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🔗 Computer science 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Systems

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

SI systems consist typically of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration often comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Examples of swarm intelligence in natural systems include ant colonies, bird flocking, hawks hunting, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and microbial intelligence.

The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while 'swarm intelligence' refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in the context of forecasting problems. Similar approaches to those proposed for swarm robotics are considered for genetically modified organisms in synthetic collective intelligence.

🔗 Statistics

Extreme learning machines are feedforward neural networks for classification, regression, clustering, sparse approximation, compression and feature learning with a single layer or multiple layers of hidden nodes, where the parameters of hidden nodes (not just the weights connecting inputs to hidden nodes) need not be tuned. These hidden nodes can be randomly assigned and never updated (i.e. they are random projection but with nonlinear transforms), or can be inherited from their ancestors without being changed. In most cases, the output weights of hidden nodes are usually learned in a single step, which essentially amounts to learning a linear model. The name "extreme learning machine" (ELM) was given to such models by its main inventor Guang-Bin Huang.

According to their creators, these models are able to produce good generalization performance and learn thousands of times faster than networks trained using backpropagation. In literature, it also shows that these models can outperform support vector machines (SVM) and SVM provides suboptimal solutions in both classification and regression applications.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook was released the same day; it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, who was mentioned briefly in one of the chapters.^{Ch. 20} In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association and won the 2012 Prometheus Award. A film adaptation, screenwritten by Cline and Zak Penn and directed by Steven Spielberg, was released on March 29, 2018.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Primates

The hundredth monkey effect is a hypothetical phenomenon in which a new behaviour or idea is said to spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behaviour or acknowledge the new idea.

One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources which have themselves misrepresented the original observations.

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema 🔗 Film/Core

The Conversation is a 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman with supporting roles by John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Robert Duvall.

The plot revolves around a surveillance expert and the moral dilemma he faces when his recordings reveal a potential murder. Coppola cited the 1966 film Blowup as a key influence. However, since the film was released to theaters just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned as President, he felt that audiences interpreted the film to be a reaction to the Watergate scandal. The Conversation has won critical acclaim and multiple accolades, including the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the highest honor at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1974 and lost Best Picture to The Godfather Part II, another Francis Ford Coppola film. In 1995, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

🔗 Biography 🔗 England 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 East Anglia 🔗 East Anglia/Suffolk

Roland the Farter (known in contemporary records as Roland le Fartere, Roulandus le Fartere or Roland le Petour) was a medieval flatulist who lived in twelfth-century England. He was given Hemingstone manor in Suffolk and 12 hectares (30 acres) of land in return for his services as a jester for King Henry II. Each year he was obliged to perform "Unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum" (one jump, one whistle, and one fart) for the King's court at Christmas.

Roland is listed in the thirteenth-century English Liber Feodorum (Book of Fees).

🔗 Video games

SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation is a management simulation video game, developed by Thinking Tools and published by Maxis with assistance from the Markle Foundation for MS-DOS in 1994. It is a simulation of the U.S. Healthcare system. The game was released during Congressional debates on the Clinton health care plan.

Due to the complexity of the game, SimHealth was seen as being very difficult. Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis's prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface. The game was seen as more serious than other Maxis games. Noel Fritzinger, who with Lyman Orton first conceptualized CommunityViz, says that his inspiration came from seeing SimHealth and wondering if the same concepts could be applied to real-world land-use planning.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Early computers

The IBM 7950, also known as Harvest, was a one-of-a-kind adjunct to the Stretch computer which was installed at the United States National Security Agency (NSA). Built by IBM, it was delivered in 1962 and operated until 1976, when it was decommissioned. Harvest was designed to be used for cryptanalysis.

🔗 Constructed languages

Lincos (an abbreviation of the Latin phrase lingua cosmica) is a constructed language first described in 1960 by Dr. Hans Freudenthal in his book Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1. It is a language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form, for use in interstellar radio transmissions. Freudenthal considered that such a language should be easily understood by beings not acquainted with any Earthling syntax or language. Lincos was designed to be capable of encapsulating "the whole bulk of our knowledge."

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

Project COLDFEET was a 1962 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation to extract intelligence from an abandoned Soviet Arctic drifting ice station. Due to the nature of its abandonment as the result of unstable ice, the retrieval of the operatives used the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system.