http://www.20q.net/
Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine 1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24 hours a day. And they did. Burgener’s genius was to turn the hard tedious work of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.
Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of guessing what you thought.
Give it a try – it’s quite uncanny !
Take a look at the following: http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/clever-ads-p1.php – some very clever ads from around the world. It just goes to show that when it’s done well, advertising really is an art form.
Here is a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) package (VOIPcheap.com) that works for regular (landline) phones. We’ve all heard about Skype & Vonage, but those are only free for other users of that system or for people who are sitting at their PC. The beauty of this package is that if you are sitting at your PC, you can ring anyone for free ! I am trying to see if there is a way to use a standard phone with an adapter for something like this. Watch this space !
For those wanting to spend some ‘downtime’ during their day, take a look at Dolphin Olympics – it will keep you amused (for a short while, anyway !).
This looks quite interesting – http://www.mp3tunes.com/ is offering 1Gb of online storage space specifically for music files. The best part of it is that it is free.
They say that you can store up to 1000 songs, but in reality 1Gb will only let you store about 300 songs in any decent quality. Once uploaded you can sync with up to 3 computers so that you can keep your online music in sync between e.g. work and home. You can either download the music whenever you want or stream it to any PC with a web connection.
I’ve just registered with them, so will report back with any findings.
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