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Plus, the QA team probably felt this a lot more then end users, testing this reset procedure thousands of times.

The product team had probably received this feedback long before the Internet spoke. And, ultimately, found a 40-second factory reset procedure is not that big of a deal.

Totally agree with this sentiment. It's easy to criticize on the Internet and receive positive feedback for that. But, constructive replies are often the most clever & interesting ones. Great post, Shu!

Opera actually has this ability built-in. It lets you A/B test websites (with/without ads) by going to the URL "speedtest".

Improbable's SpatialOS is actually a really, really neat piece of tech. For the first time it's becoming easy for an independent developer to build an MMO type application.

With the impending growth of VR (and virtual worlds in general), this is a great candidate for being the foundation of a new generation of apps.

Unity has done this for game development. It's the de facto engine of many research projects, video games, and some applications.

Unity lacks the ability to scale to large projects, however, which is where SpatialOS comes in. It's for projects that are large in scope (encourages/requires better programming practices) and is literally made for scale. The nice thing is that the SpatialOS tech uses Unity, but doesn't require it. It can be used with any engine if desired.

As the other commenter noted, "letting a bunch of molecules sit around" was precisely where we got intelligence from in the first place.

So it is possible that we reach AI just by randomly permuting connections and weights. Of course it's more likely we intelligently set (or "evolve") these connections and weights, but this allows us to set an upper bound on computation/time needed.

It's a problem perfectly suited to a logical AI, really. Take in the experimental observation data, and produce a solution that fits the parameters.

Human intuition was the major thing getting in the way, and even Einstein's intuition got in the way of his acceptance of quantum mechanics.

There's some intentional provocation going on with the title. Sure, it's factually correct, but choice of words really pulls the truth one way or another.

Subtly dishonest journalism in my opinion.

This article could just as easily be titled "Alphabet invests $859M on long-term projects".

In fact, that would be a more accurate title since that is precisely Google's intent.

There is clearly some unstated circumstances here.

One shot in the dark: what if the company was concerned for legal reasons? Since the issue had a connection to a disabled employee, is it possible the company could have fired them to avoid any legal conflicts?

The monster itself is just a strand of RNA.

The definition of living by most biologists wouldn't include a strand of genetic material. Fire replicates in particular environments, as do viruses. But we don't typically classify either as living.

I think the point you're getting at is that the distinction between living and non-living is a bit arbitrary and meaningless. I agree.

The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion.

We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary for the life we see on Earth (caveat: Miller and Urey may have been wrong about early Earth conditions).

Spiegelman tried to create something closer to what we'd consider living. His "monster" was bootstrapped with an enzyme and some RNA (a simpler version of DNA). The enzyme replicated the RNA many times over. After a "generation" of replication, he'd move a sample of the RNA over to a new test tube. This would be the father of a new generation. And so on, he repeated this process almost 100 times.

The interesting thing is that this extremely simple "monster" ended up evolving in a way. By the end of a few generations, the RNA had adapted to its environment and become much more efficient at replication. Other attempts at the experiment have produced similar results. In effect, Spiegelman created a barebones pseudo-living machine, and demonstrated it undergoing evolution in the process.