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Visual Turing Test

The Visual Turing Test is “an operator-assisted device that produces a stochastic sequence of binary questions from a given test image”. The query engine produces a sequence of questions that have unpredictable answers given the history of questions. The test is only about vision and does not require any natural language processing. The job of the human operator is to provide the correct answer to the question or reject it as ambiguous. The query generator produces questions such that they follow a “natural story line”, similar to what humans do when they look at a picture. == History == Research in computer vision dates back to the 1960s when Seymour Papert first attempted to solve the problem. This unsuccessful attempt was referred to as the Summer Vision Project. The reason why it was not successful was because computer vision is more complicated than what people think. The complexity is in alignment with the human visual system. Roughly 50% of the human brain is devoted in processing vision, which indicates that it is a difficult problem. Later there were attempts to solve the problems with models inspired by the human brain. Perceptrons by Frank Rosenblatt, which is a form of the neural networks, was one of the first such approaches. These simple neural networks could not live up to their expectations and had certain limitations due to which they were not considered in future research. Later with the availability of the hardware and some processing power the research shifted to image processing which involves pixel-level operations, like finding edges, de-noising images or applying filters to name a few. There was some great progress in this field but the problem of vision which was to make the machines understand the images was still not being addressed. During this time the neural networks also resurfaced as it was shown that the limitations of the perceptrons can be overcome by Multi-layer perceptrons. Also in the early 1990s convolutional neural networks were born which showed great results on digit recognition but did not scale up well on harder problems. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the birth of modern computer vision. One of the reasons this happened was due to the availability of key, feature extraction and representation algorithms. Features along with the already present machine learning algorithms were used to detect, localise and segment objects in Images. While all these advancements were being made, the community felt the need to have standardised datasets and evaluation metrics so the performances can be compared. This led to the emergence of challenges like the Pascal VOC challenge and the ImageNet challenge. The availability of standard evaluation metrics and the open challenges gave directions to the research. Better algorithms were introduced for specific tasks like object detection and classification. Visual Turing Test aims to give a new direction to the computer vision research which would lead to the introduction of systems that will be one step closer to understanding images the way humans do. == Current evaluation practices == A large number of datasets have been annotated and generalised to benchmark performances of difference classes of algorithms to assess different vision tasks (e.g., object detection/recognition) on some image domain (e.g., scene images). One of the most famous datasets in computer vision is ImageNet which is used to assess the problem of object level Image classification. ImageNet is one of the largest annotated datasets available and has over one million images. The other important vision task is object detection and localisation which refers to detecting the object instance in the image and providing the bounding box coordinates around the object instance or segmenting the object. The most popular dataset for this task is the Pascal dataset. Similarly there are other datasets for specific tasks like the H3D dataset for human pose detection, Core dataset to evaluate the quality of detected object attributes such as colour, orientation, and activity. Having these standard datasets has helped the vision community to come up with well performing algorithms for all these tasks. The next logical step is to create a larger task encompassing of these smaller subtasks. Having such a task would lead to building systems that would understand images, as understanding images would inherently involve detecting objects, localising them and segmenting them. == Details == The Visual Turing Test (VTT) unlike the Turing test has a query engine system which interrogates a computer vision system in the presence of a human co-ordinator. It is a system that generates a random sequence of binary questions specific to the test image, such that the answer to any question k is unpredictable given the true answers to the previous k − 1 questions (also known as history of questions). The test happens in the presence of a human operator who serves two main purposes: removing the ambiguous questions and providing the correct answers to the unambiguous questions. Given an Image infinite possible binary questions can be asked and a lot of them are bound to be ambiguous. These questions if generated by the query engine are removed by the human moderator and instead the query engine generates another question such that the answer to it is unpredictable given the history of the questions. The aim of the Visual Turing Test is to evaluate the Image understanding of a computer system, and an important part of image understanding is the story line of the image. When humans look at an image, they do not think that there is a car at ‘x’ pixels from the left and ‘y’ pixels from the top, but instead they look at it as a story, for e.g. they might think that there is a car parked on the road, a person is exiting the car and heading towards a building. The most important elements of the story line are the objects and so to extract any story line from an image the first and the most important task is to instantiate the objects in it, and that is what the query engine does. === Query engine === The query engine is the core of the Visual Turing Test and it comprises two main parts : Vocabulary and Questions ==== Vocabulary ==== Vocabulary is a set of words that represent the elements of the images. This vocabulary when used with appropriate grammar leads to a set of questions. The grammar is defined in the next section in a way that it leads to a space of binary questions. The vocabulary V {\displaystyle {\mathcal {V}}} consist of three components: Types of Objects T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}} Type-dependent attributes of objects A ( t ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {A}}(t)} Type-dependent relationships between two objects R ( t , t ′ ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {R}}(t,t')} For Images of urban street scenes the types of objects include people, vehicle and buildings. Attributes refer to the properties of these objects, for e.g. female, child, wearing a hat or carrying something, for people and moving, parked, stopped, one tire visible or two tires visible for vehicles. Relationships between each pair of object classes can be either “ordered” or “unordered”. The unordered relationships may include talking, walking together and the ordered relationships include taller, closer to the camera, occluding, being occluded etc. Additionally all of this vocabulary is used in context of rectangular image regions w \in W which allow for the localisation of objects in the image. An extremely large number of such regions are possible and this complicates the problem, so for this test, regions at specific scales are only used which include 1/16 the size of image, 1/4 the size of image, 1/2 the size of image or larger. ==== Questions ==== The question space is composed of four types of questions: Existence questions: The aim of the existence questions is to find new objects in the image that have not been uniquely identified previously. They are of the form : Qexist = 'Is there an instance of an object of type t with attributes A partially visible in region w that was not previously instantiated?' Uniqueness questions: A uniqueness question tries to uniquely identify an object to instantiate it. Quniq = 'Is there a unique instance of an object of type t with attributes A partially visible in region w that was not previously instantiated?' The uniqueness questions along with the existence questions form the instantiation questions. As mentioned earlier instantiating objects leads to other interesting questions and eventually a story line. Uniqueness questions follow the existence questions and a positive answer to it leads to instantiation of an object. Attribute questions: An attribute question tries to find more about the object once it has been instantiated. Such questions can query about a single attribute, conjunction of two attributes or disjunction of two attributes. Qatt(ot) = {'Does object ot have attribute a?' , 'Does object
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Alliance for Secure AI

The Alliance for Secure AI is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization which educates the public about the risks of advanced artificial intelligence (AI). Politico has described the Alliance as a "bipartisan nonprofit trying to push a middle-ground approach to AI guardrails." == History == In June 2025, the Alliance was launched as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit watchdog in Washington, D.C. That same month, the organization rolled out a six-figure advertising campaign featuring bipartisan warnings about advanced AI. The ad campaign presented different messages for different political audiences. The Alliance opposed the idea of a moratorium on state AI laws as part of the July 2025 budget bill, in addition to President Donald Trump's December 2025 executive order on the issue. The group has also criticized AI companies like Meta and OpenAI for what it says are failures to prevent harms to children. In addition, the Alliance has criticized OpenAI for subpoenaing nonprofit organizations in the AI safety space. In March 2026, the Alliance launched JobLoss.ai, a website that tracks the jobs that have been eliminated with AI cited as a contributing factor. As of April 2026, JobLoss.ai has tracked more than 127,000 lost jobs. == Leadership == Brendan Steinhauser, a longtime political and communications strategist, is the founder and CEO of the Alliance. He was an early Tea Party movement organizer, and ran campaigns for multiple members of Congress, including Sen. John Cornyn, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Rep. Michael McCaul. Peyton Hornberger is the group's communications director. In July 2025, Hornberger criticized Palantir for its use of AI in a USA Today op-ed column.
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METR

Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) (MEE-tər), is a nonprofit research institute, based in Berkeley, California, that evaluates frontier AI models' capabilities to carry out long-horizon, agentic tasks that some researchers argue could pose catastrophic risks to society. METR has worked with leading AI companies to conduct pre-deployment model evaluations and contribute to system cards, including OpenAI's o3, o4-mini, GPT-4o and GPT-4.5, and Anthropic's Claude models. METR's CEO and founder is Beth Barnes, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI who left in 2022 to form ARC Evals, the evaluation division of Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. In December 2023, ARC Evals was spun off into an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit and renamed METR. == Research == A substantial amount of METR's research is focused on evaluating the capabilities of AI systems to conduct research and development of AI systems themselves, including RE-Bench, a benchmark designed to test whether AIs can "solve research engineering tasks and accelerate AI R&D". === Doubling time estimates === In March 2025, METR published a paper noting that the length of software engineering tasks that the leading AI model could complete had a doubling time of around 7 months between 2019 and 2024. In January 2026, METR released a new version of their time horizon estimates model (Time Horizon 1.1). According to the updated model, the rate of progress of AI capabilities has increased since 2023, with a post-2023 doubling time estimated at 130.8 days (4.3 months). Progress is thus estimated to be 20% more rapid. === Time horizon measurements === METR releases a "task-completion time horizon" for analysed AI models. This measures the "task duration (measured by human expert completion time) at which an AI agent is predicted to succeed with a given level of reliability." The metric is reported in two variants: the 50%-time horizon, which gives the task duration at which an AI model is estimated to succeed 50% of the time, and the 80%-time horizon, which gives the task duration at which an AI model is estimated to succeed 80% of the time. METR has published two versions of the underlying model: Time Horizon 1.0 and Time Horizon 1.1, the latter introduced in January 2026. As of 9 May 2026, the best-performing model is Claude Mythos, with a 50%-time horizon of likely at least 16 hours and an 80%-time horizon of 3 hours and 6 minutes. METR notes that "[m]easurements above 16 [hours] are unreliable with [their] current task suite". The following table provides time horizon estimates ordered by each model's release date:
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ChessMachine

The ChessMachine was a chess computer sold between 1991 and 1995 by TASC (The Advanced Software Company). It was unique at the time for incorporating both an ARM2 coprocessor for the chess engine on an ISA card which plugged into an IBM PC and a software interface running on the PC to display a chess board and control the engine. The ISA card was sold with a CPU running at either 16 MHz or 32 MHz, and 128 KB, 512 KB, or 1 MB of onboard memory for transposition tables. This made economic sense at the time of introduction because mainstream PCs were only running from 10 MHz to 25 MHz. Two engines were sold with the card: The King by Johann de Koning and Gideon by Ed Schröder. Gideon was famed for winning two World Computer Chess Championships on this hardware. The King later became the engine used in the popular Chessmaster series of chess programs. TASC later incorporated the technology into a dedicated unit, sold from 1993 to 1997. There were two models, the R30 and R40, running at 30 MHz and 40 MHz respectively, and having 512 KB and 1 MB of transposition tables, respectively. The SmartBoard, a wooden sensory board, was connected to the units, which were in tiny boxes approximately the size of chess clocks. They were only sold with The King chess engine. This was the end of the era of strong dedicated chess computers, and these two models are acknowledged as the strongest dedicated chess computers that were ever sold. At the height of its strength, the R30 attained a rating over 2350 on computer rating lists, higher than any other dedicated unit. According to the SSDF rating list, the R30 held its own against its contemporary programs running a Pentium-90 MHz and won against other dedicated units.
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Structured sparsity regularization

Structured sparsity regularization is a class of methods, and an area of research in statistical learning theory, that extend and generalize sparsity regularization learning methods. Both sparsity and structured sparsity regularization methods seek to exploit the assumption that the output variable Y {\displaystyle Y} (i.e., response, or dependent variable) to be learned can be described by a reduced number of variables in the input space X {\displaystyle X} (i.e., the domain, space of features or explanatory variables). Sparsity regularization methods focus on selecting the input variables that best describe the output. Structured sparsity regularization methods generalize and extend sparsity regularization methods, by allowing for optimal selection over structures like groups or networks of input variables in X {\displaystyle X} . Common motivation for the use of structured sparsity methods are model interpretability, high-dimensional learning (where dimensionality of X {\displaystyle X} may be higher than the number of observations n {\displaystyle n} ), and reduction of computational complexity. Moreover, structured sparsity methods allow to incorporate prior assumptions on the structure of the input variables, such as overlapping groups, non-overlapping groups, and acyclic graphs. Examples of uses of structured sparsity methods include face recognition, magnetic resonance image (MRI) processing, socio-linguistic analysis in natural language processing, and analysis of genetic expression in breast cancer. == Definition and related concepts == === Sparsity regularization === Consider the linear kernel regularized empirical risk minimization problem with a loss function V ( y i , f ( x ) ) {\displaystyle V(y_{i},f(x))} and the ℓ 0 {\displaystyle \ell _{0}} "norm" as the regularization penalty: min w ∈ R d 1 n ∑ i = 1 n V ( y i , ⟨ w , x i ⟩ ) + λ ‖ w ‖ 0 , {\displaystyle \min _{w\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}}{\frac {1}{n}}\sum _{i=1}^{n}V(y_{i},\langle w,x_{i}\rangle )+\lambda \|w\|_{0},} where x , w ∈ R d {\displaystyle x,w\in \mathbb {R^{d}} } , and ‖ w ‖ 0 {\displaystyle \|w\|_{0}} denotes the ℓ 0 {\displaystyle \ell _{0}} "norm", defined as the number of nonzero entries of the vector w {\displaystyle w} . f ( x ) = ⟨ w , x i ⟩ {\displaystyle f(x)=\langle w,x_{i}\rangle } is said to be sparse if ‖ w ‖ 0 = s < d {\displaystyle \|w\|_{0}=s 0 {\displaystyle w_{j}>0} . However, as in this case groups may overlap, we take the intersection of the complements of those groups that are not set to zero. This intersection of complements selection criteria implies the modeling choice that we allow some coefficients within a particular group g {\displaystyle g} to be set to zero, while others within the same group g {\displaystyle g} may remain positive. In other words, coefficients within a group may differ depending on the several group memberships that each variable within the group may have. ==== Union of groups: latent group Lasso ==== A different approach is to consider union of groups for variable selection. This approach captures the modeling situation where variables can be selected as long as they belong at least to one group with positive coefficients. This modeling perspective implies that we want to preserve group structure. The formulation of the union of groups approach is also referred to as latent group Lasso, and requires to modify the group ℓ 2 {\displaystyle \ell _{2}} norm considered above and introduce the following regularizer R ( w ) = i n f { ∑ g ‖ w g ‖ g : w = ∑ g = 1 G w ¯ g } {\displaystyle R(w)=inf\left\{\sum _{g}\|w_{g}\|_{g}:w=\sum _{g=1}^{G}{\bar {w}}_{g}\right\}} where w ∈ R d {\displaystyle w\in {\mathbb {R^{d}} }} , w g ∈ G g {\displaystyle w_{g}\in G_{g}} is the vector of coefficients of group g, and w ¯ g ∈ R d {\displaystyle {\bar {w}}_{g}\in {\mathbb {R^{d}} }} is a vector with coefficients w g j {\displaystyle w_{g}^{j}} for all variables j {
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Resilience (mathematics)

In mathematical modeling, resilience refers to the ability of a dynamical system to recover from perturbations and return to its original stable steady state. It is a measure of the stability and robustness of a system in the face of changes or disturbances. If a system is not resilient enough, it is more susceptible to perturbations and can more easily undergo a critical transition. A common analogy used to explain the concept of resilience of an equilibrium is one of a ball in a valley. A resilient steady state corresponds to a ball in a deep valley, so any push or perturbation will very quickly lead the ball to return to the resting point where it started. On the other hand, a less resilient steady state corresponds to a ball in a shallow valley, so the ball will take a much longer time to return to the equilibrium after a perturbation. The concept of resilience is particularly useful in systems that exhibit tipping points, whose study has a long history that can be traced back to catastrophe theory. While this theory was initially overhyped and fell out of favor, its mathematical foundation remains strong and is now recognized as relevant to many different systems. == History == In 1973, Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling proposed a definition of resilience in the context of ecological systems. According to Holling, resilience is "a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables". Holling distinguished two types of resilience: engineering resilience and ecological resilience. Engineering resilience refers to the ability of a system to return to its original state after a disturbance, such as a bridge that can be repaired after an earthquake. Ecological resilience, on the other hand, refers to the ability of a system to maintain its identity and function despite a disturbance, such as a forest that can regenerate after a wildfire while maintaining its biodiversity and ecosystem services. With time, the once well-defined and unambiguous concept of resilience has experienced a gradual erosion of its clarity, becoming more vague and closer to an umbrella term than a specific concrete measure. == Definition == Mathematically, resilience can be approximated by the inverse of the return time to an equilibrium given by resilience ≡ − Re ( λ 1 ( A ) ) {\displaystyle {\text{resilience}}\equiv -{\text{Re}}(\lambda _{1}({\textbf {A}}))} where λ 1 {\textstyle \lambda _{1}} is the maximum eigenvalue of matrix A {\textstyle {\textbf {A}}} . The largest this value is, the faster a system returns to the original stable steady state, or in other words, the faster the perturbations decay. == Applications and examples == In ecology, resilience might refer to the ability of the ecosystem to recover from disturbances such as fires, droughts, or the introduction of invasive species. A resilient ecosystem would be one that is able to adapt to these changes and continue functioning, while a less resilient ecosystem might experience irreversible damage or collapse. The exact definition of resilience has remained vague for practical matters, which has led to a slow and proper application of its insights for management of ecosystems. In epidemiology, resilience may refer to the ability of a healthy community to recover from the introduction of infected individuals. That is, a resilient system is more likely to remain at the disease-free equilibrium after the invasion of a new infection. Some stable systems exhibit critical slowing down where, as they approach a basic reproduction number of 1, their resilience decreases, hence taking a longer time to return to the disease-free steady state. Resilience is an important concept in the study of complex systems, where there are many interacting components that can affect each other in unpredictable ways. Mathematical models can be used to explore the resilience of such systems and to identify strategies for improving their resilience in the face of environmental or other changes. For example, when modelling networks it is often important to be able to quantify network resilience, or network robustness, to the loss of nodes. Scale-free networks are particularly resilient since most of their nodes have few links. This means that if some nodes are randomly removed, it is more likely that the nodes with fewer connections are taken out, thus preserving the key properties of the network.
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International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools

The International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools was founded in 1992 and is published by World Scientific. It covers research on artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including new architectures, languages and algorithms. Topics include AI in Bioinformatics, Cognitive Informatics, Knowledge-Based/Expert Systems and Object-Oriented Programming for AI. == Abstracting and indexing == The journal is abstracted and indexed in: Inspec Science Citation Index Expanded ISI Alerting Services CompuMath Citation Index Current Contents/Engineering, Computing, and Technology
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Johns Hopkins Beast

The Johns Hopkins Beast was a mobile automaton, an early pre-robot, built in the 1960s at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The machine had a rudimentary intelligence and the ability to survive on its own. As it wandered through the white halls of the laboratory, it would seek black wall outlets. When it found one it would plug in and recharge. The robot was cybernetic. It did not use a computer. Its control circuitry consisted of dozens of transistors controlling analog voltages. It used photocell optics and sonar to navigate. The 2N404 transistors were used to create NOR logic gates that implemented the Boolean logic to tell it what to do when a specific sensor was activated. The 2N404 transistors were also used to create timing gates to tell it how long to do something. 2N1040 Power transistors were used to control the power to the motion treads, the boom, and the charging mechanism. The original sensors in Mod I were physical touch only. The wall socket was detected by physical switches on the arm that followed the wall. Once detected, two electrical prongs were extended until they entered the wall socket and made the electrical connection to charge the vehicle. The stairway, doors, and pipes on the hall wall were also detected by physical switches and recognized by appropriate logic. The sonar guidance system was developed for Mod I and improved for Mod II. It used two ultrasonic transducers to determine distance, location within the halls, and obstructions in its path. This provided "The Beast" with bat-like guidance. At this point, it could detect obstructions in the hallway, such as people. Once an obstruction was detected, the Beast would slow down and then decide whether to stop or divert around the obstruction. It could also ultrasonically recognize the stairway and doorways to take appropriate action. An optical guidance system was added to Mod II. This provided, among other capabilities, the ability to optically identify the black wall sockets that contrasted with the white wall. The Hopkins Beast Autonomous Robot Mod II link below was written by Dr. Ronald McConnell, at that time a co-op student and one of the designers for Mod II.
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Wargame (hacking)

In hacking, a wargame (or war game) is a cyber-security challenge and mind sport in which the competitors must exploit or defend a vulnerability in a system or application, and/or gain or prevent access to a computer system. A wargame usually involves a capture the flag logic, based on pentesting, semantic URL attacks, knowledge-based authentication, password cracking, reverse engineering of software (often JavaScript, C and assembly language), code injection, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, exploits, IP address spoofing, forensics, and other hacking techniques. == Wargames for preparedness == Wargames are also used as a method of cyberwarfare preparedness. The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) organizes an annual event, Locked Shields, which is an international live-fire cyber exercise. The exercise challenges cyber security experts through real-time attacks in fictional scenarios and is used to develop skills in national IT defense strategies. == Additional applications == Wargames can be used to teach the basics of web attacks and web security, giving participants a better understanding of how attackers exploit security vulnerabilities. Wargames are also used as a way to "stress test" an organization's response plan and serve as a drill to identify gaps in cyber disaster preparedness.
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UMBEL

UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a logically organized knowledge graph of 34,000 concepts and entity types that can be used in information science for relating information from disparate sources to one another. It was retired at the end of 2019. UMBEL was first released in July 2008. Version 1.00 was released in February 2011. Its current release is version 1.50. The grounding of this information occurs by common reference to the permanent URIs for the UMBEL concepts; the connections within the UMBEL upper ontology enable concepts from sources at different levels of abstraction or specificity to be logically related. Since UMBEL is an open-source extract of the OpenCyc knowledge base, it can also take advantage of the reasoning capabilities within Cyc. UMBEL has two means to promote the semantic interoperability of information:. It is: An ontology of about 35,000 reference concepts, designed to provide common mapping points for relating different ontologies or schema to one another, and A vocabulary for aiding that ontology mapping, including expressions of likelihood relationships distinct from exact identity or equivalence. This vocabulary is also designed for interoperable domain ontologies. UMBEL is written in the Semantic Web languages of SKOS and OWL 2. It is a class structure used in Linked Data, along with OpenCyc, YAGO, and the DBpedia ontology. Besides data integration, UMBEL has been used to aid concept search, concept definitions, query ranking, ontology integration, and ontology consistency checking. It has also been used to build large ontologies and for online question answering systems. Including OpenCyc, UMBEL has about 65,000 formal mappings to DBpedia, PROTON, GeoNames, and schema.org, and provides linkages to more than 2 million Wikipedia pages (English version). All of its reference concepts and mappings are organized under a hierarchy of 31 different "super types", which are mostly disjoint from one another. Each of these "super types" has its own typology of entity classes to provide flexible tie-ins for external content. 90% of UMBEL is contained in these entity classes.
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Dataism

Dataism is a term that has been used to describe the mindset or philosophy created by the emerging significance of big data. It was first used by David Brooks in The New York Times in 2013. The term has been expanded to describe what historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow from 2015, calls an emerging ideology or even a new form of religion, in which "information flow" is the "supreme value". In art, the term was used by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi to refer to an artist movement that uses data as its primary source of inspiration. == History == "If you asked me to describe the rising philosophy of the day, I'd say it is Data-ism", wrote David Brooks in The New York Times in February 2013. Brooks argued that in a world of increasing complexity, relying on data could reduce cognitive biases and "illuminate patterns of behavior we haven't yet noticed". In 2015, Steve Lohr's book Data-ism looked at how Big Data is transforming society, using the term to describe the Big Data revolution. In his 2016 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari argues that all competing political or social structures can be seen as data processing systems: "Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing" and "we may interpret the entire human species as a single data processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips." According to Harari, a Dataist should want to "maximise dataflow by connecting to more and more media". Harari predicts that the logical conclusion of this process is that, eventually, humans will give algorithms the authority to make the most important decisions in their lives, such as whom to marry and which career to pursue. Harari argues that Aaron Swartz could be called the "first martyr" of Dataism. In 2022, Albert-László Barabási coined the term "Dataism" to define an artistic movement that positions data as the central means of understanding nature, society, technology, and human essence. This movement underscores the necessity for art to integrate with data to stay relevant in contemporary society. Dataism responds to the intricacy and interconnectedness of modern social, economic, and technological realms, which exceed individual understanding. Advocating for the use of methodologies from various fields like science, business, and politics in art, Dataism sees this fusion as essential for art to retain its significance and influence. == Criticism == Commenting on Harari's characterisation of Dataism, security analyst Daniel Miessler believes that Dataism does not present the challenge to the ideology of liberal humanism that Harari claims, because humans will simultaneously be able to believe in their own importance and that of data. Harari himself raises some criticisms, such as the problem of consciousness, which Dataism is unlikely to illuminate. Humans may also find out that organisms are not algorithms, he suggests. Dataism implies that all data is public, even personal data, to make the system work as a whole, which is a factor that's already showing resistance today. Other analysts, such as Terry Ortleib, have looked at the extent to which Dataism poses a dystopian threat to humanity. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed how political leaders manipulated Facebook's users' data to build specific psychological profiles that went on to manipulate the network. A team of data analysts reproduced the AI technology developed by Cambridge Analytica around Facebook's data and was able to define the following rules: 10 likes enables a machine to know a person like a coworker, 70 likes like a friend would, 150 likes like a parent would, 300 likes like a lover would, and beyond it may be possible to know a people better than they know themselves.
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Tree (abstract data type)

In computer science, a tree is a widely used abstract data type that represents a hierarchical tree structure with a set of connected nodes. Each node in the tree can be connected to many children (depending on the type of tree), but must be connected to exactly one parent, except for the root node, which has no parent (i.e., the root node as the top-most node in the tree hierarchy). These constraints mean there are no cycles or "loops" (no node can be its own ancestor), and also that each child can be treated like the root node of its own subtree, making recursion a useful technique for tree traversal. In contrast to linear data structures, many trees cannot be represented by relationships between neighboring nodes (parent and children nodes of a node under consideration, if they exist) in a single straight line (called edge or link between two adjacent nodes). Binary trees are a commonly used type, which constrain the number of children for each parent to at most two. When the order of the children is specified, this data structure corresponds to an ordered tree in graph theory. A value or pointer to other data may be associated with every node in the tree, or sometimes only with the leaf nodes, which have no children nodes. The abstract data type (ADT) can be represented in a number of ways, including a list of parents with pointers to children, a list of children with pointers to parents, or a list of nodes and a separate list of parent-child relations (a specific type of adjacency list). Representations might also be more complicated, for example using indexes or ancestor lists for performance. Trees as used in computing are similar to but can be different from mathematical constructs of trees in graph theory, trees in set theory, and trees in descriptive set theory. == Terminology == A node is a structure which may contain data and connections to other nodes, sometimes called edges or links. Each node in a tree has zero or more child nodes, which are below it in the tree (by convention, trees are drawn with descendants going downwards). A node that has a child is called the child's parent node (or superior). All nodes have exactly one parent, except the topmost root node, which has none. A node might have many ancestor nodes, such as the parent's parent. Child nodes with the same parent are sibling nodes. Typically siblings have an order, with the first one conventionally drawn on the left. Some definitions allow a tree to have no nodes at all, in which case it is called empty. An internal node (also known as an inner node, inode for short, or branch node) is any node of a tree that has child nodes. Similarly, an external node (also known as an outer node, leaf node, or terminal node) is any node that does not have child nodes. The height of a node is the length of the longest downward path to a leaf from that node. The height of the root is the height of the tree. The depth of a node is the length of the path to its root (i.e., its root path). Thus the root node has depth zero, leaf nodes have height zero, and a tree with only a single node (hence both a root and leaf) has depth and height zero. Conventionally, an empty tree (tree with no nodes, if such are allowed) has height −1. Each non-root node can be treated as the root node of its own subtree, which includes that node and all its descendants. Other terms used with trees: Neighbor Parent or child. Ancestor A node reachable by repeated proceeding from child to parent. Descendant A node reachable by repeated proceeding from parent to child. Also known as subchild. Degree For a given node, its number of children. A leaf, by definition, has degree zero. Degree of tree The degree of a tree is the maximum degree of a node in the tree. Distance The number of edges along the shortest path between two nodes. Level The level of a node is the number of edges along the unique path between it and the root node. This is the same as depth. Width The number of nodes in a level. Breadth The number of leaves. Complete tree A tree with every level filled, except the last. Forest A set of one or more disjoint trees. Ordered tree A rooted tree in which an ordering is specified for the children of each vertex. Size of a tree Number of nodes in the tree. == Common operations == Enumerating all the items Enumerating a section of a tree Searching for an item Adding a new item at a certain position on the tree Deleting an item Pruning: Removing a whole section of a tree Grafting: Adding a whole section to a tree Finding the root for any node Finding the lowest common ancestor of two nodes === Traversal and search methods === Stepping through the items of a tree, by means of the connections between parents and children, is called walking the tree, and the action is a walk of the tree. Often, an operation might be performed when a pointer arrives at a particular node. A walk in which each parent node is traversed before its children is called a pre-order walk; a walk in which the children are traversed before their respective parents are traversed is called a post-order walk; a walk in which a node's left subtree, then the node itself, and finally its right subtree are traversed is called an in-order traversal. (This last scenario, referring to exactly two subtrees, a left subtree and a right subtree, assumes specifically a binary tree.) A level-order walk effectively performs a breadth-first search over the entirety of a tree; nodes are traversed level by level, where the root node is visited first, followed by its direct child nodes and their siblings, followed by its grandchild nodes and their siblings, etc., until all nodes in the tree have been traversed. == Representations == There are many different ways to represent trees. In working memory, nodes are typically dynamically allocated records with pointers to their children, their parents, or both, as well as any associated data. If of a fixed size, the nodes might be stored in a list. Nodes and relationships between nodes might be stored in a separate special type of adjacency list. In relational databases, nodes are typically represented as table rows, with indexed row IDs facilitating pointers between parents and children. Nodes can also be stored as items in an array, with relationships between them determined by their positions in the array (as in a binary heap). A binary tree can be implemented as a list of lists: the head of a list (the value of the first term) is the left child (subtree), while the tail (the list of second and subsequent terms) is the right child (subtree). This can be modified to allow values as well, as in Lisp S-expressions, where the head (value of first term) is the value of the node, the head of the tail (value of second term) is the left child, and the tail of the tail (list of third and subsequent terms) is the right child. Ordered trees can be naturally encoded by finite sequences, for example with natural numbers. == Examples of trees and non-trees == == Type theory == As an abstract data type, the abstract tree type T with values of some type E is defined, using the abstract forest type F (list of trees), by the functions: value: T → E children: T → F nil: () → F node: E × F → T with the axioms: value(node(e, f)) = e children(node(e, f)) = f In terms of type theory, a tree is an inductive type defined by the constructors nil (empty forest) and node (tree with root node with given value and children). == Mathematical terminology == Viewed as a whole, a tree data structure is an ordered tree, generally with values attached to each node. Concretely, it is (if required to be non-empty): A rooted tree with the "away from root" direction (a more narrow term is an "arborescence"), meaning: A directed graph, whose underlying undirected graph is a tree (any two vertices are connected by exactly one simple path), with a distinguished root (one vertex is designated as the root), which determines the direction on the edges (arrows point away from the root; given an edge, the node that the edge points from is called the parent and the node that the edge points to is called the child), together with: an ordering on the child nodes of a given node, and a value (of some data type) at each node. Often trees have a fixed (more properly, bounded) branching factor (outdegree), particularly always having two child nodes (possibly empty, hence at most two non-empty child nodes), hence a "binary tree". Allowing empty trees makes some definitions simpler, some more complicated: a rooted tree must be non-empty, hence if empty trees are allowed the above definition instead becomes "an empty tree or a rooted tree such that ...". On the other hand, empty trees simplify defining fixed branching factor: with empty trees allowed, a binary tree is a tree such that every node has exactly two children, each of which is a tree (possibly empty). == Applications == Trees are commonly used to represent or manipulate hierarchical data in ap
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AirPair

AirPair is a service and eponymous company that connects people who need help with programming issues (usually, programmers at small technology companies or at finance companies that use technology products) and people who can help them. Unlike services such as oDesk and Elance, AirPair is not a service for outsourcing programming tasks, but rather a service that facilitates one-off knowledge transfers from people with highly specialized knowledge of particular technology stacks or programming issues to people who are in need of specialized help. == History == AirPair launched in March 2013, with founder Jonathon Kresner, who hails from Australia, working full-time, and it soon hired three other part-time developers to work alongside him. Kresner had previously founded two other startups: Preparty, a social invitation and event-booking service based in Australia, and ClimbFind, an online rock-climbing community that reached a million users. Kresner was inspired to work on AirPair because he saw the need for outside expert assistance with programming issues arise regularly at these startups. In November 2013, founder Kresner describes the company's initial success at bootstrapping itself to "Ramen profitability" in a blog post. In December 2013, AirPair was accepted into the Winter 2014 Y Combinator batch. In March 2014, AirPair announced it would launch partnerships with Stripe, Twilio, and other companies that had their own application programming interfaces, allowing developers having trouble with the APIs to seek help over AirPair from experts on the APIs. AirPair presented at the Y Combinator Winter 2014 Demo Day on March 25, 2014, and successfully raised over $1 million within the next 48 hours. == Reception == A review of AirPair by Will Lam stressed that because payment was based on time rather than results, it was important to use it for clearly thought-out questions where one had high confidence that the session would help. Dennis Beatty, who met AirPair founder Jonathon Kresner in March 2014, wrote in April 2014 a glowing review of AirPair's vision of connecting people and its business success. AirPair has been compared with other peer-to-peer coding help sites such as Codementor and HackHands.
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Computer game bot Turing test

The computer game bot Turing test is a variant of the Turing test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world must distinguish between other humans and video game bots, both interacting with the same virtual world. This variant was first proposed in 2008 by Associate Professor Philip Hingston of Edith Cowan University, and implemented through a tournament called the 2K BotPrize. == History == The computer game bot Turing test was proposed to advance the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational intelligence with respect to video games. It was considered that a poorly implemented bot implied a subpar game, so a bot that would be capable of passing this test, and therefore might be indistinguishable from a human player, would directly improve the quality of a game. It also served to debunk a flawed notion that "game AI is a solved problem." Emphasis is placed on a game bot that interacts with other players in a multiplayer environment. Unlike a bot that simply needs to make optimal human-like decisions to play or beat a game, this bot must make the same decisions while also convincing another in-game player of its human-likeness. == Implementation == The computer game bot Turing test was designed to test a bot's ability to interact with a game environment in comparison with a human player; simply 'winning' was insufficient. This evolved into a contest with a few important goals in mind: There are three participants: a human player, a computer-game bot, and a judge. The bot needs to appear more human-like than the human player. Judge scores are not bipolar — both human and bot can be scored anywhere on a scale from 1 to 5 (1=not humanlike, 5=human). All three participants are to be indistinguishable in the arena, with the exception of a randomly generated name tag, so as to reduce the chance of random elements such as name or appearance influencing the judges. Chat is disabled throughout the match. Bots were not given omniscient powers as they may be in other games. Bots must react only to the data that might be reasonably available to a human player. Human participants were of a moderate skill range, with no participant either ignorant to the game or capable of playing at a professional level. In 2008, the first 2K BotPrize tournament took place. The contest was held with the game Unreal Tournament 2004 as the platform. Contestants created their bots in advance using the GameBots interface. GameBots had some modifications made so as to adhere to the above conditions, such as removing data about vantage points or weapon damage that unfairly informed the bots of relevant strengths/weaknesses that a human would otherwise need to learn. == Tournament == The first BotPrize Tournament was held on 17 December 2008, as part of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in Australia. Each competing team was given time to set up and adjust their bots to the modified game client, although no coding changes were allowed at that point. The tournament was run in rounds, each a 10-minute death match. Judges were the last to join the server and every judge observed every player and every bot exactly once, although the pairing of players and bots did change. When the tournament ended, no bot was rated as more human than any player. In subsequent tournaments, run during 2009–2011, bots achieved scores that were increasingly human-like, but no contestant had won the BotPrize in any of these contests. In 2012, the 2K BotPrize was held once again, and two teams programmed bots that achieved scores greater than those of human players. == Successful bots == To date, there have been two successfully programmed bots that passed the computer game bot Turing test: UT^2, a team from the University of Texas at Austin, emphasized a bot that adjusted its behaviour based on previously observed human behaviour and neuroevolution. The team has made their bot available, although a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 is required. Mihai Polceanu, a doctoral student from Romania, focused on creating a bot that would mimic opponent reactions, in a sense 'borrowing' the human-like nature of the opponent. These victors succeeded in the year 2012, Alan Turing's centenary year. == Aftermath == The outcome of a bot that appears more human-like than a human player is possibly overstated, since in the tournament in which the bots succeeded, the average 'humanness' rating of the human players was only 41.4%. This showcases some limits of this Turing test, since the results demonstrate that human behaviour is more complicated and quantitative than was accounted for. In light of this, the BotPrize competition organizers will increase the difficulty in upcoming years with new challenges, forcing competitors to improve their bots. It is also believed that methods and techniques developed for the computer game bot Turing test will be useful in fields other than video games, such as virtual training environments and in improving Human–robot interaction. == Contrasts to the Turing test == The computer game bot Turing test differs from the traditional or generic Turing test in a number of ways: Unlike the traditional Turing test, for example the Chatterbot-style contest held annually by the Loebner Prize competition, the humans who played against the Computer Game Bots are not trying to convince judges they are the human; rather, they want to win the game (i.e., by achieving the highest kill score). Judges are not restricted to awarding only one participant in a match as the 'human' and the other as the 'non-human.' This emphasizes more qualitative rather than polarized findings. With regards to a successful video game bot, this is not to be confused with a claim that the bot is 'intelligent,' whereas a machine that 'passed' the Turing test would arguably have some evidence for its Chatterbot's 'intelligence.' The game Unreal Tournament 2004 was chosen for its commercial availability and its interface for creating bots, GameBots. This limitation on medium is a sharp contrast to the Turing test, which emphasizes a conversation, where possible questions are vastly more numerous than the set of possible actions available in any specific video game. The available information to the participants, humans and bots, is not equal. Humans interact through vision and sound, whereas bots interact with data and events. The judges cannot introduce new events (e.g., a lava pit) to aid in differentiating between human and bot, whereas in a Chatterbot designed system, judges may theoretically ask any question in any manner. The two participants and the judge take part in a three-way interaction, unlike, for example, the paired two-way interaction of the Loebner Prize Contest.
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Inbenta

Inbenta is an AI company that originated in Barcelona, Spain, in 2005. Inbenta is currently headquartered in Allen, Texas, with additional offices in Spain, São Paulo, Brazil, Toulouse, France, and Tokyo, Japan. Inbenta provides natural language processing and semantic search through artificial intelligence. == History == Inbenta raised $12 Million in their Series B funding round to extend the reach of their artificial intelligence for business solutions. In 2023 Inbenta's new chief executive officer Melissa Solis moved Inbenta's headquarters to One Bethany West in Allen, Texas from Foster City, California. == Controversy == On 23 June 2018, Ticketmaster UK identified malicious software on a customer support product hosted by Inbenta Technologies, compromising personal data and payment details for thousands of Ticketmaster customers. Three days later, Inbenta's CEO Issued a message about the incident to convey the full scope of the breach. Also on its FAQ section, Inbenta claimed that "After a careful analysis of all clues and snapshots from our systems, the technical team at Inbenta discovered that the script had been implemented on the payment page. We were unaware of this, and would have advised against doing so had we known, as it presents a point of vulnerability". On November 13, 2020, the Information Commissioner's Office fined Ticketmaster UK Limited £1.25 million for failing to protect customers' payment details. According to the ICO, "It was because of Ticketmaster's business decision to include the [Inbenta] chat bot on its payment page that the chat bot was able to unlawfully process the personal data of customers."
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