Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Analogy recovery from the Wikipedia corpus - a natural language processing task

Natural language processing is a field of science aiming at teaching machines the hectic human language, whether it is spoken or written. On the lowest level of abstraction computers talk to each other in sequence of bits, which in chunks forms instructions. The instruction set is limited, as well as well-defined - not any like human language. We can express rather complex concepts by a single word, while a computer would struggle spending a great amount of its words (1 word usually consists of a few bytes) to tell the same stuff. Also, families of human languages are results of thousands years of evolution, thus often neglect logic as much as are built upon traditions. All in all, getting machines understand our most innate communication form is not an easy sport. In fact, it's difficult as hell. So complex that so far we could only rely on heuristics; not even close to a full blown neural net, which would imitate our language processing brain parts, functions.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Existence of an ideal time capsule

Let's say, you want to hide, or make inaccessible some data (e.g. video of yourself, a secret) till a given time - or in other words, send a message to the future. The problem is how would you prevent yourself, or in that matter, anybody else, to read that peace of data before the given time? How do you make absolutely sure that there's no way to open the time capsule prematurely?

You'd say let's put that secret inside a platinum chest, inside a platinum chest, inside a platinum chest ... with a self-destruction function, so if someone peeked into those boxes before intended, then the data would be wiped out of existence. Oh and do not forget to bury that matryoshka platinum chest deep down the crust of earth where platinum is at the limits of melting.

A modern time capsule feeding on solar energy.