What is Moravec’s paradox? Moravec’s paradox is that AI machines find it very easy to do things that we find difficult, such as chess, but very difficult to do things that we find easy, such as tying a shoelace. The paradox has Hans Moravec’s name, but he wasn’t the only person to notice this. He […]
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How do driverless cars navigate a city? Driverless cars use a whole mix of software and sensors to navigate through a city. They use Lidar, radar, cameras, and self-learning algorithms. Driverless cars are becoming more common these days, but they always have to have a driver paying attention at the wheel in case something goes
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How does a CT scan work? A CT scan uses x-rays and computer software to produce a 2D or a 3D image of the section of the body being scanned. CT stands for Computed Tomography. “Computed” means calculated, or worked out. “Tomography” is “imaging by sections using any kind of penetrating wave”. Tomography is made
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How does a quantum computer work? They use subatomic particles, which can exist in more than one state at the same time. Regular computers are binary, which means everything they display or calculate is just a series of 0s and 1s. For example the word plasma, is 011100000110110001100001011100110110110101100001. A computer is made up of millions
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How does autofocus work? Active autofocus works by calculating the distance to the object and passive autofocus works by using contrast sensors to analyze the image. How does a camera focus? Cameras focus in the same way that our eyes do. Light waves are reflected off objects and they enter our eyes or a camera.
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How many servers are in a data center? It depends on the company and the type of server, but the average data center appears to have about 100,000 servers in it. When I am talking about data centers, I mean the kind of place that stores all of the information on the Internet. It is
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What is Bitcoin? It is the original, and the most famous, digital currency. Let’s look at what Bitcoin is, why it was created, and how it works. Bitcoin was introduced to the world in 2009 by someone who said their name was Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is or even if it is
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Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman were the creators of the RSA encryption that we use many times, possibly hundreds of times, a day. They gave the first letters of their surnames to name it. Encryption has been around ever since people wanted to send secret messages. An early cipher is the Caesar cipher
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Do the three laws of robotics need updating? The three laws of robotics were an invention by Isaac Asimov and they were meant for a story, not to be a literal way of controlling the robots and AI in our lives today. We will need some kind of laws that robots have to follow at
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How does a TV screen display different colors? By using different intensities of red, green, and blue. These colors can be displayed with liquid crystal or with gases. All screens, no matter how they are made, are divided up into pixels. The word pixel was made from a combination of “picture” and “element”. One pixel
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