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Submission + - World's first AI chatbot, ELIZA, resurrected after 60 years (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: A groundbreaking chatbot created in the 1960s has been painstakingly reconstructed from paper records and run for the first time in over half a century, as part of an effort to preserve one of the earliest examples of artificial intelligence.

ELIZA was written by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just 420 lines of code. Several versions of ELIZA can be found online, but Jeffrey Shrager at Stanford University in California and his colleagues in the ELIZA Archaeology Project say these are recreations, rather than running on Weizenbaum’s original code. Shrager says he created one of these recreations when he was just 13 years old in the 1970s, and he regularly sees code purporting to be ELIZA that is just an adapted version of his copy, or one of a few other known attempts at mimicry.

Submission + - NASA is developing a Mars helicopter that could land itself from orbit (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: NASA is working on plans to send another, much larger helicopter to Mars than Ingenuity. The "Chopper" craft would land itself after “screaming into” the planet’s atmosphere at speed, before covering several kilometres a day while carrying scientific equipment. It would probably be the most graceful arrival on the red planet of any lander yet.

Submission + - Google creates self-replicating life from digital 'primordial soup' (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: A self-replicating form of artificial life has arisen from a digital “primordial soup” of random data, despite a lack of explicit rules or goals to encourage such behaviour. Researchers believe it is possible that more sophisticated versions of the experiment could yield more advanced digital organisms, and if they did, the findings could shed light on the mechanisms behind the emergence of biological life on Earth.

Because there were no rules to govern how the code samples should change and no rewards for certain behaviour, the researchers expected the population, which was capped at a fixed number, to remain random and do nothing coherent. But to their surprise, they found that the simulation eventually led to the emergence of self-replicating programs that quickly multiplied to hit the population cap. Eventually, new types of replicators emerged that competed for space and occasionally overwhelmed and replaced the previous population, just as biological organisms can outcompete each other.

Submission + - Multiple nations enact mysterious export controls on quantum computers (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: Secret international discussions have resulted in governments across the world imposing identical export controls on quantum computers, while refusing to disclose the scientific rationale behind the regulations. Although quantum computers theoretically have the potential to threaten national security by breaking encryption techniques, even the most advanced quantum computers currently in public existence are too small and too error-prone to achieve this, rendering the bans seemingly pointless.

New Scientist reached out to dozens of nations to ask what the scientific basis for these matching legislative bans on quantum computer exports was, but was told it was kept secret to protect national security.

Submission + - Is the world's biggest fusion experiment dead after new delay to 2035? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: ITER, the world’s largest fusion power project, has been hit by a 10-year delay, meaning plans to switch it on have now been pushed back to 2035. Such a delay could see ITER being overtaken by commercial fusion projects, leaving some to question whether it is even worth continuing with the experiment, suggesting that management should not "chase sunk costs".

The reactor, which is under construction in France, is a vast international effort involving the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. Work officially started in 2006, although discussions date back to 1985, and the first run of the reactor to create plasma was initially scheduled for 2020, but later pushed back to 2025. Construction costs have boomed, with early estimates having already risen by 300 per cent, to over €20 billion, in 2020.

Submission + - Ukraine turning to AI to prioritise 700 years of landmine removal (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen so many landmines deployed across the country that clearing them would take 700 years, say researchers. To make the task more manageable, Ukrainian scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to identify which regions are a priority for de-mining, though they expect some may simply have to be left as a permanent “scar” on the country.

The model considers vast amounts of data, including tax and property ownership records, agricultural maps, data on soil fertility, logs from the military and emergency services of where bombs and shells have landed, information gleaned from satellite images and interviews with local civilians and the military. Even climate change models and data on population density derived from mobile phone operators could be assessed. The AI then weighs factors such as civilian safety and potential economic benefits to determine the importance of a given piece of land and how urgent it is to make it safe.

Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy minister at Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy, is leading the team, and he likens the task of de-mining during an ongoing war to designing and building a submarine entirely underwater, except that the water is on fire. “It’s a big problem,” he says.

Submission + - UK imposes mysterious ban on quantum computer exports (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: The UK government has set limits on the capabilities of quantum computers that can be exported — starting with those above 34 qubits, and rising as long as error rates are also higher — and has declined to explain these limits on the grounds of national security. Experts say this make no sense and that it could harm the nascent UK quantum computer industry. Clearly 34 qubits is seen as an important milestone for some military or intelligence reason, but the rationale behind that belief is being kept behind closed doors.

Submission + - Are the world's most powerful supercomputers operating in secret? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: A new supercomputer called Frontier has been widely touted as the world’s first exascale machine – but was it really? Although Frontier, which was built by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, topped what is generally seen as the definitive list of supercomputers, others may already have achieved the milestone in secret.

Some owners prefer not to release a benchmark figure, or even publicly reveal a machine’s existence. Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK points out that not only do intelligence agencies and certain companies have an incentive to keep their machines secret, but some purely academic machines like Blue Waters, operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also just never entered.

Submission + - Driverless cars could force other road users to drive more efficiently (newscientist.com) 3

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: The idea that autonomous cars, even in small numbers, can increase fuel efficiency, travel times and safety for all cars on the road will be put to the test on routes around Nashville, Tennessee, later this year.

Benedetto Piccoli at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and his colleagues previously used a computer model of a simple circular road with just one lane in each direction, and found that autonomous cars could decrease overall fuel consumption of all traffic by 40 per cent, even once adoption of these vehicles had only reached 5 per cent.

The best-case scenarios from these new models “rarely happen” in the real world, he says, but his team still hopes to reduce fuel consumption of all vehicles on the road during the trial – not just the driverless cars – by as much as 10 per cent. "If you take just the overall cost of the traffic system in any country, and you reduce that by even 5 per cent we are talking about billions of dollars,” he says.

Submission + - Plan for microbes to eat Chernobyl's nuclear waste may be ruined (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: Researchers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine had been looking for bacteria to eat radioactive waste – but they now fear that their work was irreparably lost during the Russian invasion of the facility.

A limited party was able to access laboratories on 12 April and found doors and windows broken and most scientific equipment looted, damaged or destroyed.

Scientist Olena Pareniuk was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor before the Russian invasion. If her samples are lost it will likely be impossible to replace them.

Submission + - UK intelligence agencies are investigating cryptocurrency transactions (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: Bitstamp, Europe's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has handed over information on some of its customers to the UK's intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6. The news suggests that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are being used in serious organised crime and terrorism, as well as domestic crime.

The Security Service, also known as MI5, is responsible for preventing terrorism and espionage within the UK, while the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, is tasked with foreign intelligence. Neither organisation tackles ordinary crime, unless there is a threat to national security, and until now no cryptocurrency investigations have been confirmed.

Submission + - Quantum computers are a million times too small to hack bitcoin (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: Quantum computers would need to become around one million times larger than they are today in order to break the SHA-256 algorithm that secures bitcoin, which would put the cryptocurrency at risk from hackers. Breaking this impenetrable code is essentially impossible for ordinary computers, but quantum computers, which can exploit the properties of quantum physics to speed up some calculations, could theoretically crack it open.

Webber’s team calculated that breaking bitcoin’s encryption in this 10 minute window would require a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits, while cracking it in an hour would require a machine with 317 million qubits. Even allowing for a whole day, this figure only drops to 13 million qubits.

This is reassuring news for bitcoin owners because current machines have only a tiny fraction of this – IBM’s record-breaking superconducting quantum computer has only 127 qubits, so devices would need to become a million times larger to threaten the cryptocurrency, something Webber says is unlikely to happen for a decade.

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