To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at...The New York Times From ACM Opinion | March 7, 2011
At the dawn of the modern computer era, two Pentagon-financed laboratories bracketed Stanford University. At one laboratory, a small group of scientists and engineers...The New York Times From ACM News | February 15, 2011
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...The New York Times From ACM Opinion | February 7, 2011
A substantial part of all stock trading in the United States takes place in a warehouse in a nondescript business park just off the New Jersey Turnpike.The New York Times From ACM News | January 7, 2011
An I.B.M. supercomputer system named after the company’s founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr., is almost ready for a televised test: a bout of questioning on the quiz...The New York Times From ACM News | December 15, 2010
For $150 billion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration could have sent astronauts back to the Moon. The Obama administration judged that too expensive...The New York Times From ACM News | November 2, 2010
Tim Nichols measures fun. A slim, 32-year-old psychologist, he spends his days behind a one-way mirror at Microsoft’s video games research center here, watching...The New York Times From ACM News | October 25, 2010
Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on...The New York Times From ACM News | October 12, 2010
Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined—win at chess, predict the weather—and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced...The New York Times From ACM News | October 5, 2010
The pianist Robert Taub was puttering around the house one afternoon in 2004 while his teen-age daughter was practicing for a violin lesson—a Schubert sonatina...The New York Times From ACM News | August 23, 2010
The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion. The two hit it off quickly—unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism—and the boy is imitating...The New York Times From ACM News | July 12, 2010
Robots designed to provide companionship are making strides, and falling costs may help lead to their wider use. The New York Times From ACM TechNews | July 7, 2010
"Hi, thanks for coming," the medical assistant says, greeting a mother with her 5-year-old son. "Are you here for your child or yourself?" The boy, the mother replies...The New York Times From ACM News | June 25, 2010
On a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for...The New York Times From ACM News | June 14, 2010
No one doubts that social media--all the stuff on Facebook, Twitter and other online forums--provides a rich lode of user sentiment that companies ought to be able...The New York Times From ACM News | April 12, 2010
In computing, the vision always precedes the reality by a decade or more. The pattern has held true from the personal computer to the Internet, as it takes time...The New York Times From ACM News | February 1, 2010
An optimistic outlook has returned to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) 45 years after the pronouncement by computer scientist John McCarthy that a thinking...The New York Times From ACM TechNews | December 9, 2009
Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.
The company’srecommendation...The New York Times From ACM News | September 22, 2009
Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security experts to eradicate the program...The New York Times From ACM News | August 27, 2009