On my first work trip to Jakarta 14 January 2016 for Grab, multiple terrorist bombs exploded a couple of miles from the GrabBike office where I had just arrived. People were fleeing cafes and restaurants around the attack site. My new colleagues were shaken, glad to be safe, looking to help. There was news of crowds on the streets trying to get away, confirmed by a spike in booking requests from the blocks around the explosion. My colleagues remembered the 2002 Bali bombings, and knew we should get people to spread out. And we knew that our algorithms would treat…
Using this as an interesting place to share “AI bloopers” and hopefully as a not-too-obnoxious way to file a “bug report” in the hope that some friend at Google might know where to route this to.
I happened to be looking up the estimated number of particles in the universe. Imagine my surprise to see the answer “1080”.
I remember that this was quoted at 10⁷² when I was young. And I know that the answer is a lot lot more than 1080, because I can see more blades of grass than that right now! So what’s going on? …
Dominic Widdows
Works at LivePerson on AI and software engineering, particularly natural language processing. See http://puttypeg.net for more.
