DailyDirt: Fooling Some Of The People Some Of The Time...
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
There's a sucker born every minute -- if you like to believe unverifiable statistics. Usually, if it's too good to be true, it ain't true. But as technology gets better, sometimes it's hard to distinguish sufficiently advanced algorithms from magic. Here are a few scams that successfully fooled some folks for a while.- A stock-picking robot named Marl convinced thousands of investors that it could identify penny stocks that were about to soar in price. The SEC is looking to impose a fine and force the creators of Marl to repay their duped investors... but with claims on a website like: "The longer Marl is allowed to run on a computer … The More Advanced He Becomes!" How could anyone go wrong? [url]
- Penn and Teller don't usually do pranks, but when it comes to tricking Nobel prize laureate, Arno Penzias, they apparently make exceptions. Creating a fake computer with voice recognition in the late 1980s fooled this brilliant physicist, but nowadays Apple's Siri is in TV ads all the time doing nearly the same routine. [url]
- Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built a mechanical chess-playing machine (shaped like a Turk...) that gained widespread fame in 1769. This mechanical turk was actually controlled by a hidden human being, but only a few hundred years later, we actually could build a chess playing robot with grandmaster skills. [url]
- To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
Filed Under: chess, fraud, marl, nobel prize, penn and teller, sec, siri, statistics
