Sometimes, however, you just want to kick back and read some stuff that just blows your mind.
This collection isnt meant to describe the biggest, most impactful events in the AI world from 2021.
Instead, its a sort of editors choice of our coolest, slickest, and most wow-inducing pieces.
Some of these things are huge (Googles time crystals!
), and some pieces are about small, interesting stuff that was only covered at Neural.
First things first:We have to talk about thosetime crystals.
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What are time crystals?
Its a concept thats difficult to nutshell.
Its a seven-pointed lattice one moment and a ten-pointed lattice the next, or whatever.
What makes time crystals so incredible is that they dont consume energy to cycle back and forth.
This could eventually turn out to be a fundamental component of functioning quantum computers.
But time crystals werent the only cool thing to happen last year, not by a long shot.
The nine-year-old macaque, called Pager, has a Neuralink implanted in his brain.
Pager was first trained to play Pong with a joystick in return for a banana smoothie reward.
As he played, his neural activity was captured by a 1,024 electrode machine, called the N1 Link.
This data was transmitted to a decoder that mapped Pagers neural patterns to his joystick movements.
After a few minutes of calibration, the software could predict Pagers movements by analyzing his brain activity.
As TNWs Ivan Mehta wrote:
The visualizations are striking in a slightly disturbing way.
They are not the most sophisticated animations, but rather low-res GIFs.
It almost reminds me of band Storm Corrosions video for their dark song Drag Ropes.
This might not be technologically mind-blowing, but the imagery it outputs is something Id called beautifully inhuman.
And Im hard-pressed to think of anything cooler than the actual sounds of lasers zapping Martian rocks.
As Thomaswrote:
Perseverance is equipped with two microphones, both of which are off-the-shelf devices.
One sits on the buggys chassis and listens to the wheels and internal systems of the rover.
The other mic is attached to the spacecrafts mast.
As Perseverances laser instrument shoots rocks and studies the resulting plasma, the mast mic records the zaps.
These are just a handful of the amazing things we covered this year.
And we expect next year to be an even bigger, wackier, and more mind-blowing year.
