http://cache.io9.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png http://io9.com/tag/computer science http://io9.com/tag/computer science

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. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5879423&view=rss&microfeed=true

In less than a decade, Sudoku has gone from obscure logic puzzle to global phenomenon. Scientists have built up an entire sub-field of mathematics around this game, mostly to answer one question: what's the toughest possible puzzle that's actually solvable? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5874038&view=rss&microfeed=true

Photoshop is a reality in the world of photography, but it gets out of hand when advertisers and fashion directors completely transmogrify the original image, creating an unrealistic and impossible result. New research proposes a way to codify how heavily Photoshopped an image is. The only catch? The industry has to cooperate with it. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5863711&view=rss&microfeed=true

Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons. There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5860537&view=rss&microfeed=true

When you're a robot, a new motion-planning algorithm can mean the difference between waving your arms around like an inflatable tube man and reaching for a coffee mug like you're supposed to. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5842760&view=rss&microfeed=true

In new JJ Abrams show Person of Interest, airing tomorrow night on CBS, a mysterious man named Finch (Lost's Michael Emerson) has become disenchanted with his government job designing a system that sifts through massive amounts of data to find terrorism suspects. Now Finch is a rogue outsider with a backdoor to the system he created — nicknamed "the Machine." He's able to pilfer hints about upcoming (non-terrorist) crimes from his Big Data creation when it feeds him the social security numbers of people who are soon to be at the center of a crime. Along with his partner Reese (Jim Caviezel), Finch tries to stop these crimes before they happen. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5842682&view=rss&microfeed=true

Members of 343 Industries and authors of the Halo novels joined forces at Comic-Con to tell us what lies ahead for Halo — not just in the games, but the expanded universe as well. The panel opened with comments that 343 Industries had been secretly working on Halo 4 for the past few years, and with a story of team members lying to their family members and saying they were developing a side-scrolling shooter. Halo 4 will be released in 2012, beginning a new trilogy of Halo games. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5824061&view=rss&microfeed=true

Computers may be naturally fluent in binary, but how might they fare with learning human languages? Computers were tested by playing the game Civilization. Random chance let them win about half the time...but then they started reading the instruction manual. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5820624&view=rss&microfeed=true

The internet preserves unimaginable amounts of data, including huge amounts of minutiae describing people's everyday lives. So here's the question: is this information worth saving for future generations to study, or is this the sort of data that's best forgotten? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5797835&view=rss&microfeed=true

Computronium is defined by some as a substance which approaches the theoretical limit of computational power that we can achieve through engineering of the matter around us. It would mean that every atom of a piece of matter would be put to useful work doing computation. Such a system would reside at the ultimate limits of efficiency, and the smallest amount of energy possible would be wasted through the generation of heat. Computronium crops up in science fiction a lot, usually as something that advanced civilizations have created, occasionally causing conflicts due to intensive harvesting of matter from their galaxy to further their processing power. The idea is also also linked with advanced machine intelligence: A block of matter which does nothing other than compute could presumably would be incredibly sought after by any artificial intelligence looking to get the most compact and powerful brain for its money! More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5758349&view=rss&microfeed=true

The Living Earth Simulator is quite possibly the most ambitious computer project ever undertaken. This all-encompassing simulation will collect all the data in the entire world, to predict everything from the next major disease outbreak to the next financial crisis. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5721553&view=rss&microfeed=true

Peter Robinson, a professor at Cambridge, got so fed up with how irritating his GPS device is that he set out to build a device that would understand his feelings of frustration. Here's what happened next. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5716072&view=rss&microfeed=true

19th century inventor Charles Babbage never lived to finish his analytical engine, a punchcard computer that was decades ahead of its time, but now Babbage aficionados are finally building this device. Jennifer Oullette of Cocktail Party Physics has the details. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5665687&view=rss&microfeed=true

For just 0.015% of what the United States spends annually on defense, a computer expert could put together an army of hackers and stealthy programs that could take down any country's cyber-infrastructure. How could we possibly defend ourselves against that? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5601827&view=rss&microfeed=true

A new device uses optical fibers to measure light from individual ions. Since these charged atoms store quantum information, this ion trap could allow us to build practical quantum computers and to link light and matter at the quantum level. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5584150&view=rss&microfeed=true

Fundamental to computer science is transmitting information using electromagnetic communication - the 0s and 1s of binary code. But nature's tiniest lifeforms have used a very different method for eons, and figuring out how they do it could revolutionize computers. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5574825&view=rss&microfeed=true

A box recently sealed in a vault in the Swiss Alps contains tools for future users to reconstruct defunct file formats and retrieve otherwise lost information. But how does it work? We spoke with the project's leaders to find out. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5558640&view=rss&microfeed=true

A prankster who submitted a computer-generated research paper to the International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering discovered that not only was his fake paper accepted - its "author" is to chair a panel. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5117892&view=rss&microfeed=true

Two miles ahead, a construction crew is closing down the right lane on a busy stretch of road. A truck stalled on the left shoulder is slowing down drivers who stop to look. In the minivan to your right, a distracted dad is paying more attention to his kids than to the road. Unfortunately, you are aware of none of these things. Wouldn't it be cool if a computer could analyze all that information and warn you of a high risk condition like this? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5082129&view=rss&microfeed=true

Now your computer can simulate the movement of light through fog in a way that will easily fool the untrained eye. Using new "photon mapping" algorithms that map how light would bounce off water particles in the air (i.e. fog), UC San Diego computer scientists can now whip up a quick, realistic fog world for a videogame or movie without a lot of expensive computer power. Compare the photon mapped image above, with what the same amount of computing power would have produced without the algorithm, below. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=380777&view=rss&microfeed=true