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The World's Oldest Computer is Still Revealing its Secrets

Sarah Kaplan Washington Post
In this very small volume of messed-up corroded metal you have packed in there enough knowledge to fill several books telling us about ancient technology, ancient science and the way these interacted with the broader culture of the time.

Open Source Software Went Nuclear This Year

Cade Metz Wired
Even the most powerful tech companies and entrepreneurs are freely sharing the code underlying their latest technologies. They recognize this will accelerate not only the progress of technology as a whole, but their own progress as well. It’s altruism with self-interest. And it’s how the tech world now works.

The Bicentennial of George Boole, the Man Who Laid the Foundations of the Digital Age

Colm Mulcahy Scientific American
It wasn’t until almost a century after Boole’s pioneering work that the world caught up. Both Victor Shestakov at Moscow State University in 1935 and Claude Shannon at MIT in 1937 proposed using Boolean logic to design electrical switches, the latter’s work paving the way for a major shift in electrical engineering in the USA. By late 1948, Shannon had introduced what we now know as information theory, and digital computers soon followed.

The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation

Michael Nielsen Quanta Magazine
Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?

Artificial Intelligence For Biology?

Derek Lowe In the Pipeline
That's what computers are really good at, relentless grinding. I can't call it intelligence, and I can call it artificial intelligence only in the sense that an inflatable palm is an artificial tree. I realize that we do have to call it something, though, but the term "artificial intelligence" probably confuses more than it illuminates.

Movie: The Imitation Game

The story of Alan Turing, British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist who led the effort to crack the German Enigma Code, helping the Allies win WWII. After the war Turing was prosecuted by the UK government for homosexual acts.
 

[Quantum Computing Don't Get No Respect]

Scott Aaronson Shtetl-Optimized
We have failed to make the honest case for quantum computing—the case based on basic science—because we’ve underestimated the public. We’ve falsely believed that people would never support us if we told them the truth: that while the potential applications are wonderful cherries on the sundae, they’re not and have never been the main reason to build a quantum computer. The main reason is that we want to make absolutely manifest what quantum mechanics says about reality
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