Implications of the Higgs Boson Discovery]

God particle discovered

On July 4, 2012, scientists at the LHC announced they had found the Higgs boson, an elusive particle first proposed 50 years ago by English physicist Peter Higgs. In Higgs' conception, in the blink after the Big Bang, an energy field, now dubbed the Higgs field, emerged that imparts mass to the subatomic particles that trawl through it. Particles that are "stickier" and slow down more while traversing the field become heavier.

Because subatomic particles are either matter carriers called fermions, such as electrons and protons, or force-carrying particles called bosons, such as photons and gluons, the existence of the Higgs field implied an associated force-carrying particle, called the Higgs boson, which is like a ripple in that field, Klute said.

The 2012 discovery left little doubt that the Higgs boson exists, and Higgs and his colleague, François Englert, won the Nobel Prize for the theory in 2013. But there were still many unanswered questions. Is there one Higgs boson or multiple? If there are multiple, what are their masses? And just how do these different-flavored Higgs behave? [Nature's Tiniest Particles Dissected (Infographic)]

Well-behaved particle

To answer those questions, physicists still had to pore over tons of data from the LHC, which accelerates protons to just below the speed of light, then smashes them together, creating a shower of subatomic particles.

Of the billions of collisions produced by the LHC every second, just a few hundred had the signature energy levels associated with the Higgs boson, Klute said.

When the LHC collaborators analyzed those Higgs events, they found about 6 percent of the elusive particles decayed into tau leptons, Klute told Live Science. And though not unexpected, the new results show no hint of additional Higgs bosons that would lend credence to alternate theories such as supersymmetry, which predicts that every particle currently known has a "superpartner" with slightly different properties.

Unanswered questions

The idea of the Higgs decaying to tau leptons was somewhat tacked onto the Standard Model after its creation, yet this "ad hoc addition to the Standard model turns out to be how nature does it," Klute said.

But there are still a few pieces left to complete the picture predicted by the Standard Model, said Nitesh Soni, a particle physicist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who was not involved in the current research.

"The Higgs is predicted to decay into some other particles too, but those have relatively smaller decay rates and higher background" noise, making it too difficult to detect those particles from the current dataset, Soni said.

New physics?

Though the Standard Model has been stunningly successful at predicting behavior in the subatomic realm, there has to be more to the laws of nature, Klute said.

For instance, the Standard Model can't explain dark matter or the existence of gravity. So the lack of evidence for something new is a little disappointing, Klute said.

"My hope was that we would already find some new physics," Klute said.

But he's not giving up hope yet. The hunt for new particles will continue once the LHC is turned on again at much higher energies in 2015, Klute said.

The new analysis of the LHC data was published yesterday (June 22) in the journal Nature Physics.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

http://www.livescience.com/46466-higgs-decays-to-fermions.html

Supercomputer passes Turing test for the first time

London, Jun 9 (PTI): A supercomputer programme has passed the Turing Test for the first time in history after it managed to fool 33 per cent of the human judges into thinking that it
was a 13-year-old boy.

The Turing Test is based on 20th century mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing's 1950 famous question and answer game, 'Can Machines Think?'.

The experiment investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans.

If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30 percent of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test.

No computer has ever achieved this, until now.

The Turing Test was passed for the very first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman after it managed to convince 33per cent of the human judges that it was human at an event organised by the University of Reading.

Eugene simulates a 13-year-old boy and was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was one of five supercomputers battling it for the Turing Test 2014 Prize at the Royal
Society in London on June 7.

The Eugene development team included Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the US, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.

Professor Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Coventry University, said: "In the field of Artificial
Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is
not a machine but rather is a human.

"Some will claim that the Test has already been passed.

The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world.

"However this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted.

"A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's Test was passed for the first time on
Saturday.

"Of course the Test has implications for society today.

Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cybercrime.

"The Turing Test is a vital tool for combating that threat. It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an
individual human in such a way that they are fooled into believing something is true...when in fact it is not," Warwick said.

PTI

A computer just passed the Turing test — but no, robots aren't about to take over

Updated by Joseph Stromberg on June 9, 2014, 10:10 a.m.

Not the chatbot that passed the Turing test. Ute Grabowsky/Photothek via Getty Images

 

Yes, a computer may have just passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence. No, this isn't as big a deal as many news outlets are making it out to be.

This is a gradual improvement on a program from 2012

On Saturday, at an artificial intelligence competition in London, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman successfully convinced 33 percent of a panel of judges that it was actually a 13-year-old boy.

In doing so, the computer seems to have passed the "Turing test" — a theoretical standard for artificial intelligence first proposed in 1950. The idea is that if a computer program can convince more than 30 percent of a group of humans that it too is human after five minutes of chatting, it has achieved some aspect of true artificial intelligence.

At the same time, an earlier version of the same program reached a 29 percent success rate at a competition in 2012, so it's not as though this is a breakthrough achievement — just a gradual improvement. Moreover, the 30 percent figure itself is somewhat arbitrary: Alan Turing, the British mathematician who proposed the test, originally mentioned it as an idle prediction about machine intelligence that would exist in the year 2000, rather than some sort of unequivocal gold standard for AI.

Still, programmers around the world have been creating bots to pass the test for years — and if the results hold up, this would be the very first success. (The results have yet to be independently reviewed.) The chatbot might not be a truly groundbreaking technology, but it is an important milestone on the pathway to artificial intelligence.

A brief history of the Turing test

A statue of Alan Turing

Alan Turing — widely considered the father of artificial intelligence — proposed the test in a 1950 paper called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." In arguing that computers would one day be able to think, he proposed that "thinking" could be interpreted to mean "imitating humans."

Specifically, he proposed a setup in which a human judge chats with both another human and a computer program via a text chat. If the program is sophisticated enough to imitate human behavior to the degree that the judge can't reliably tell the human and computer apart, Turing argued, it is "thinking" in some meaningful way. (Text was used so the computer wouldn't need to imitate the inflections of a human voice.)

in arguing that computers would one day be able to think, turing proposed that "thinking" be interpreted to mean "imitating humans"

The 30 percent standard and five-minute chatting period came about in an aside: Turing was disclosing his personal beliefs about AI, and simply mentioned that he expected a program to be able to cross this threshold by the year 2000.

Soon afterward, programmers began developing primitive programs they hoped would be able to pass that 30 percent test. In 1991, the Loebner Prize — an annual competition among computer programs (and programmers) to pass the Turing test — was established.

The chatbots that participate in this and other competitions have slowly gotten more sophisticated over the years. The early ones simply scanned a human's text input for certain keywords and answered with responses vaguely based on them (if you ever chatted with AIM's SmarterChild, these bots might be familiar to you).

More recent ones are built from the same basic template, but they're more sophisticated, and programmed to demonstrate very human tendencies — like sarcasm, irreverence, and playfulness — in order to fool human judges. Over the past few years, various programs have come close to crossing the 30 percent barrier — in many cases, if they'd deceived a human one more time, they would have passed the Turing test.

How a computer may have passed the Turing test

A screenshot of Eugene Goostman, the chatting program that may have passed the test.

On Saturday, at an event organized by the University of Reading in the UK, a program named Eugene Goostman — developed by the computer scientists Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko — convinced a third of a panel of judges that it too was human, leading the event organizers to claim it had passed the Turing test.

The program, first created in 2001 and refined over the years, had previously finished in second place at several Loebner Prize competitions and hit a 29 percent success rate. It's designed to resemble a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine.

the program is designed to resemble a 13-year-old boy from odessa, ukraine

"Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything," Veselov said in a press release. "We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality."

The character has a pet guinea pig, likes hamburgers and candy, and has a father who is a gynecologist. A version of Eugene is hosted online so anyone can chat with it, but it appears to be down at the moment.

The event organizers claim that the result was independently verified and that their competition involved more judges than any previous event, which would make it less likely to be the result of randomness, or a few judges particularly bad at telling humans from computers.

Still, the outcome hasn't been formally peer-reviewed, so it's not conclusive just yet.

But the Turing test is only one small milestone for artificial intelligence

This announcement certainly doesn't mean that self-aware robots are about to take over the world — and it doesn't even mean that there's one out there capable of consistently fooling people into thinking its a human.

It does, however, mean that one has crossed the threshold Turing predicted would be passed by 2000, a meaningful milestone on the way to artificial intelligence.

That said, there are plenty more milestones that still need to be passed — even in terms of the Turing test. The Loebner prize, for instance, will award a silver medal for the first program to pass a text-only test, but a gold medal for one that passes an audio test — something that's probably still a long way off.

this announcement doesn't mean that self-aware robots are about to take over the world

Moreover, there are many computer scientists and philosophers out there who criticize the idea of the Turing test in the first place — and argue that merely being able to trick humans doesn't constitute true artificial intelligence.

For one, the test just proves that a computer can imitate humans — who, in many cases, act unintelligently. Making typos and grammatical mistakes, for instance, might enhance a program's success, even though they really have nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

One of the most famous objections, by philosopher John Searle, posits that even if a computer can reliably interpret symbols (in this case, written English) to the degree that it can provide sensical responses, it can't be said to be truly "conscious" because it doesn't really understand what the symbols mean.

Still, if Eugene Goostman's success is ultimately verified, it'd be an exciting moment for the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence — and one technology historians might someday look back at with wonder.

Further reading:

• Brian Christian's deep look, from 2011, at the Loebner prize and the programs trying to win it
• Alan Turing's original 1950 article, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• Wired's report on the state of AI and Turing test attempts from 1995
• A skeptical look at Eugene Goostman from someone who's chatted with him

நன்றி: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/9/5793072/a-computer-just-passed-the-turing-test

© 2014 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Computer Program Passed the Turing Test

 

Added by Kimberly Ruble on June 13, 2014.

Numerous individuals have caught word about “Eugene Goostman,” which is a computer program created by Vladimir Veselov, Sergey Ulasen and Eugene Demchenko, and it passed the Turing Test this week. However the responses toward the computer doing so have been strange to say the least.

People’s reactions have been similar to how fans act when a lesser team wins on the soccer field due to a penalty shoot-out. Yes they won, but it almost seems that they did not deserve the win. Likewise, many seemed to believe that the threshold for passing the Turing Test was much too low and that the judges were too unassuming; they failed to ask the proper questions that would have puzzled the robot. So therefore it won, but clearly the victory did not mark any sort of real Artificial Intelligence.

These people have all missed the very point of the computer program taking the test in the first place. That was is a machine able to think? For Turing the question was basically too meaningless to even deserve any discussion. What is the actual act of thinking anyway? The idea will probably never be exactly answered. Turing’s purpose instead was to make available a standby for the pointless question a perfectly important one that had the quality of being forthright and decidable.

The Turing Test is basically a game of imitation. The evaluator had the task of deciding, on the source of text-based communication, whether he or she was interacting with another person or a programmed computer. The machine passed the test if the reviewer was not able to recognize it as being a machine after an appropriate period of time.

The test ended up making a lot of sense. If one went on the conjecture that people are the actual thinkers, then there would be something to the idea that the machine is thinking if the person cannot tell, sorely on the basis of discussion, that he or she is not, in fact, talking with another individual. Computers which pass the Turing Test, at least with respect to written communication, are thought to be as decent in thinking as real life thinkers.

AI has yet to prove the existence of artificial thinkers but it has altered the way in which scientists look at the act of thinking and it is now actually kind of accepted to say things like Watson, the IBM computer, was the Jeopardy game show champion, or that Deep Blue actually did beat Gary Kasparov in a game of chess. The fact of the matter is that over 30 percent of the judges’ panel in the latest test did not realize that “Eugene Goostman” was a computer program instead of a child.

Please remember that Turing’s main contribution to mathematics was the theory of computability and mathematizing the intuitive idea that some questions could be answered by using algorithms. However it was not his assertion that he proved each one. Besides it is only the algorithm functions that are able to be computed by what is known today as a Turing Machine.

Now it is probably best to believe that computers designed to pass the Turing Test really is not the cutting edge of technology for AI. With the way reactions to the Eugene Goostman test seem to show, it actually was too simple for a humdrum bag of tricks to emulate thinking within the boundaries of the game. However the fact itself was informative and brought everyone a step forward because the computer program was able to pass the Turing Test this past week.

Sources:

Newsweek

Wired News

NPR News

Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/06/computer-program-passed-the-turing-test/#toLCmfUMtqT6jcDB.99

100 Days to go for Mars Orbiter Mission landing

 

MOM is racing towards its target and almost 70% of its journey is complete

BS Reporter  |  Chennai

June 16, 2014 Last Updated at 20:27 IST

Exactly 100 days from today, the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft, India's first interplanetary mission, is scheduled for a rendezvous with the Red planet. On September 24, the spacecraft is expected to reach the Mars.

If the event is successfully conducted, it will be a "very" significant technological milestone for the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro).

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is racing towards its target and almost 70 per cent of its journey is complete. MOM is currently at a radio distance of 108 million km from the earth, and a signal takes around six minutes to reach the earth.The spacecraft and its five payloads are in good health, said Isro.

The second trajectory correction manoeuvre (TCM-2) of the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft was successfully performed on June 11, 2014, it said. The TCM-2 was performed by firing the spacecraft's 22 newton thrusters for a duration of 16 seconds.

Isro is continuously monitoring the spacecraft using the Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN).

The spacecraft has so far traveled to Mars a distance of 466 million km as part of its total journey of 680 million km. On November 5, 2013, PSLV-C25, in its 25 flight, successfully launched the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR at Sriharikota, near Chennai.

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