Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Hiroshi Kawano and his AI abstract artist
Piet Mondrian is famous for his pioneering pure abstract paintings that consist of blocks of colour with thick black borders. This series of works is iconic now...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Piet Mondrian and Image Representation
Piet Mondrian was a pioneer of abstract art. He was a Dutch painter, famous for his minimalist abstract art. His series of grid-based paintings consisted of rectangles...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Maria Cunitz: astronomer and algorithmic thinker
When did women first contribute to the subject we now call Computer Science: developing useful algorithms, for example? Perhaps you would guess Ada Lovelace inContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Maria Kirch: human computer of the 1600s and 1700s
Maria Kirch was a very early female human computer. Working in the late 1600s into the early 1700s, with her husband, she created astronomical tables that while...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
ELIZA: the first chatbot to fool people
Chatbots are now everywhere. You seemingly can’t touch a computer without one offering its opinion, or trying to help. This explosion is a result of the adventContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Dina St Johnston: Kickstarting a software industry
Back in its early days, after the war, women played a pivotal role in the computing industry, originally as skilled computer operators. Soon they started to beContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The logic behind syntactic sugar
Computer Scientists talk about “Syntactic Sugar” when talking about programming languages. But in what way might a program be made sweet? It is all about how necessary...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Turn Right in Tenejapa
Designing software that is inclusive for global markets is easy. All you have to do is get an AI to translate everything in the interface into multiple languages...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Peter Landin: Elegance from Logic
Celebrating LGBTQ+ Greats Thousands of programming languages have been invented in the many decades since the first. But what makes a good language? A key ideaContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A puzzle, spies … and a beheading
A puzzle about secrets Ayo wants to send her friends Guang and Elham who live together secret messages that only the person she sends the message to can read. She...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Designing an interactive prayer mat
Successful interactive systems design is often based on detecting a need that really good solutions do not yet exist for, then coming up with a realistic solution...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A sound social venture: recognising birds
Dan Stowell was a researcher at Queen Mary University of London when he founded an early version of what is now known as a Social Venture: a company created toContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Oh no! Not again…
What a mess. There’s flour all over the kitchen floor. A fortnight ago I opened the cupboard to get sugar for my hot chocolate. As I pulled out the sugar, it knocked...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Conjuring with logic: the remote control red-black mind meld
Magic tricks are just algorithms – they involve a magician following the steps of the trick precisely. But how can a magician be sure a trick will definitely work...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Adrian Stokes: Internet pioneer
We take the Internet for granted now, but it is not that long ago that it did not exist at all. Despite being disabled from birth with spina bifida, Adrian Stokes...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Herman Hollerith: from punch cards to a special company
Herman Hollerith, the son of immigrants, struggled early on at school and then later in bookkeeping at college but it didn’t stop him inventing machines that used...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A handshaking puzzle
By Przemysław Wałęga, Queen Mary University of London Logical reasoning and proof, whether done using math notation or informally in your head, is an importantContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Tanaka Atsuko: an electric dress
Wearable computing is now increasingly common whether wearing smart watches or clothes that light up. The pioneer of the latter was Japanese artist, Tanaka Atsuko...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Electric Dreams and Solid Light at the Tate Modern
Two current exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London that those interesting in technology and art may want to see are “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)