Informatics

The About page on the OpenAI website

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At the end of last week the opening of the project OpenAI was announced. It’s a nonprofit company with the purpose of conducting research in artificial intelligence for the benefit of all humanity, without the constraints caused by the need to obtain a financial gain. This isn’t yet another project which soon may fall into oblivion because it’s supported by funding for approximately one billion dollars and involves entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

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Google published a series of results obtained with the D-Wave 2X quantum computer, a system purchased to use it together with NASA. The fuss came from the fact that tests showed performance a hundred million times greater than those of a traditional processor. The problem is that these results are achieved only for specific operations ending up adding new controversy around these systems.

Ada Lovelace portrait (1840)

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Augusta Ada Byron, this is her birth name, was born on December 10, 1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Byron. Her parents split shortly after her birth and because of the lack of interest for her by her father it was her mother Anne Isabella who took care of her. The woman had received a high level education in various subjects and, in fear that her daughter would follow in her father’s footsteps, encouraged her to study mathematics.

Image from patent number 6,202,150 showing how it works (Source USPTO)

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CryptoPeak Solutions, a virtually unheard Texas business, launched nearly 70 lawsuits against companies such as AT&T, Yahoo, Netflix, GoPro, Sony, Pinterest and Groupon claiming ownership of a patent on secure web connections, for instance the one that have a URL starting with https instead of http. This is the latest sensational case of a patent troll, meaning a company that exists for the sole purpose of obtaining money by using software patents.

Simulation of the structure and motion of a phosphoglycerate kinase protein (Image courtesy Thomas Splettstoesser; http://www.scistyle.com all rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Physics” describes the results obtained with a series of simulations conducted using supercomputers at the Department of Energy of the USA’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The object of these sophisticated simulations were proteins to understand their motion, a key element in the functional, structural and regulatory roles they have in living organisms.