Top TechTop Tech #116: Smaller Fusion Power, Jazz-Playing AI, Evolving Robots
Important innovations in science and technology
By Paul Worthington
Wednesday’s Top Tech:
• Smaller fusion power plant coming from MIT
• Robot Evolution
• DARPA’s Jazz-playing AI
Smaller fusion power plant coming from MIT
Advances in magnet technology enable a new design for a practical compact Tokamak fusion reactor, MIT reports.
It “might be realized in as little as a decade,” researchers there say. It will use new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils. “It changes the whole thing.”
Evolving Robots
Evolution at its most basic occurs when Nature ‘selects’ one genetic variation over another for greater survivability…
And now some scientists have put one robot in Nature’s roll, selecting from the mini-bots it makes itself.
“Roboticists have developed a “mother” robot that can build and evaluate her own “children,” and then decide which version performs best to inform the design of the next generation,” i09 reports. “Remarkably, the system doesn’t require any human intervention.” The roboticists from the University of Cambridge “have leveraged Darwinian principles to create a robotic system capable of artificial evolution.”
“In all experiments,” write the researchers in their study, “the fitness increases relative to the initial generation.”
Yeah, this bodes well…
DARPA’s Jazz-playing AI
As part of its ongoing work to improve artificial intelligence and improve how we communicate with computers, DARPA hired a jazz musician…
Tech Insider reports the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working with jazz musician and computer scientist Kelland Thomas to build an AI program “that can learn to play jazz and jam with the best of them.”
“A jazz musician improvises, given certain structures and certain constraints and certain basic guidelines that musicians are all working with,” Thomas told Tech Insider. “Our system is going to be an improvisational system. So yeah, it will be able to jam.”
