Word: familiar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pair acknowledges that working "across the river" has meant that few undergraduates are familiar with the Palfrey name. Yet the Palfrey family has played an influential role throughout Harvard's history, beginning in 1815 when John G. Palfrey, one of Sean Palfrey's forefathers, graduated from the College...
...pair acknowledges that working "across the river" has meant that few undergraduates are familiar with the Palfrey name. Yet the Palfrey family has played an influential role throughout Harvard's history, beginning in 1815 when John G. Palfrey, one of Sean Palfrey's forefathers, graduated from the College...
...calculate the trajectories of spacecraft or pick the next move in a chess game, the machines have until now been flummoxed by crude recognition tasks that even a baby can perform, often failing to distinguish between a beach ball and a cabbage, to say nothing of picking out a familiar face in a photo album filled with strangers. Such a pattern-recognition talent, says Salk Institute neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, in whose lab the work was done: "is a survival skill humans probably had even before they acquired language. For computers, it's a major challenge...
Does this concept--a fairly rudimentary assemblage of hardware performing prodigious and multifaceted tasks according to the dictates of the instructions fed to it--sound familiar? It certainly didn't in 1937, when Turing's seminal paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," appeared in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. Turing's thoughts were recognized by the few readers capable of understanding them as theoretically interesting, even provocative. But no one recognized that Turing's machine provided a blueprint for what would eventually become the electronic digital computer...
...minor bureaucrat in Madras, India, Ramanujan tried twice to interest professional mathematicians in his spare-time dabbling with numbers. All too familiar with numerological crackpots, they were profoundly uninterested. But Ramanujan persisted, and his third shot was the lucky one. The eminent Cambridge don G.H. Hardy took the time to decipher the young man's idiosyncratic scrawls and realized he was corresponding with a genius. Unlike trained mathematicians, Ramanujan knew his speculations about numbers were true, so he didn't bother to prove them. That wouldn't do. Hardy brought him to England in 1914, and the pair spent four...