H+ Weekly - Issue #348
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This week - AI solves Math Olympiad problems and does competitive programming challenges; the history of transhumanism; autonomous cars drift and go off-road; and more!
MORE THAN A HUMAN
Chinese scientists create AI nanny to look after babies in artificial womb
Researchers in Suzhou say they have developed an artificial intelligence system that can monitor and take care of embryos as they grow into fetuses in an artificial womb environment. The tests have been conducted on mouse embryos as international law forbids experimental studies on human embryos beyond two weeks of development.
► H+ Academy Roundtable "Transhumanism: Its Histories” (1:23:21)
H+ Academy Roundtable is featuring Elise Bohan, Natasha Vita-More, and Sara Lumbreras in exploring the history and philosophy of transhumanism.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Solving (Some) Formal Math Olympiad Problems
OpenAI presents an AI that can solve challenging high-school olympiad problems. "While these results are extremely exciting, as they demonstrate that deep learning models are capable of non-trivial mathematical reasoning when interacting with a formal system, we are still very far from best-student performance on these competitions, only occasionally, rather than consistently, closing challenging olympiad problems", write OpenAI researchers in this post.
Competitive programming with AlphaCode
AI can now beat humans in competitive programming competitions. AlphaCode, DeepMind's newest AI, reached the top 54% of participants in programming competitions by solving new problems that require a combination of critical thinking, logic, algorithms, coding, and natural language understanding.
ROBOTICS
Robot Dogs Take Another Step Towards Deployment at the Border
Do you remember the company that strapped a gun to Spot (I wrote about them in issue #332)? The same company is now presenting how Spot can be used to patrol the southern border of the United States.
► Pushing Vehicle Capabilities To Advance Active Safety (3:04)
Behind this extremely boring video title, Toyota shows an autonomous car that can drift on its own like a pro driver.
DARPA’s RACER Program Sends High-Speed Autonomous Vehicles Off-Road
DARPA launches a new program. RACER is all about high-speed autonomous off-road vehicles. Three teams have now three years to build the off-road vehicle that can do on average 18km/h in Phase 1 and 29km/h in Phase 2 in rough terrain, mostly on its own and with minimal human interventions.
Gecko-inspired robot gripper is strong but gentle
Aiming to create a robotic gripper that can grasp with delicate strength, researchers have combined adhesives based on gecko toes with a customized robotic hand. The researchers demonstrated that the robot is capable of handling a wide variety of items, including raw eggs, bunches of grapes, plates, jugs of liquids, basketballs, and even an angle grinder.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
NVIDIA GPUs Enable Simulation of a Living Cell
Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have built a 3D simulation that replicates physical and chemical characteristics (energy production, protein building, gene transcription and more) at a particle scale — creating a fully dynamic model that mimics the behaviour of a living cell.
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Conrad Gray (@conradthegray)
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