Month: September 2022

HYBRID SYSTEM. “DeepMind Technologies, a London-based artificial-intelligence firm acquired by Google this year, has revealed that it is designing computers that combine the way ordinary computers work with the way the human brain works. They call this hybrid device a Neural Turing Machine. The hope is it won't need programmers, and will instead program itself.” https://lnkd.in/drQaBXa View in LinkedIn

THE HYPE. “But, predictably, the scientific merit of the purported "breakthroughs" is paltry at best. Notwithstanding the fad and the hype, there's, well, no news here. A BetaBeat story on the topic, "Google’s New Computer With Human-Like Learning Abilities Will Program Itself," is essentially a big, emotive headline with no real content.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/10/is_google_a_ste090771.html View in LinkedIn

NUANCED CHALLENGE. “Go is considered much more difficult for computers to win than other games such as chess, because its much larger branching factor makes it prohibitively difficult to use traditional AI methods such as brute-force search.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo View in LinkedIn

THE TROPHY. “The company made headlines in 2016 when it was reported its AlphaGo program successfully beat a human professional Go player.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE considers the evolution of the carpel, the part of flowering plants that is the female flower ovary, the gnoeceium, the heart of reproduction in flowering plants. This single structure is credited with participating in creating ecosystems with other species and transforming the biota of planet Earth. View in LinkedIn

REPRODUCTION IN FLOWERING PLANTS, a video by Larry Jensen. An outstanding video with brilliant graphics. A must-watch. https://youtu.be/0UEpq1W9C_E View in LinkedIn

THE FLOWER IMPACTED THE PLANET. “The origin of the flower during the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous eras (most recent estimates are between 150 and 190 MYA) was a key evolutionary innovation that profoundly altered the Earth’s biota.” https://lnkd.in/dm8pYAd View in LinkedIn

FLOWER SUCCESS. “Flowering plants (angiosperms), with reproductive security and speed conferred by the flower, replaced other seed plants in most ecosystems.” http://www.genetics.org/content/202/4/1255 View in LinkedIn

HEART OF AN ECOSYSTEM. “Diversification of flowers and the resulting fruit spurred coevolutionary change in pollinators and dispersers, with subsequent wide-ranging effects on herbivores, mycorrhizae, and other interacting organisms.” http://www.genetics.org/content/202/4/1255 View in LinkedIn