Four short links: 20 December 2016
Ingestible Origami Robot, Feature Flags, AI Q&A, and Disappearing Ideas
- Ingestible Origami Robot (MIT) — The researchers tested about a dozen different possibilities for the structural material before settling on the type of dried pig intestine used in sausage casings. “We spent a lot of time at Asian markets and the Chinatown market looking for materials.”
- Feature Flags Implementations (Tom Limoncelli) — notes on a couple of techniques for implementing feature flags.
- MS MARCO — a set of 100,000 questions and answers that artificial intelligence researchers can use. Described in this Microsoft blog post.
- Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (PDF) — The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 25 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. Across a broad range of cases and levels of disaggregation, we find that ideas—and in particular the exponential growth they imply—are getting harder and harder to find. Exponential growth results from the large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.
