From runaway robots to "sonic bombs," we reviewed offbeat alarm clocks designed to awaken even the heaviest sleepers. Not every alarm clock is created equal. Heavy sleepers know how easy it is to snooze through the overly genteel alarms on your phone. For people who can't get out of bed without a bigger jolt, extreme alarms have popped up in recent years--from relatively simple puzzle-alarm phone apps to alarms on wheels to alarms that shake the bed. Not only are these an innovative way to get chronic snoozers out of bed, but they can be great for those who are hard of hearing, utilizing different frequencies and pitches as well as movement through vibration.

While it seems sensible that human-centred artificial intelligence (AI) means centring "human behaviour and experience," it cannot be any other way. AI, I argue, is usefully seen as a relationship between technology and humans where it appears that artifacts can perform, to a greater or lesser extent, human cognitive labour. This is evinced using examples that juxtapose technology with cognition, inter alia: abacus versus mental arithmetic; alarm clock versus knocker-upper; camera versus vision; and sweatshop versus tailor. Using novel definitions and analyses, sociotechnical relationships can be analysed into varying types of: displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. Ultimately, all AI implicates human cognition; no matter what. Obfuscation of cognition in the AI context -- from clocks to artificial neural networks -- results in distortion, in slowing critical engagement, perverting cognitive science, and indeed in limiting our ability to truly centre humans and humanity in the engineering of AI systems. To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes.

Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have reported high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks. However, it is still unclear whether the observed results arise from true reasoning or from statistical recall of the training set. Inspired by the ladder of causation (Pearl, 2009) and its three levels (associations, interventions and counterfactuals), this paper introduces RE-IMAGINE, a framework to characterize a hierarchy of reasoning ability in LLMs, alongside an automated pipeline to generate problem variations at different levels of the hierarchy. By altering problems in an intermediate symbolic representation, RE-IMAGINE generates arbitrarily many problems that are not solvable using memorization alone. Moreover, the framework is general and can work across reasoning domains, including math, code, and logic. We demonstrate our framework on four widely-used benchmarks to evaluate several families of LLMs, and observe reductions in performance when the models are queried with problem variations. These assessments indicate a degree of reliance on statistical recall for past performance, and open the door to further research targeting skills across the reasoning hierarchy.

Alarmo, the most important hardware announcement Nintendo's made in the last year, will soon be available to a lot more people. Nintendo says the motion-tracking alarm clock will be able to be purchased "in stores at participating retailers" in March, without the need for a Nintendo Switch Online subscription or a visit to a physical Nintendo store. Nintendo's alarm clock originally launched in October 2024. It combines beloved sound effects from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and Pikmin 4 with motion sensors that can track your tossing and turning. This gives the Alarmo some rudimentary sleep tracking features, and morning alarms that can get louder the more you flop around, only stopping when you actually sit up.

Amazon's latest attempt to usurp the humble bedside alarm clock is the revamped Echo Spot, equipped with a speaker and small display for a customisable Alexa clock. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. It is a full reimagining of the original Echo Spot from 2018, keeping the general half-ball shape but ditching the camera and shrinking the screen. The display is a small square in the top half of the face, immediately above a speaker grille.

We study a multi-agent decision problem in population games, where agents select from multiple available strategies and continually revise their selections based on the payoffs associated with these strategies. Unlike conventional population game formulations, we consider a scenario where agents must estimate the payoffs through local measurements and communication with their neighbors. By employing task allocation games -- dynamic extensions of conventional population games -- we examine how errors in payoff estimation by individual agents affect the convergence of the strategy revision process. Our main contribution is an analysis of how estimation errors impact the convergence of the agents' strategy profile to equilibrium. Based on the analytical results, we propose a design for a time-varying strategy revision rate to guarantee convergence. Simulation studies illustrate how the proposed method for updating the revision rate facilitates convergence to equilibrium.

The Echo Dot may be a smaller version of Amazon's standard smart speaker, but thanks to its combination of Alexa smarts and affordability, it's one of Amazon's best-selling Echo devices. The company currently has three versions in the Dot lineup: the standard Echo Dot, the Echo Dot with clock, and the Echo Dot Kids, all of which were updated in 2022. Prime Day sales are bringing all three to their lowest prices ever. The savings also extend to other Echo devices, with discounts on Echo Shows, the Echo Studio and the new Echo Pop. Here are the best Prime Day deals on Echo Dots and other Echo devices we could find. Our favorite smart speaker under $50 is now 54 percent off for Prime Day, making it just $23.

Example of embodied commonsense reasoning. A robot proactively identifies a remote on the floor and knows it is out of place without instruction. Then, the robot figures out where to place it in the scene and manipulates it there. For robots to operate effectively in the world, they should be more than explicit step-by-step instruction followers. Robots should take actions in situations when there is a clear violation of the normal circumstances and be able to infer relevant context from partial instruction.

I have a love-hate relationship with my alarm. I rely on it to ensure I get up in the morning and perform important tasks throughout the day, but when it sounds in the morning, I glare at it with the fury of a thousand suns. A good alarm clock can make the waking experience less jarring -- with cool features like ramp-up lighting or pleasing nature sounds. But it doesn't stop there; the best alarm clocks have additional features like voice assistants and interactive displays that make your alarm clock more useful than ever. Picking the best alarm clock for you can be tough, especially with so many features, price points and brands.

Commentator 2: Deep Blue! Kasparov, after the move C4, has resigned! Jennifer: I'm Jennifer Strong, and this is I Was There When--an oral history project featuring the stories of breakthroughs and watershed moments in AI and computing, as told by those who witnessed them. This episode, we meet the man on the other side of that chess board, Garry Kasparov. Garry Kasparov: It was inevitable that something described on the cover of Newsweek as the brain's last stand and in books as big as the moon landing would involve a lot of mythology. I admit that I was caught up in a lot of this hype myself.