algorithms

Moving through real-life battlefields inevitably proves trickier than playing a game of Minesweeper, but Spanish researchers and army officers have converted the video game Panzer General into a simulator that can test troop maneuver algorithms based on ant colony behavior.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering have developed an algorithm that predicts the next big music superstar, and the accuracy is amazingly high: so far, it has a success rate of about 30 to 50 percent, according to lead researcher Yuval Shavitt.

The algorithm pulls data from Gnutella, which gets about 30 to 40 million queries a day and is currently the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network in the United States.

Carlos Guestrin wants to stop the spread of waterborne disease, design chairs that adjust to your posture, and cure Internet-induced information overload. This might seem a bit overambitious, but Guestrin has developed a single algorithm that can tackle them all.

The game of Go has long been a bastion of human brilliance. While computers have gotten steadily better at playing chess and poker, they've had a harder time wrapping their silicon minds around the elegant Japanese strategy game. That's why it's a big deal that a computer Go player known as MoGo beat a top-ranked human, Myungwan Kim, yesterday.

Detecting art forgeries is an inexact science—even some certified masterpieces have a cloud of doubt over their authenticity. But in recent years James Z. Wang and his colleague Jia Li have been putting Van Gogh under the microscope to create a database they hope will eventually thwart art fakers and revolutionize the detection of forgeries. Using 23 high-resolution gray scale images known to be by Van Gogh, the Penn State team broke the images down into 2.5 x 2.5 inch squares, analyzing “wavelet” based texture features and the geometric characteristics of the master’s brushstrokes.