Almost everything currently called “artificial intelligence” — chatbots, spam filters, the app that sorts your phone’s photos — is pattern recognition running at an enormous scale, not a thinking mind. The label covers a wide range of software, and understanding what is actually happening under the hood explains both why these tools are so capable
Behind the hype, most of today's AI is pattern recognition at enormous scale — not a thinking mind.
Your phone works out its location by timing radio signals from satellites and doing the math on how long each one took to arrive. That’s the whole trick behind GPS: distance from timing, timing from light speed, and location from distance. How a phone figures out where it is At least 24 GPS satellites (the
Behind every blue dot is a constellation of atomic clocks and a surprisingly elegant trick of geometry.
Wi-Fi works by turning the wired internet connection coming into your house into radio waves, using frequencies far higher than a car radio, then decoding those waves back into data on the other end. It feels instant because the whole exchange happens in a fraction of a second, but underneath it is closer to a
No cable in sight, yet the internet is just there. Here is the radio-wave mechanism connecting your devices to the router in under a second.
Sensor networks and old infrastructure are an unlikely but increasingly common pairing, and the results are already reshaping how utilities decide where to dig. Most of the pipes carrying drinking water under major cities were laid before anyone thought to make them smart. Some of the cast-iron mains beneath American streets predate the automobile. Retrofitting
Inside the Quiet Redesign of How Cities Manage Their Water Read More »
Sensor networks and old infrastructure are an unlikely but increasingly common pairing.
Processing power is moving away from centralized data centers faster than most forecasts predicted — but the numbers show two things happening at once, not one. The shift toward edge and distributed computing is being driven less by any single breakthrough than by an accumulation of smaller pressures: latency-sensitive applications, rising energy costs, and regulatory
The Numbers Behind the Global Shift to Distributed Computing Read More »
Processing power is moving away from centralized data centers faster than most forecasts predicted.