MPJ

After the Second World War, another tide of the arms race slowly but surely began to develop in the world. With the first nuclear power plant built in Obninsk back in 1954 in the former Soviet Union, it became clear that atomic weapons and the nuclear industry overall would mark the second half of the twentieth century. Today, about 80 years after the first nuclear reactor ever built, "Chicago Pile-1", the current numbers for the commercial use of nuclear power indicate that 50 countries operate about 220 research reactors with as many more operating power plants in the majority of these countries. The military numbers are expected to be even higher, and the fact is that nuclear submarines and ships can be equipped with multiple nuclear reactors on board. Some of the aircraft carriers can have up to eight of them.

One day, I would love to have an artificial intelligence installed on my smartphone that could watch me and my wife playing ping-pong in the basement to referee suspicious situations and count points so we don't have to. I wouldn't mind if it could occasionally throw in a witty comment during the game as well; for example, if I miss some easy point, it would be interesting to hear some scathing intrusion, like "Come on, I'm sure you can do that better!" or "Oh dear, why am I even rooting for you!". When that happens, I will know that the next breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence has definitely happened. But we are not there yet. Today, artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, and that's actually a good thing. It is a long ride, and it needs time. I'm perfectly aware that the current stage of AI is more focused on handling real (and huge) amounts of internet data, both online and offline, than towards real human-like ...

Without a doubt, at the very beginning, MPJ started as a public journal in mind, but it was always open to guest articles, provided they contained topics and stories compatible with the portal's themes and threads. There have been several guest authors in the past, with different topics that added extra quality to the site, but today I have the great pleasure to present one more guest writer who will, I am sure of it, give another dimension to the future of MPJ. Starting with this post, please meet ChatGPT (OpenAI's conversational application that deserves to be called a comprehensive AI entity). I am positive that this thread will have more AI articles and stories from various sources in the future and even more collaboration articles between me and AIs. For starters, let's see what ChatGPT thinks of the history and evolution of AI, illustrated with designs from another AI entity called Leonardo.Ai. Evolution of AI Algorithms: Unveiling Progress, Challenges, and Future Pr...

Perhaps it's a little weird for me to begin an article with a glimpse of a romantic movie, but I can't think of a cooler way to start today's topic. When I came up with the idea to write about "Camera Obscura", the first thought that came to my mind was a movie from 1997 called "Addicted to Love". Of all the movies in this genre, only a few are at the top of my mind, and this one, directed by Griffin Dunne with Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan in lead roles, is definitely the best one I remember. In short, Sam, an astronomer who, in an attempt to win back his girlfriend, turns his astronomical tools into specific spy equipment and, by using his dark-chambered pinhole camera, manages to observe what is happening in the building across the street in real time. What he used to achieve this is a principle behind Camera Obscura—a method to project the light through a small hole and create an image on the opposite wall inside a dark room, tent, or box. Something...

The knowledge and manufacture of lenses were known since the time of the old Greeks (the word optics came from the Greek word ὀπτικά, which means appearance) and later in the old ages with Egyptian scholar Alhazen, who made important contributions to the study of optics in general. In Europe, the lenses arrived around the 13th century and immediately triggered the invention of the first eyeglasses. However, one important discovery had to wait three centuries later in order to set off a wave of new discoveries in the field of astronomy. The invention was made by Hans Lippershey, the spectacle maker from the Dutch city of Middelburg in the Netherlands, who in October 1608 tried to apply for a patent for a tool he described as an aid capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby" . It consisted of convex and concave lenses in a tube capable of magnifying objects three or four times. For strange reasons, the patent was rejected, but the new instrument immediately attracted a...

Hmmm, I think I got that title wrong. I wanted to write something catchy, but obviously language puzzles are not really my thing. In the case of Star Wars storytelling backwards in time, this triple 'prequels' looks fine, but again, if I put all the main Jedi characters of various ages in chronological order, i.e., something like this:  Gella > Avar > Anakin > Luke > Rey , then it does look like I missed one more word 'prequel' in it. Or... well... if we consider Rey's story to be the only sequel to the first prequel's main story in this thread, which started with "A New Hope", the very first movie of the franchise that initiated it all... then I could be correct after all. Right? Oh, darn it, let it be... So, let's explore the latest prequel in the galaxy far, far away and long time ago, minus 150 years. Minus 150 years means 150 solar cycles of the Coruscant, capital of the Republic, an entire planet evolved into one giant city bef...

Up there, within our own solar system (and beyond), everything is in motion. There is no space object that is standing still. Ever since the big bang. Even the black holes that are capturing things into singularity points are moving across the universe along with their own neighborhood. The same is with Earth and its first neighbor, Mars. They are both orbiting the Sun in their own time schedules—Earth needs a full year to complete the cycle, while Mars, in its own distant orbit, needs 322 more days to do it. While both Earth and Mars travel around the Sun, sometimes they get closer to each other by the approximate 55 million kilometers (while the farthest distance between the two is about 400 million kilometers).

I have no sailor material in me. At all. I don't mean qualified skills that are fascinating and easily acquired through study and experience. I mean literally and physically, my body is simply not built for the navy. I realized that when I entered those 4D/5D theaters for the first (and last) time, about dozens of years ago. I remember anxiously waiting for that sophisticated motion ride system built into movie theater seats to come to my city, and when it finally arrived, I was among the first in the ticket line... And I was the first to get out of the small theater with a terrible motion sickness thundering throughout my entire body. I should have guessed what was going to happen after seeing the title of the short film had the word "rollercoaster" in it. I fully recovered more than 24 hours later. After that, I never stepped into any movie theater with more than a 3D label on its front gate. Sometimes, even in those, I check if the chair is fixed solid. To be honest, I...

More and more I found myself troubled by following worldwide news on daily basis. It's not that I lack the free time to filter them all out. More, it is that recently I started feeling certain reluctance reading the headlines filled with conflicts, wars and civil fights, religious and cultural animosities, political and all the other disgusting affairs, political elections full of poorly casted actors, stories that you have to use superb power to read them between the lines, worldwide armed conflicts and warfare in foreign countries that I have not the slightest clue what initiated them all and why, mediocre journalism and sensationalism in the worst meaning of the word, etc... The list is endless and believe me, I'm not even referring to all those black chronicle stories with unappropriated articles where, i.e. somebody killed his parents with an ax or mass murder of cinema crowd by a lunatic in batman suit or worse. Or in today's case and what inspired me to revive this b...

Or, to be precise, the title should be 'Why I prefer chess bots to human players'. In short, at least with me, playing bots is pure fun and learning, while playing against humans is usually nothing more than a competition that always comes with various feelings that are not always related to the game per se. It's not that there are no emotions involved when playing computer algorithms; it's more in the fact that it is much easier to punch the table when the blunder comes out of nowhere if there's a screen across the board than an actual person, and it's even easier to hit the 'play again' button without any regrets or remorse. Don't get me wrong here; I enjoy playing humans immensely, but chess is something that occupies me on a daily basis, and for that, the only opponent ready at any given time is artificial intelligence, especially all those colorful characters from within the Chess.com portal. To be honest, I've only been playing against ...

There are many periods in one person's life. To me, they all seem distinct from each other. Referring to those farthest in the past, in my mind, it was almost like they didn't really happen to me. Some of the choices I made before, from this perspective, looked like some other person made them on my behalf. Especially in the first couple of decades. But that's the point of growing up and all the changes that happen from early youth to adulthood. Later, we are left with tons of memories that we look back on most of the time with a smile on our faces, sometimes with a little sadness or shame, and once in a while with a confused look as if it happened at all. But one thing is certain: everything that happened, exactly how it happened, defines us as we are today. Viktor, testing the drums before 'Some like it hot', theatrical play Of them all, no single period in life compares to the one called the teenage years. I remember those years. Vividly. If I could choose ju...

Let me answer with what I think right away. To me, this is not one of those yes-or-no questions because it's impossible to tell. Simply put, the theory behind the question is most likely unprovable. Not from the inside anyway. 'Simulation Hypothesis' and the phrase 'non-playable characters' are concepts relatively new, born not that long ago, when digital computing came to be fast enough to produce graphically demanding multi-player games sophisticated enough to hint at this question and the probability that we might also be inside one of those simulations. And to dispute the question about the nature of reality is quite useless, because everything that surrounds us, no matter how strange we think it is, can also be real and not part of the code. Even if our reality were simulated, its origin would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove. By design, nothing inside the simulation could be able to see the lines of the code, only the outcome of its work. In...

Before the start of the Great War, the prevailing sentiment in most, if not all, European countries was that victory in any major military conflict was guaranteed only if it was fought with a large, durable, well-trained, and modern army. The dawn of the 20th century established the environment in which countries entered the race to mobilize the largest part of the qualified population, to create faster motorized transport for troops and logistics, to use state-of-the-art communications and the greatest range of artillery, as well as to use various new drugs in medical treatments like morphine and even cocaine to boost the troops and fuel their fighting mood. Compared to 19th-century wars, new warfare was revolutionized and upped to the next level. By June 1914, the stage was set and only a spark was needed to fire off the conflict. But was it really inevitable? Was the military race alone enough to cause the conflict in which 20 million died and many more were wounded? Or did it need ...

I was no more than four years old when our car got stuck on a snowy hill decades ago. Everyone but me went outside to push to get us out of the frozen road. More people gathered from other cars to help each other, and soon everyone was engaged in a small rescue operation. That certainly didn't mean I didn't help—as well as others pushing the car from the outside, I did the same from the inside. From the back seat, I put my hands on the front and pushed hard. In my defense, deep down I knew that what I was doing was kind of weird and useless. At the time, I just didn't know why. I was just ashamed sitting alone and doing nothing. Well, like they say, with age comes wisdom, and now I know that what I did was physically impossible, just like in the case of Baron Münchhausen—when he got himself and his horse he was sitting on out of a swamp by pulling his own hair upwards. And just like in an old expression about an absurd and impossible thing one can do—if I were to pull the b...

It was commonly believed that ancient hunter-gatherers, both humans and Neanderthals, had a simple lifestyle in which most or all of their food was obtained by gathering from local sources or by hunting animals from their environment. We simply assumed that beside the meat they hunted, their diet consisted of only raw foods such as wild plants, edible insects, mushrooms, honey, or pretty much anything that was safe to eat. Well, according to the recent study performed by Ceren Kabukcu* and her team from the archaeobotanical department of the University of Liverpool, we couldn't be more wrong. Researchers analyzed charred food remains at two locations: the Shanidar Cave in Iraq and the Franchthi Cave in Greece. The food remains from the first cave originated from both Neanderthal hearths, 70,000 years old, and those from ancient humans thirty millennia later, and also those from Greece consumed some 12,000 years ago by our modern ancestors under microscopic examination reveal th...

It's amazing how different people react to the same thing. Consider the famous question, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" What do you see inside such glass when you spot it on the table? The water or the air? This is, of course, not a school-grade sort of question. Actually, there is no right or wrong answer here. There's no definite reason to consider anyone thinking that the glass is half full to be overly optimistic or those who see the emptiness of the glass to be unreasonably realistic. It is just a point of view and nothing more. But it tells a bit about your character, or how Carl Jung, a well-known Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, defined it—your personality type. The point of inquiries like this one is simply in the fact that if we ask ourselves enough questions, they would have the potential to unveil our personality type fully, or to a high degree of accuracy. However, we would need to be careful in both selecting the questions and defining all ...