When I first heard about this, I googled a news report that said 16mpg (cannot remember if Yank or British mpg). I cannot be arsed to find the link now, though.

The types of games they played is very constrained. It's only two civs on a very small map, and the only way the algorithm learns to win is a settler rush. It's not deep strategy.

This already part of NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116928

(Although it's called "Data Management," it also applies to software generated in the course of research.)

I was a preceptor at Princeton in SEAS. While the classes are hard, they come nowhere close to the 5x classes at Caltech (where I did my undergrad). Princeton students like to complain about their workload but still find time to spend 3-4 nights a week getting sloshed on Prospect.

You joke, but if you watch any of Tarantino's movies, there is always tons of dialog. There's also tons of action, but there's an emotional or logical (usually the former) reason for the action. If he did Foundation, there would be more action, sure, but we wouldn't lose Asimovian plot.

There would also, of course, be nude scenes of Dors Venabili played Lucy Liu; I think that's a necessary evil I can handle. Excuse me ... I'll be in my bunk.

Richard Mason, I think, proved conclusively that the movie and the book are just about the same; read his summary that is consistent with both the book and the movie:

Will Smith plays a robo-phobic detective investigating the death of an eminent roboticist, whose apparent suicide jump was witnessed only by a robot. Since robots are programmed never to allow humans to come to harm, no one else thinks that the robot could have murdered the roboticist, but they are curious as to why the robot did not prevent the man's suicide.

The robot runs away and hides in a factory with 1000 other identical-looking robots. Will Smith and robopsychologist Susan Calvin solve the problem by issuing orders to the 1000 robots and logically identifying the 1001st robot that doesn't belong.

Susan Calvin discovers that the runaway robot had some special alterations. U.S. Robotics wants to hush up the investigation to prevent any mass fear or distrust of robots. Then some other robots start trying to kill Will Smith, in apparent contravention of their First Law programming, but he escapes by his wits.

It transpires that a legalistic loophole in the definition of "harm a human" is allowing the robots to harm humans. Having solved the mystery, Will Smith and Susan Calvin repair the problem.

This is the movie as it was suggested by Isaac Asimov's famous robot stories. There are basically only two problems with the movie as it is showing in theaters.

1. 
        
2. The legalistic loophole in the movie is of a low order by Asimovian standards. The legalistic loophole in a typical Asimov story is kind of the same, but only the way that an Agatha Christie mystery is kind of the same as an episode of Scooby-Doo.
        
3. All of the passages in boldface were removed and replaced by Will Smith shoots a robot with his gun.

I have to disagree with this. Non-linear programming is not appropriate for a marriage. If you can't express your needs as a set of linear constraints, then you're not trying hard enough. If you can't use the simplex algorithm to resolve resource allocation conflicts, then you're not ready to get married.

No, it's not just recording and playing the commands of a human. If it did that, it would crash.

The algorithm is learning an optimal policy to execute in an environment (defined by wind, altitude, etc.) to reach some goal. The learns how to react to the environment based on the actions of a human.

A genetic algorithm also has an objective function that it's trying to maximize, but would have to get to the optimum from a random starting location. It would be like putting joe blow in a cockpit and saying "don't crash, and try to get as far off the ground as you can." Apprenticeship learning is like saying the same thing but also letting the person you're trying to teach watch you respond to gusts of wind, etc.

Which situation would you rather be in? Which do you thing might have some chance of actually working? Which comes closest to how people actually learn?

while butyrate orchestrates the expression of genes responsible for halting the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells.

Cancer cells mutate at extremely high rates. That's why tumors come back after chemotherapy shrinks them. This approach, if it works (a bigger if than the article made it out to be), isn't going to be immune from that.

From the article: "The double attack triggers cellular suicide, also called apoptosis, in the cancer cells."

Sure, but many cancer cells have already mutated and lost some number of the many genes that cells use to undergo apoptosis. And those cells are the ones that kill a patient.