Category: Sin

  • AI. Games. Intelligence. Humans.

    AI. Games. Intelligence. Humans.

    Artificial Intelligence is constantly beating humans in more and more board games. Some years ago, the same team that created that Go-playing bot celebrated something more formidable: an artificial intelligence system that is capable of teaching itself—and winning at—three different games. The AI is one network, but works for multiple games; that generalizability makes it […]

  • Believing. In God. In You.

    Believing. In God. In You.

    An ancient tribe still has a cult centered around a WWII American serviceman. (1) Amazing. Funny. And yet. It is the funniest things which show the way towards the most serious… We once believed in us. But we needed to stop. Because we were too appalling. We had to turn to God. We had to […]

  • The birth of consciousness…

    Think about consciousness for long enough, and you’ll drive yourself to distraction. To psychologist Julian Jaynes, the question of consciousness was big enough to last a lifetime. His answer? Consciousness is much smaller, much rarer, and much younger than we tend to think. Forget about wondering if a dog, cat, or earthworm has consciousness — […]

  • Lust for knowledge. The sin of our era…

    A new computational-model reveals that serotonin, one of the most widespread chemicals in the brain, can speed up learning. (1) Researchers have found that piano lessons have a specific effect on kindergartners’ ability to distinguish different pitches, which translates into an improvement in discriminating between words. (2) We live in a knowledge-centric world. Wanting to […]

  • Undermatched.

    “Undermatching” is a term to describe when high-performing students, typically from economically-disadvantaged households, attend less competitive colleges than their qualifications permit. A new study concerning this widespread phenomenon in the U.S. finds that it correlates with another higher education problem: delayed graduation. The study, presented by University at Buffalo researchers at the American Educational Research […]