On a table in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has connected an array of breadboards via a web of brightly colored wires. The setup looks like a DIY home electronics project, but this unassuming assembly can learn to sort data like a machine-learning model. While its current capability is rudimentary, the hope is that, if it works, it could help spark a far more energy-efficient approach to building faster AI. Have you ever thought about the fact that, despite the myriad differences between languages, virtually everyone uses the same QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have more or fewer than 26 letters in their alphabet--or no "alphabet" at all, like Chinese, which has tens of thousands of characters.

Last week, MIT Technology Review published an excerpt from a new book, The Chinese Computer, which talks about how this problem was solved in China. After generations of work to sort Chinese characters, modify computer parts, and create keyboard apps that automatically predict the next character, it is finally possible for any Chinese speaker to use a QWERTY keyboard. It ends with a bigger question about what this all means: Why is it necessary for speakers of non-Latin languages to adapt modern technologies for their uses, and what do their efforts contribute to computing technologies? I talked to the book's author, Tom Mullaney, a professor of history at Stanford University. We ended up geeking out over keyboards, computers, the English-centric design that underlies everything about computing, and even how keyboards affect emerging technologies like virtual reality.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has enhanced the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various reasoning tasks. However, CoT still falls short in dealing with complex math word problems, as it usually suffers from three pitfalls: semantic misunderstanding errors, calculation errors and step-missing errors. Prior studies involve addressing the calculation errors and step-missing errors, but neglect the semantic misunderstanding errors, which is the major factor limiting the LLMs' performance. To this end, we propose a simple-yet-effective method, namely Deeply Understanding the Problems (DUP), to improve the LLMs' math problem-solving ability by addressing semantic misunderstanding errors. The core of our method is to encourage the LLMs to deeply understand the problems and extract the key problem-solving information used for better reasoning. Extensive experiments on 10 diverse reasoning benchmarks show that our DUP method consistently outperforms the other counterparts by a large margin. More encouragingly, DUP achieves a new SOTA result on the GSM8K benchmark, with an accuracy of 97.1% under zero-shot setting.

It has been lightly edited. When a young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard in 2013 and rattled off an enigmatic string of letters and numbers, his forty-four keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as "input" or shuru. Shuru is the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad. The young man, Huang Zhenyu, was one of around 60 contestants in the 2013 National Chinese Characters Typing Competition. But Zhenyu's prizewinning performance wasn't solely noteworthy for his impressive typing speed--one of the fastest ever recorded.

These 44 keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as "input" or shuru: the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad. Across all computational and digital media, Chinese text entry relies on software programs known as "input method editors"--better known as "IMEs" or simply "input methods" (shurufa). IMEs are a form of "middleware," so named because they operate in between the hardware of the user's device and the software of its program or application. Whether a person is composing a Chinese document in Microsoft Word, searching the web, sending text messages, or otherwise, an IME is always at work, intercepting all of the user's keystrokes and trying to figure out which Chinese characters the user wants to produce. Input, simply put, is the way ymiw2klt4pwyy … becomes a string of Chinese characters.

The whole idea of QWERTY is about spreading the most often used characters over the keyboard space in order to avoid malfunctions. This means this layout is not optimized in terms of typing time and yet it is still widely used nowadays by convention. However, the issues it addressed back then are no longer and the non-optimality of this layout is an issue for digital devices. For example, writing on a phone with one finger is harder than it should be with QWERTY. In this regard, here we propose novel keyboard layouts that address this particular issue of reducing the writing time.

A new book suggests the iPhone almost ended up as a BlackBerry clone. Here's why we should be grateful it didn't work out like that If you've ever used a BlackBerry, you'll know that most of them have physical keyboards on them – although even BlackBerry seems to moving away from that model for many of its latest handsets. The BlackBerry QWERTY keyboards are easy to use, and fast typing is a breeze. So it's no surprise that Apple considered putting one on the first iPhone, right? Except it really doesn't seem likely.

'Our initial scepticism about the hypothesis of the effect raised our curiosity, it could be a good example of how human-computer interaction can have an fundamental effect on human communication,' Dr Garcia told MailOnline. 'We thought data from the web was a good opportunity to test the effect, and to our surprise we found evidence supporting its existence and illustrating some of its limitations.' The pair looked at millions of English-language product names and titles of books, films and video clips that appeared on 11 websites. The websites included Amazon, YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes. Dr David Garcia and Professor Markus Strohmaier wanted to see if the effect had any impact on the way we use words across the web.