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The Motorola Atrix HD, Motorola Droid RAZR and Droid RAZR M

The statement that “human-level artificial intelligence is the last invention mankind need ever make” has been much bandied about of late. It implies that once we have invented something as smart as ourselves, it can take over and start making the inventions itself. The concept is most often pronounced by a computer scientists speaking from a podium and resembling nothing so much as a medieval cleric handing down divine scripture from above. The date of this so called “singularity event” is assumed to take place in the distant future, but as researchers at Tufts University revealed this week, we may be perilously close to that date already.
The study in question used an artificial intelligence system to reverse engineer the regenerative biology of planarian worms, in what is arguably one of the first examples of “robots” making discoveries where their human counterparts left off.
Biological systems like the planarian worm are in some ways ideal targets for machine intelligence research, precisely because they are so devilishly complex. One has only to glance at the cellular models in question to gain an appreciation for the layers of complexity that comprise something as seemingly simple as the planarian worm. Teasing out all the interactions in such systems has been giving biologists gray hair since before Darwin’s time, and for good reason — humans were not evolved to be good at keeping track of twenty or more symbolic elements, each modifying and being modified by other elements in the same hypothetical system. That kind of activity has very little to do with running a gazelle down on the evolutionary savannah in which we took shape. Our brain children, on the other hand, the so-called deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms, are very good at these activities.
And so it was at Tufts University last week, where an evolutionary algorithm successfully unraveled the mysteries of the planarian worm’s regenerative biology. To gain a feel for the science behind this, it helps to understand the difficulty biologists have been facing in regards to worm regeneration. In fields like systems biology, there is often a large gap between an observed biological phenomenon and the component parts like DNA and RNA which build up to the trait in question. What is missing is what happens in between. It is relatively simple to identify the various molecules that must be involved, but understanding how they progress from their components to the observed “phenotype” is, more often than not, a black hole. In many cases there are simply too many possible paths leading from the primary components to the end product. The task of following up every permutation and combination that could lead to the trait would take weeks if not years, at least for a human intelligence.
It turns out that the genius of the Tufts team was in posing the question in such a way that their evolutionary algorithm could loop through thousands of possible cellular permutations to discover the exact combination that would produce the biology of the worm. This marks a big win for both the fields of regenerative medicine and artificial intelligence. However, the day when algorithms starts posing their own research questions and preferring these to the mysteries of worm biology may prove a little more unsettling.

Do you love to learn? Then you should take a look at this massive sale happening over at Udemy. Thousands of online courses are being discounted to just $10 a pop, so you can take multiple courses even if you’re on a budget. Whether you need to learn how to design logos or how to speak Arabic, there’s something for nigh-on every area of interest.

• $10 courses at Udemy (Coupon code: SAIL010)

If you’re trying to break into the world of web development, consider taking the complete web developer’s course by Rob Percival. Even if you’ve never made a website before, this class will run you through the entire development process. And if you just need to knock some of the rust off of your dev skills, this is 10 bucks well spent.
More interested in staking a claim in the smart watch market? Rob Percival also has a program called the complete Apple Watch developer course. Spend $10 on that class, and you’ll learn how to develop apps for Apple’s latest major platform. With such massive coverage of the Apple Watch, there’s bound to be some serious money to be made here for third-party developers.
Normally, these courses are much more expensive. In fact, some of these cost upwards of $500 without this sale, so you can save up to 98% off the original asking price. Just use the coupon code “SUMMER1001” during checkout, and you’ll only pay $10 per course. This sale ends at 11:59 PT on May 30th, 2015, so don’t hesitate. This is a great opportunity for self improvement — don’t let it slip away.

When the iPad was released in the spring of 2010, many people didn’t know what to make of it. Some would point to my iPad and ask: Why do I need a giant iPod touch? Or, why can’t I see more than one app on this big screen? These questions faded away as the usefulness of the iPad became clearer in the months that followed.
That said, the iPad didn’t work like a “real” desktop computer, and nowhere was that more evident than in its lack of multitasking. Every now and then, some developer would scratch the itch of wanting to see two different things on the iPad’s display at the same time. One that caught my eye back in 2012 was Tapose, a then-$2.99 app (now priced at $9.99) that let an iPad user see two window panes. One pane generally was for the main journal editor, while the second window pane contained a browser, map, or some simple tool like a calculator to use as a reference when creating a journal entry. That app’s developer wasn’t allowed to touch the iPad’s operating system to let it work with other apps, though.
That brings us to today. Apple doesn’t have the restrictions Tapose’s developers did, naturally, and announced this week at WWDC 2015 that iOS 9 will let iPad users display two apps side-by-side. A swiping gesture Apple refers to as Slide Over lets you slide in one of the built-in Apple apps into a second window pane while keeping Safari in a larger window. The gesture and effect is reminiscent of Microsoft’s Windows 8 split-paned window view which, quite honestly, I could never use effectively, because I could never remember which app it would bring into the second window pane. Apple’s pull-down gesture, however, lets you easily see which other apps can be brought into this Slide Over view alongside the Safari Web browser. In Slide Over mode, the Safari browser is inactive while the second app is used in the second pane.

There’s a second split-screen mode Apple calls Split View on an iPad that is activated by tapping on the divider between two apps. It lets two apps be active at the same time on a single screen. And, the two screens can interact. Apple’s examples involved tapping on links in the Notepad app that appeared in the Safari pane, as well as tapping on a location that appeared in the Maps app.
Then there’s Picture-in-Picture, which lets you conduct a FaceTime call in one small window that overlaps another app you’re using in a larger second window. It looks much like the picture-in-picture feature you may have used on a TV set. While Apple’s own apps will support multitasking when iOS 9 is released later this year, third-party app developers will need to add support for multitasking in their own apps.
Apple says you can upgrade any device currently running iOS 8 to iOS 9. But these new multitasking features will only work on relatively recently released iPad models. Slide Over and Picture-in-Picture will work on an iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, iPad air, or iPad air 2. But the dual-pane multitasking Split View will only work with the iPad air 2 and, presumably, whatever new iPad Apple introduces later this year. If you’re running an older model iPad like me, you’ll need to start saving your nickels and dimes for a newer model if you want to multitask in iOS 9.