In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. "There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits," he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. "With nine digits especially, it's very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use--you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn't matter what I use--it seems very difficult to get." Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers. I would read him a series of digits at a rate of about one per second--"Seven ... four ... zero ... one ... one ... nine ..." and so on--and Steve would try to remember them all and repeat them back to me once I was done. One goal was simply to see how much Steve could improve with practice. Now, after four of the hour-long sessions, he could reliably recall seven-digit strings--the length of a local phone number--and he usually got the eight-digit strings right, but nine digits was hit or miss, and he had never managed to remember a 10-digit string at all. And at this point, given his frustrating experience over the first few sessions, he was pretty sure that he wasn't going to get any better. What Steve didn't know--but I did--was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right. Decades of research had shown that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory, which is the type of memory the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time. If a friend gives you his address, it is your short-term memory that holds on to it just long enough to write it down. Or if you're multiplying a couple of two-digit numbers in your head, your short-term memory is where you keep track of all the intermediate pieces: "Let's see: 14 times 27 ... First, 4 times 7 is 28, so keep the 8 and carry the 2, then 4 times 2 is 8 ..." and so on.

Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says the decentralization and advancements of 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology are the future of warfare, and may enable the rise of modernized private robotic armies. Wilkerson's statements were made during an exclusive interview with Rick Wiles of TRUNEWS on Thursday, while discussing the possibility that billionaires like George Soros could bring rise to a modern version of the East India Company. "As were developing these new technologies particularly 3-D printing, nanotechnology, nano engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics, as were developing these now, we are reducing enormously the costs for some of the most sophisticated weapons to be in the world," Wilkerson said. These advancements, Wilkerson noted, are already being placed into conceptual practice. "With 3-D printing we have recently produced, in less than 16 hours, a drone that underwater went to the coast of France and back to the Eastern coast of the United States, underwater. You produce this drone with 3-D printing almost overnight, you hang some smart weapons on it like submarine killing torpedoes or smart mines, you take it out there and you kill a 4 billion Ohio class submarine. This is the future and if you make these kinds of weapons available to almost anyone in the world, at a reasonable price, I mean you can make this drone for about 100,000, its going to kill a 4 billion submarine, thats quite a price exchange there."

As the world celebrated Earth Day on Friday, a team led by an Indian-origin researcher has found a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to protect the Earth's endangered animals and forests by outwitting poachers with technology. With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Army Research Office, researchers are using AI and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and Malaysia. "This research is a step in demonstrating that AI can have a really significant positive impact on society and allow us to assist humanity in solving some of the major challenges we face," said Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active and habitual," said Fei Fang, PhD candidate from the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Tambe who is also director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.

If you have a box of beloved video games that you haven't played for years stashed beneath your bed, now could be the time to cash them in. Retro gaming titles from Ice Climber to Pokemon are fetching hundreds as nostalgia trumps common sense - and now there's a calculator that lets you guess how much your favourites could be worth. The rise in demand for old pixelated titles flies in the face of hi-tech advances in gaming, with PlayStation launching a VR headset for more realistic experiences soon. Click on the module below to guess the value of retro games. Mobile users who can't see the game can visit MrGamez's website Retro gaming titles from Ice Climber to Pokemon are fetching hundreds of pounds as nostalgia trumps common sense - and now there's a calculator that lets you guess how much your favourites could be worth. Favourite platform games, beat'em ups and fantasy installments have appreciated rapidly in recent years, with ice Climber, first sold in 1985 for Nintendo's NES, for a price of 29.99 ( 43) selling on one occasion for a whopping 1,818 ( 2,617) This was for a factory-sealed copy, but if you own one still in its box, it could fetch almost 90 ( 130).

If you've watched "Game of Thrones," you've probably come to realize that the show and real life have at least one hard truth in common: people die and you don't always know when to expect it. And, like many a pondering soul, you may also wonder when that judgment day will come. Now, students at the Technische Universität in Munich, Germany, have developed an application that may help you answer that question (at least as far as John Snow and company are involved). The students reportedly developed a computer algorithm in a programming course that mines the internet -- the place where people spend extensive time mulling over things like how tall Tyrion Lannister is, or whether he will die an untimely death while sipping on mulled wine -- and recycles that information in order to predict who will get the axe, or sword, next. "We tested 24 characteristics - for example, how many relatives of the character are already dead," Tatyana Goldberg, one of roughly 40 researchers who worked on the project, said.

We've long seen robots replacing well-paying manufacturing jobs, resulting in huge social and economic fallout. But what happens when AI evolves to the point where it displaces roles -- like recruiting -- once held by knowledge workers? I'm no futurist, so I really can't say what will happen. But I do know that the staid world of recruiting is ripe for a little AI. I've covered this topic in a previous post, when I discussed how emerging technologies are already eliminating huge waste in the hiring process.

As the world celebrated Earth Day on Friday, a team led by an Indian-origin researcher has found a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to protect the Earth's endangered animals and forests by outwitting poachers with technology. With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Army Research Office, researchers are using AI and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and Malaysia. "This research is a step in demonstrating that AI can have a really significant positive impact on society and allow us to assist humanity in solving some of the major challenges we face," said Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active and habitual," said Fei Fang, PhD candidate from the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Tambe who is also director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Brands need to be "waking up" up to the potential of bots and be aware of sensors, the cloud and machine learning as we approach the "fourth industrial revolution", Microsoft's UK chief marketing officer told The Drum. Paul Davies, who spoke on the Advertising Week Europe panel dubbed'How smart cities will transform advertising', explained how Microsoft is already looking to an automated, connected future when designing and collaborating on innovations. "We have an app experience for people who are visually impaired, which is powered through bluetooth sensors to help them walk around all the way, through an electric car sharing company called Autolib," he said. "Their mission is to reduce the number of cars in Paris by 25,000 in the next seven years...using data and the cloud to empower that." Davies believes the world is "on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution".

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing. "BCI was a technology that was geared specifically for medical purposes, and in order to expand this to the general public, we actually have to embrace these consumer brand devices and push them to the limit."

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing.