Joe Petviashvili

“Can you guess what is shown in this photo?”

So that you don't undervalue scientific truth when you learn it, just because it doesn't seem to be protected appropriately to its value. Imagine the robes and masks. Visualize yourself creeping into the vaults and stealing the Lost Knowledge of more...

“Character animation in video games—whether manually key-framed or motion captured—has traditionally relied on codifying skeletons early in a game's development, and creating animations rigidly tied to these fixed skeleton morphologies. This paper introduces a novel system for animating characters wh more...

“When Death met the philosopher, the philosopher said, rather excitedly: "At this point, you realise, I'm both dead and not dead."”

The problem is that fundamentally we suck at symbolic reasoning, quite contrary to many people's assumptions. We simulate the process of logical thought by modeling perceptual patterns that generally coincide with it. The reason all those AI systems failed is more...

“It looks like a single being. But it's a society of former individualists...the slime mold.”

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

“You can see the dampenning rods inserted in between the brightly glowing uranium fuel rods. Isn't the blue glow of the Cerenkov radiation pretty?”

The Fed cut interest rates a quarter point, then said they'd do more, then admitted that no one has any idea what's happening, because economics is not a real "science" and that textbooks should come with warning labels. "Economics is more...

in-degree/out-degree distribution of the Wikipedia's hyperlink graph in logarithmic coordinates. The distribution follows a simple geometric pattern (an "ant-hill").

"They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way more...

Many of the adult subjects indicated they were certain they had learned nothing and were "amazed" by their success

“The victory was won as part of the 'IA-GO Challenge', in a so-called 9x9 game (played over nine lines and nine columns). Although Catalin Taranu beat the computer in a 19x19 configuration with a nine-stone handicap, the Go Master nevertheless more...

"Smile you're on ele-vision: How a camera attached to an elephant's trunk captured amazing jungle views"