SCIENCE BOND

In an interview, Palmer Luckey said currently no single Apple computer met the minimum specifications for the Rift.  The problem lay in the fact that Apple did not prioritise powerful graphics hardware, he added.  By contrast, HTC said its headset would work with Apple machines at launch.  Questioned at a Microsoft Xbox press event, Mr Luckey said support for the Oculus Rift headset on Macs depended on the way Apple built its machines. "If they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he said.  "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritise high-end GPUs," he told the Shack News site. The Rift, and other headsets, typically require the computer to which they are connected to possess a powerful graphics card or GPU. Buying or building a machine to support the Rift has been estimated to cost about £1,000 ($1,500).  Some research suggests that fewer than 1% of the world's PCs are running hardware that can support VR headsets. ...

However, neither the Apple 1 nor the rare antique television were sold.  Apple 1 computers are usually valuable collectables. Made in 1976, there are now only about 50 left in the world.  At a similar sale last year, one fetched $365,000 (£237,000). And in 2013, another attracted a $905,000 bid.  The Apple 1 at Monday's vintage tech sale had a starting price of $300,000.  The Cray-4 processor sold for $37,500. The 1936 Baird television set may not work and delivers a huge  electrical charge of 5000 volts.  But auctioneer Bonhams had forecast that it could fetch between $20,000 (£13,000) and $30,000.He was working on the Cray-4 model when his company went bankrupt in 1995, and the following year he died in a traffic accident.  The processor, with serial number 001, was listed with an expected price tag of $50,000 - $80,000.  Other lots included an early German Enigma machine, handwritten paperwork by Albert Einstein and a 19th Century te...

By 2050 some experts believe that machines will have reached human level intelligence. Thanks, in part, to a new era of machine learning, computer are already learning from raw data in the same way as the human infant learns from the world around her.  It means we are getting machines that can, for example, teach themselves how to play computer games and get incredibly good at them (work ongoing at Google's DeepMind) and devices that can start to communicate in human-like speech, such as voice assistants on smartphones.  Computers are beginning to understand the world outside of bits and bytes.First as a PhD student and latterly as director of the computer vision lab at Stanford University, she has pursued the painstakingly difficult goal with an aim of ultimately creating the electronic eyes for robots and machines to see and, more importantly, understand their environment.  Half of all human brainpower goes into visual processing even though it is something we all ...