Since Clive Thompson’s comments system over at Collision Detection is broken, I’m leaving this post with a trackback to his recent piece on some Japanese scientists recreating traffic jam behaviours by driving round and round in a circle.

There’s a full report over at New Scientist, and an unintentionally hilarous video of the experiment (at double speed, no less) which you can view larger on YouTube.

This experiment shows on a really small, easy to follow, level that driving smoothly without excessive braking can all-but eliminate traffic jams. Clive makes the link to a 1989 study by an electrical engineer called William Beatty, who thinks he has some solutions.

I’m now dying to try the William Beatty method for myself. I know it wouldn’t work though … because everywhere I can test the theory there will be a second lane of traffic from which other drivers could switch into the gap I’m trying to leave.

This place has been attracting more comment spam week by week. I’ve had enough, so I’ve upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4. Hopefully that will help. What it has definitely done is wreck the stylesheets around here. I’ll fix it sometime. Honest.

Quantum computers are very strange things, so far unseen outside of the science lab. Optical-based quantum computers work by measuring the intereference patterns present in various combinations of lightwaves. The process involves an interaction between electrons, light waves, and acoustic elements, which culminates in a ‘quantum database’. It all has a lot to do with wave-particle duality and the fact that photons of light can be in two places at once (sort of). No, I don’t fully understand that. I do understand the practical outcome though: Running a program through a quantum computer gives you every possible result of that program, all at once. Which must be a cool thing where something like a search engine is concerned.

A team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by Paul Kwiat, set up a quantum computer to combine two methods: Quantum computation and quantum interrogation. They call the process ‘counterfactual computation’—using information that is counter to what must have actually happened.

One of the research students on the team, Onur Hosten, said; “By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm”. So … by not running the program, they got their answer? Kwiat says; “It is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running.” So, erm, yes.

This new form of quantum computer gave them the answer to a problem before they switched it on. It solved an algorithm without running. That’s just plain weird.

Full details are here, but a little complex. I certainly don’t understand it all.

You have no idea how long I’ve dreamed of being able to write a headline like that. It’s easily on a par with this one.

Hanson Robotics are an American company, specialising in humanising technology—working towards natural-looking humanoid robots, natural conversation artificial intelligence, facial recognition and following, and other such things. They’re probably best known (until now) for their ‘Albert Hubo’ robot with the face of Albert Einstein, as seen on the cover of last month’s edition of Wired Magazine.

Hanson Robobtics’ flagship project of recent years has been the creation of a robotic facsimile of dead science fiction author Phillip K. Dick. Dick was written off as a pulp author during his short lifetime, but posthumously appreciated as one of the genre’s greats, mostly thanks to Hollywood movie adaptations of his short stories. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck … there’s a lot of them out there.

The ‘Phil’ robot is capable of holding reasonably coherent conversations with people, its facial expressions are very lifelike, and its natural language systems incredibly advanced. Phil supposedly has a tendency to quote his own works when a little thrown by a particular question, but the real Phillip K. Dick was well known as an oddball himself, so this can be forgiven. Phil was exhibited at the Wired Nextfest in 2005 and blew the crowds away.

The best is yet to come though.

Phil is missing. Hanson Robotics have lost their android clone of Phillip K. Dick. The man responsible for Blade Runner. Whose books so often concerned themselves with the question of whether robots have a soul, whether androids deserve rights, whether a robot knows it is a machine, and so on. Let me repeat that one more time: Phillip K. Dick’s android clone has gone missing. Outstanding stuff.

Phil was being transported by air to California for an exhibition in early January this year, when he disappeared. Foul play is suspected and detectives are scouring eBay in case somebody tries to sell Phil on. Company officials fear ransom demands (not that they’re too worried—they are talking about building a second Phil anyway).

I think this is my favourite news story ever. Not only have I learned that somebody, somewhere managed to get enough funding together to spend their days building a robot based on a deceased paranoid delusional science-fiction author, but the disappearance of the robot really brings the ‘clone’ to life. Dick’s stories often concerned themselves with the nature of consciousness and perception of reality, with robots who believed they were human … and now here I am talking about this lump of rubber, plastic and silicon as though it has run away from it’s creators. I’m humanising it.

Another point worth pondering: If you stole an android clone of Phillip K. Dick, what would you do with it? Sit it in your living room and talk to it of an evening? Prop it up on a park bench and film the public’s reactions?

If you want to read up on the Phil project, go do so here.

Erm, yeah … I’m messing with this site. Changing this, altering that. You know the drill. It’ll be messy around here for a while.

Doom has been ported to just about every possible computer format over the years… and now it’s running on the iPod as well.

It’s been done through the iPod Linux project, and only runs on the more recent iPod Colour or Photo models (with the Linux variant Podzilla installed).

There’s photos, video of it running, and also all the flies you need to download if you’re mental enough to try and install it for yourself – Right here.

According to the Kansas City Star, the Kansas City T-Bones are set to play a historic baseball game against their traditional rivals, the Schaumburg Flyers. Historic because they are only going to play the second half of the game. The first half will be played virtually, by two star videogamers.

Contests are underway to find the region’s top 16 players of MVP Baseball 2005 on the Xbox. The teams will then pick their virtual representatives from those lucky 16. The gamers will duke it out for two innings in front of the crowd on the stadium’s sixteen by twenty-four foot video screen. The real baseball teams will take over from where those two innings leave off, finishing the game in the real world.

What’s the bets that every fan leaves the game wanting to buy an Xbox and a copy of the game?

The annual SXSW (South by Southwest) music festival in Austin, TX is the biggest and best new music showcase in the world.

They’re always at the cutting edge of new technology to make it more accessible – last year they set up a shared iTunes playlist which anybody with a wi-fi laptop could listen to whenever they were online, like at a coffee shop between bands, for instance.

This year they’ve taken the big step of setting up a BitTorrent file of 750 songs (2.6GB) which is out there for anyone to download. One song from each of the top 750 tipped bands playing at SXSW this year. On top of that, they’ve released their own iPod application, which allows you to scroll through the acts playing each night by venue and time, then select any of them to play their sample track. Amazing, and all for free.

Wired News have the full scoop and all the appropriate links.

The newest Powerbooks include an accelerometer, to sense if the laptop is dropped, park the drive heads, and prevent damage to your hard drive. That accelerometer, by definition, must be able to sense any and all movement in three dimensions.

So …

If you were to find a way of taking the data from it, you could then use that info an any way you like. You could tilt your laptop to control it. Flick it to the left or the right to switch applications. Tilt forwards and back to scroll a webpage. And so on …

Outright genius.

Here’s the man who’s already coded a proof-of-concept. Here’s an article by Matt at Interconnected which gets the imagination flowing in the right direction, and here he waxes lyrical about the potential this specific haptic interface holds.

Edge Online, recently resurrected website of the top-notch videogame magazine Edge, brought to my attention today an interesting videogame-related art installation by John Paul Bichard.

It’s based around thoughts on ‘first-person shooter’ games, like Doom, Halo, and Half-life. As Edge say; “The [blood] splattered corridors of first person shooters never really seem to reflect the bloodiness of what goes on in them. In most cases, the buckets of guts spilled on the floor seem uncannily able to clean themselves up, melting into antiseptic invisibility before you’ve had time to squeeze off another round.”

What John Paul Bichard’s Evidência #000 (link to view it here) attempts is to imagine what the scene would really look like after a game is over. When a deathmatch between four or five players has been completed, and the players have moved on—what are the consequences? What would we see if the police arrived on scene, cordoned the area off, and set up an investigation? What evidence would be left, and how would it make a viewer feel?

Obviously, Evidência #000 is a pretty sensationalist piece of art, calculated to shock with it’s realistic gore and fashionable association to the world of gaming. It bring up some interesting points though. If videogames continue to strive for realism in terms of visuals and physical systems, surely they will start to strive also for more realism in terms of continuity, both within the gameplay and outside of it, in the surrounding game ‘world’. How long until we see a game where the scene shifts from a frantic shootout to it’s aftermath? A game where the player must deal with the consequences of his actions, or at the very least be exposed to them for a period, rather than being magically whisked off to the next level?

Alternatively, what if this posits a possible direction for game franchises to expand horizontally, rather than continuing their current inexorable vertical path from sequel to sequel? Imagine a second game set in the the Half-Life world, where rather than playing the main protagonist again, you play the part of a forensics expert, assigned to the scene of a shootout. It would be a puzzle game, a murder-mystery, a thriller … with the player hot on the trail of another player who is playing the original Half-Life game somewhere else on the internet (because we’re all connected now anyway, right?) Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself there, but I think the concept is valid. Various genres of game, set in the same game universe, with the same characters appearing, and the same overarching plotlines. A true, broad-based franchise opportunity, rather than the staid plodding from one episode to the next which we’re stuck with at the moment.

Art is supposed to make you think. I guess Evidência #000 is more successful than I first realised.