Bot Brain

If you have a passion for robotic projects, then the BotBrain Animatronic Robot Head Kit is a pretty good toy for you. It is meant to help one pick up the basics of robotics and animatronics by leading the user through the entire assembly process of a fully functioning animatronic head. This head will be able to turn left and right, with moving eyes and eyelids add to the realism. The mouth can change according to how it is “feeling” at the moment, while integrated sensors enable it to react to changes in the environment. The BotBrain Animatronic Robot Head Kit retails for $449 so make sure you have a great love for all things robotic before dropping that amount of cash.

GigaPan Epic: How Do You Create Your Own 1,474-Megapixel Photo?

Some people like to say that "size doesn't matter." We think that those people have never seen the gigapixel photographs taken with a GigaPan Epic Sytem. David Bergman, a self-described "All Access" photographer took his GigaPan Epic to the recent inauguration of President Barack Obama:

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Priced at $379, we think the GigaPan Epic is a steal for what it does. So must have one of these. Full list of features after the jump.

Reading University Turing Test Searches for a “Thinking” Computer

lan Turing wrote a seminal paper in 1950 titled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. In it, he states that a thinking computer is impossible to distinguish from a human in text-based conversation. Alan Turing further hypothesized that a 30% chance existed a computer could be mistaken for a human in a five minute conversation by the end of the 20th Century.

Reading University recently conducted the Turing Test to examine this theory. A panel of human judges were tasked with evaluating conversations to determine if they were computer or human. While some of the computer results were impressive, none of the computer programs passed the Turing Test. An AI named Elbot won the Loebner Prize, though, by convincing "a quarter of the judges". Although the results may not seem staggering, it does bring into focus that it’s possible within our lifetime AI will exist that is indistinguishable from a human.