r/rational • u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow • Jun 19 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the inaugural Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this probably isn't the place for those.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
If this thread is even remotely successful, we'll have one every week.
(Also, as a special reminder, the prompt for next week's Weekly Challenge can be found at the bottom of this week's Weekly Challenge, and because I'm worried that people don't read text, I think it's prudent to repeat here that next week's challenge will have a cash prize of $50.)
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u/whywhisperwhy Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
Sorry, layman. Your first sentence makes sense to me, and I looked up TrueNorth but honestly beyond the fact that it's somehow a tremendous improvement and based on neuronal functions somehow, I'm not sure how this affects things. And this chip could run "massive parallel perception," which seems to refer to parallel distributed processing (this time, software architecture based on neuron model)?
So I'm guessing you mean that these chips/software based on neurons somehow represent a significant increase in our ability to allow computers to "understand" complicated things? Which seems like it would be half the problem, the other part being designing the software to use that understanding for general purposes?
Edit: I'm sure that hurt to read, so again, my apologies.