Dr. Dobb's Journal April 2003
The Social Science Experimental Lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is hosting a programming contest pitting programs designed to emulate human behavior against their equal-and-opposite counterparts—programs designed to distinguish between human and machine behavior. This "Turing Tournament" runs both the emulator programs and a group of human subjects through a set of repeated games. The results will be shuffled and fed to the detector programs. The winning detector is the program that, on average, identifies human and computer players with the most accuracy. The winning emulator is the program that performs best—that is, most often eludes identification— against the winning detector.
A $10,000 prize will be awarded in each category; entries are due by May 31. Submissions must be written in C, C++, Java, Perl, Mathematica, Gambit GCL, or a combination of those languages. For details of the entry requirements and tournament rules, see http://turing.ssel.caltech.edu/.
A survey conducted by the National Science Foundation concludes that the number of science and engineering doctorate degrees granted in the U.S. has declined steeply since 1998. The report (http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf03300/start.htm), which includes data from 1992 to 2001, shows that the total number of science and engineering Ph.D.s awarded in the U.S. dropped from over 27,200 per year in 1996, 1997, and 1998 to 25,509 in 2001—a 6 percent decline.
The number of computer-science degrees, in particular, underwent an even more dramatic decline in the same period, falling from 927 to 826—a drop of more than 10 percent. Meanwhile, Ph.D.s in the humanities, health, education, and other fields continue to be granted at a steady rate.
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) think that encoding data as artificial DNA in bacteria populations could provide a stable means of data storage. In a study initially published in the Communications of the ACM, the scientists encoded portions of the song "It's A Small World" as artificial DNA, inserted the sequences into bacteria DNA, allowed the colony to multiply, and were able to retrieve the information—even after 100 bacterial generations.
The advantages of storing data in bacteria populations are that each cell in a colony can copy the information, providing high redundancy within a small space, and that special breeds of bacteria can be employed to fit different environmental conditions. The PNNL scientists experimented with E. coli and with Deinococcus radiodurans, a type of bacteria that can withstand intense radiation. For more information, see http://multimedia.pnl.gov:2080/wong/.
One of the first legally binding Internet votes has taken place in the Swiss village of Anières, despite warnings from researchers and security experts that the Internet is too unreliable and insecure for use in elections. 323 residents of the Geneva suburb used the Internet to vote, while 370 voters sent ballots by mail, and slightly fewer than 50 residents voted in person. The vote concerned a tax-funded grant to renovate a local restaurant (the measure passed).
To vote over the Internet, residents logged onto a government web site, typed in a series of security codes, and entered their date/place of birth. Swiss officials said the online system was therefore more secure than voting by mail, where only birth data is required. Opponents argue that electronic votes cannot guarantee anonymity and are impossible to verify. (See DDJ Contributing Editor Bruce Schneier's analysis of security problems inherent to Internet voting at http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0102.html#10.)
The OASIS Standards group has announced an effort to define a new sort of URL "that can be used across all domains, applications, and transport protocols." The new identification scheme is based on "Extensible Resource Identifiers" (XRIs). XRIs would allow several copies of a file stored in different physical locations to be easily identified as a single logical resource.
OASIS intends to define a federated syntax, readable by both humans and machines, with provisions for internationalization similar to XML. For more information, see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xri/. Comments on the committee's progress can be sent to the xri-comment@lists.oasis-open.org mailing list; the archives of that list (as well as the members-only mailing list xri@lists.oasis-open.org) can be read at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/.