How Machines Write Poetry — Harmon would love to have writers or other experts judge FIGURE8’s work, too. Her online subjects tended to rate the similes better if they were obvious. “The snow continued like a heavy rain” got high scores, for example, even though Harmon thought this was quite a bad effort on FIGURE8’s part. She preferred “the snow falls like a dead cat,” which got only middling ratings from humans. “They might have been cat lovers,” she says.FIGURE8 (PDF) system generates figurative language.
The Decisions the Pentagon Wants to Leave to Robots — “You cannot have a human operator operating at human speed fighting back at determined cyber tech,” Work said. “You are going to need have a learning machine that does that.” I for one welcome our new robot script kiddie overlords.
Love in the Age of Big Data — Over decades, John has observed more than 3,000 couples longitudinally, discovering patterns of argument and subtle behaviors that can predict whether a couple would be happily partnered years later or unhappy or divorced. Turns out, “don’t be a jerk” is good advice for marriages, too. (via Cory Doctorow)
