Lego Turing Machine

LEGO Turing Machine from ecalpemos on Vimeo.

The Analytical Engine: The Greatest Machine That Never Was

Interface Prototyping Tools

Pencil Project
http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Home.aspx

Verify
http://verifyapp.com/

Web Site Wireframe Tool
http://wireframe.talltree.us/default.asp

Mockingbird
https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/

fluidA
http://stage.fluidia.org/

fluidUI
https://fluidui.com/

Cacoo
https://cacoo.com/

Lumzy
http://lumzy.com/app/

iPhone Mockup
http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch/

Google SketchUp
http://www.sketchup.com/product/newin7.html

Animation of the Tower Of Hanoi

This link provides an animation of the solving of the Towers of Hanoi problem, as well as showing which lines of code are being executed at the time.

http://www.animatedrecursion.com/intermediate/towersofhanoi.html

Scientists confirm Alan Turing’s 60-year-old theory for why tigers have stripes

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, cryptographer, and logician, plus the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He also worked in biology, and now, 58 years after his tragic death, science has confirmed one of his old biological hypotheses.

Turing's idea was that biological patterns - such as a tiger's stripes or a leopard's spots - are formed by the interactions of a pair of morphogens, which are the signaling molecules that govern tissue development. The particular pair that Turing proposed was an activator and an inhibitor. Turing proposed that the activator would form something like a tiger's stripe, but then interaction with the inhibitor would shut down its expression, creating a blank space. Then the process would reverse, and the next stripe would form. The interaction of these two morphogens would combine to create the full stripe pattern.

This hypothesis has remained mostly just speculation until now, as researchers at King's College London have now tested the idea in the mouths of mice. The roofs of mice's mouths contain regularly spaced ridges, and the researchers discovered the precise two morphogens that were working as activator and inhibitor to create the pattern, just as Turing suggested. What's more, when the researchers tampered with one morphogen or the other to increase or decrease their activity, the pattern of the ridges changed just as Turing's initial equations predicted they would.

MORE HERE>>

The World Now Buys More Smartphones than Computers

In 2011, manufacturers shipped 487.7 million smartphones and only 414.6 million computers—that's desktops, laptops and tablets. Combined. We'd heard prophecy of this day, and now it may have arrived.

The study by Canalys has troves of data about global smartphone sales, which seem to lend credence to the theory that smartphones are becoming the main computing devices of the masses. Creation and productivity tasks aside, the vast majority of what we need to do or obtain from the internet can be accomplished on a $100 device that fits in our hand. And they're becoming near-ubiquitous.

http://io9.com/5882172/the-world-now-buys-more-smartphones-than-computers?tag=computers

A computer program "painted" this artwork from its own imagination

This landscape may not look like that much - it's a solid B+ in middle school art, I'd say - but this might just be proof that its creator, a computer program named the Painting Fool, is a creative being.

The program is the brainchild of Dr. Simon Colton, a computer scientist at Imperial College London. This is one of dozens of paintings by the Painting Fool, and it's particularly exciting because the program wasn't working from an existing digital image, as it usually does. Instead, this is actually a set of images that sprang from the AI equivalent of imagination. And when the program does work from a preexisting image, the results are even more impressive in more traditional aesthetic terms, as you can see in this video and at its website.

MORE HERE >>