Google Earth has provided many an office worker with several consecutive hours of procrastination material – “Ooh, there’s my house! And my mum’s house! And my nan’s house!” – and these examples of glitches, curated into one handy Flickr account by Trapcode founder Peder Norrby, are fascinating in their weird digital distortion of landscapes the world over. The glitches aren’t really glitches of course but logical misalignments which occur as a result of texture mapping, when a two-dimensional image is applied to the surface of a three-dimensional model. They’re created by an algorithm, rather than human beings, explaining the oddly dehumanised images they present.
The result of these robots creating maps of the world? Trees melting into houses, bridges bending under the weight of cars that cross them and street corners that resemble the scary red slide from Playworld. Like peeping into a weird, dystopian parallel universe, the images are strangely alluring in their interpretations of the changing representations of the Earth’s surface.
We've seen many of these real-digital glitches, but it is still fascinating. Could possibly become an interesting environment for a new "Inception-like" movie...
The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will use the most advanced commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave Two.
Quantum computing took a giant leap forward on the world stage today as NASA and Google, in partnership with a consortium of universities, launched an initiative to investigate how the technology might lead to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
The new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will employ what may be the most advanced commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave Two, which a recent study confirmed was much faster than conventional machines at defeating specific problems (see “D-Wave’s Quantum Computer Goes to the Races, Wins”). The machine will be installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and is expected to be available for government, industrial, and university research later this year.
Google believes quantum computing might help it improve its Web search and speech recognition technology. University researchers might use it to devise better models of disease and climate, among many other possibilities. As for NASA, “computers play a much bigger role within NASA missions than most people realize,” says quantum computing expert Colin Williams, director of business development and strategic partnerships at D-Wave. “Examples today include using supercomputers to model space weather, simulate planetary atmospheres, explore magnetohydrodynamics, mimic galactic collisions, simulate hypersonic vehicles, and analyze large amounts of mission data.”
Quantum computers exploit the bizarre quantum-mechanical properties of atoms and other building blocks of the cosmos. At itse very smallest scale, the universe becomes a fuzzy, surreal place—objects can seemingly exist in more than one place at once or spin in opposite directions at the same time.
While regular computers symbolize data in bits, 1s and 0s expressed by flicking tiny switch-like transistors on or off, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, that can essentially be both on and off, enabling them to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. In principle, quantum computers could prove extraordinarily much faster than normal computers for certain problems because they can run through every possible combination at once. In fact, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe.
D-Wave, which bills itself as the first commercial quantum computer company, has backers that include Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel (see “The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing”). It sold its first quantum computing system, the 128-qubit D-Wave One, to the military contractor Lockheed Martin in 2011. Earlier this year it upgraded that machine to a 512-qubit D-Wave Two—reputedly for about $15 million, which might be roughly what the new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab paid for its device.
The collaboration between NASA, Google, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) aims to use its computer to advance machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence devoted to developing computers that can improve with experience. Machine learning is a matter of optimizing behavior that may be easier for quantum computers than conventional machines.
For instance, imagine trying to find the lowest point on a surface covered in hills and valleys. A classical computer might start at a random spot on the surface and look around for a lower spot to explore until it cannot walk downhill anymore. This approach can often get stuck in a local minimum, a valley that is not actually the very lowest point on the surface. On the other hand, quantum computing could make it possible to tunnel through a ridge to see if there is a lower valley beyond it.
“Looks like win-win-win to me—Google, NASA, and USRA bring unique skills and an interest in novel applications to the field,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum-mechanical engineer at MIT. “In my opinion, the focus on factoring and code-breaking for quantum computers has overemphasized the quest for constructing a large-scale quantum computer, while slighting other potentially more useful and equally interesting applications. Quantum machine learning is an example of a smaller-scale application of quantum computing.”
Over the years, many critics have questioned whether D-Wave’s machines are actually quantum computers and whether they are any more powerful than conventional machines. The standard approach toward operating quantum computers, called the gate model, involves arranging qubits in circuits and making them interact with each other in a fixed sequence. In contrast, D-Wave starts off with a set of noninteracting qubits—a collection of supercomputing loops kept at their lowest energy state, called the ground state—and then slowly, or “adiabatically,” transforms this system into a set of qubits whose interactions at its ground state represent the correct answer for the specific problem the researchers programmed it to solve.
Many scientists have wondered whether the approach D-Wave used was vulnerable to disturbances that might keep qubits from working properly. But independent researchers recently found that D-Wave’s computers can actually solve certain problems up to 3,600 times faster than classical computers. Before choosing the D-Wave Two, NASA, Google, and USRA ran the computer past a series of benchmark and acceptance tests. It passed, in some cases by a giant margin.
USRA will invite researchers across the United States to use the machine. Twenty percent of its computing time will be open to the university community at no cost through a competitive selection process, while the rest of it will be split evenly between NASA and Google. “We’ll be having some of the best and brightest minds in the country working on applications that run on the D-Wave hardware,” Williams says.
When will we start to speak about "quantum architecture"? "Fuzzy, surreal" architectures "that can seemingly exist in more than one place at once" or that have different and sometimes opposite states at the same time? "Quantum reality" sounds quite like the environment I'm living in every day...
PS. And again, after the Large Hadron Collider, fascinating pictures from scientific devices!
Created at the Mediated Matter Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, The Silk Pavilion explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales. The primary structure was created of 26 polygonal panels made of silk threads laid down by a CNC (Computer-Numerically Controlled) machine, followed by a swarm of 6,500 silkworms spinning flat non-woven silk patches as they locally reinforced the gaps across CNC-deposited silk fibers.
Inspired by the silkworm’s ability to generate a 3D cocoon out of a single multi-property silk thread (1km in length), the overall geometry of the pavilion was created using an algorithm that assigns a single continuous thread across patches providing various degrees of density. Overall density variation was informed by the silkworm itself deployed as a biological “printer” in the creation of a secondary structure.
Note: interesting post by Léopold Lambert about body, presence and activism, as a tribute to all "occupy" movements of parks, streets, squares, etc. and in particular the recent ones in Turkey: body presence in public physical spheres completed by social media communication.
A Body of Gezi Park. 31 May 2013. From Yücel Tunca via Nar Photos.
For the last five days, the small park of Gezi near Taksim square in Istanbul has been occupied by dozens of thousands of people protesting, at first, against the urban project in development for this site that involves a shopping mall. Such a project that transforms a public space into an instrument of capitalism is part of a long series of others that has been changing Istanbul’s urban landscape and politics in the last decade. Very quickly however, the protest generalized itself and reached other cities of Turkey (Ankara, Izmir and more) in an attempt to globally constitute a strong resistance against the conservative and religious Turkish government and its Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The latter used to be Istanbul’s mayor and still has strong interests in its development. The police violently attacked the protesters, injuring severely some of them, but reinforcing the movement’s determination and legitimacy.
It is interesting to observe that such a news has been spread out much rapidly on the international level than on the national one since the Turkish Press – just like the American one, including the New York Times, at the beginning of the Occupy movement – did not communicate about this information in a clear submission to the political status quo. In New York, hundreds of occupiers went back on Zucchotti Park to show their international solidarity with the Turkish movement of the same name.
For the last two years, many “professional politicians” in power learned what it is to be afraid of the multitude. All answered with brutality (from Cairo to Santiago, via Benghazi, Damascus, Athens, Montreal, New York and many more), some stepped down, some kept their status, some others are still ordering massacres against their own people but all of them seems to have feared the power of the crowds, gathered by their common will to resist against totalitarianism and capitalism. Something needs to be understood here: despite all the media attempts to “surf” on these political waves with a common approach of the use of social media as a new form of political act – to a certain extent, it is not completely wrong – the thing that veritably choked the status quo is the gathering of bodies in the public space. Of course, some gathering of bodies are less political than others – sport events related ones for example – and therefore, there needs to be a certain performativity involved in this process; however, there is something inherently political in this act of forming a group of bodies in the public realms. As I have been writing often, especially to exclaim the sense of this notion of occupying, our body can only be at one place at a time and, because of its materiality, no other body can be at the very same place at the same time. This involves a certain necessity as our body is always spatialized but, at the very same time, it also involves the radical choice for this space at the exclusion of every other in the world. At each moment of our life, we have therefore to re-accomplish the necessary yet radical choice of the localization of our body. When thousands of bodies choose to be localized together in the streets or on a square, in such a way that they are not participating to the economy and might even have to confront the physical violent encounter with the various forces of suppression, rather than choosing the comfort of the private realms, a strong political gesture is being created.
It would be too easy to necessarily applaud any political gesture of this kind. The recent numerous demonstrations of catholic extremists and other movement of right wing activists in France against the legislation authorizing gay marriage – now in vigor - prove it well. In this latter case, the bodies that were demonstrating were the bodies representing the norm: white Christians heterosexuals. The latter do not really suffer from the way society is organized as they constitute the bodies that society considers to organize itself. The streets of Istanbul, on the other hand, are filled by people whose bodies are getting more and more constrained by the conservative religious dominant ideology – by dominant, I don’t imply as much a question of majority than one of relationships of power.
As always, architecture is not innocent here. The fact is that these bodies are gathering in the public realms, but more precisely, outside, in the streets, on the squares, in the parks. Architecture through its internality always has a limitation of the amount of bodies it can host (the maximum occupancy as the urban code defines it); the outdoor world does not really. Choosing for our body to be outside is to potentially contribute to a crowd that theoretically won’t be limited in its number by physical borders, hence the fear of politicians to see the movement spreading. Architecture is inherently participating to the striation of space, nevertheless, it can attempt to create a substantial porosity between the space it contains and the public one that surrounds it, in such a way that the political bodies can appropriate it.
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