Since 2013, Torobo, a robotic arm designed to test the limits of artificial intelligence, has had one ambition—to be admitted to the University of Tokyo. However, it has repeatedly failed. This year was no exception.

    In early November Torobo took an exam to prepare for an all-important standardized test. While Torobo's total score of 525 out of 950 was 14 points higher than in 2015，its standard score of 57.1% was slightly lower, because human students did better in the 2016 test.

    Though the score，which is higher than the national average, is enough to get the robot admitted to many other famous Japanese universities,
it falls short of the minimum required for the University of Tokyo.

    A closer analysis of the results showed that Torobo's newly programmed ability to solve complex physics problems helped increase its
year-over-year physics score from 46. 5% to 59%. The robot also dug deep into its database of information from textbooks and websites to obtain
an impressive 66.3% in world history. The average 60% scores acquired in the two math sections, were not too shabby either.

    But，while Torobo is able to handle knowledge-based questions and ones involving complex mathematical calculations, it has a hard time thinking independently. As a result, the robot is unable to fully understand multiple sentences and phrases to arrive at the logical conclusions required in the English language tests. This weakness was reflected in the weak oral and writing scores, which came in at 36.2% and 50.5%, respectively.

    Fortunately, after four tiring years, the robot's creators have decided to free Torobo from its annual test-taking suffering, the research team will instead focus on improving the robot's ability to pick out specific answers from massive sets of data—a skill that led to its excellent history scores. They believe the expertise(专业技术）will  help Torobo succeed as an industrial robot.

    Opening week specials at Munchies Food Hall

    At the corner of Green and Brown Streets in the city

    Monday, 7th of January until Sunday, 1 3th of January 2008

    Feast until you're full!

    Come down to Munchies this week to enjoy the special dishes on offer at all of our food outlets. Order from the following:

    Succulent chicken rice     • Spicy satay beef            •DeliciOus noodle dishes

    Plump pork chops            • Seafood specialties         • Crunchy vegetables

    Sweet tropical fruit

    10% discount on all orders above $ 20.00

    Halal food is available at the stall Malay Food Heaven.

    Win Prizes and Gifts!

    Spend $ 20.00 or more and win instant prizes from our lucky draw box.

    Collect a free party balloon and whistle for each young diner.

    Enjoy a free meal if you are the first customer of the day at any of our stalls.

    Win a holiday to Westem Australia. A free raffle ticket is given with every receipt. Just fill in your information and place your entry in the box provided.

    Winner to be announced in The Straits Times on the 15th of January.

    Join in the Fun!

    Between 7:00 pm and 8:00 pm each evening until the 10th of January, your favorite Channel 3 television actors and singers will entertain you:

    May Lee      • Jackie Chen       • Kim Yap             • Kamal

    Autograph sessions will follow each performance! And who will be our extra special mystery star? Come down on Saturday at noon to find out.

    There is no better way to enjoy Scottish traditions than going fishing and tasting a little bit of whisky (威士忌) at a quiet place like the Inverlochy Castle. When Queen Victoria visited the castle in 1873 she wrote in her diary, “I never saw a lovelier spot.” And she didn't even go fishing.

    Scotland is not easily defined. In certain moments, this quiet land of lakes and grasses and mountains changes before your very eyes. When evening gently sweeps the hillside into orange light, the rivers, teeming with fish, can turn into streams of gold. As you settle down with just a fishing pole and a basket on the bank of River Orchy, near the Inverlochy Castle, any frustration (烦恼) will float away as gently as the circling water. It's just you and purple, pink, white flowers, seeking a perfect harmony. If you are a new comer to fishing, learning the basics from a fishing guide may leave you with a lifetime's fun. For many, fishing is more than a sport; it is an art.

    Scotland offers interesting places where you can rest after a long day's fishing. Set against a wild mountain and hidden behind woodland, the beautiful Inverlochy Castle Hotel below the Nevis is a perfect place to see the beauty of Scotland's mountains. Ben Nevis is the highest of all British mountains, and reaching its 1343-metre top is a challenge. But it's not just what goes up that matters; what comes down is unique. More than 900 metres high, on the mountain's north face, lies an all-important source of pure water. Its name comes from the Gaelic language “usquebaugh” or “water of life”; and it is the single most important ingredient (原料) in Scotland's best known drink: whisky.

    Microsoft has developed a new smart phone app that interprets eye signals and translates them into letters, allowing people with motor neurone disease to communicate with others from a phone.

    The GazeSpeak app combines a smartphone's camera with artificial intelligence to recognize eye movements in real time and convert(改变) them into letters, words and sentences.

    For people suffering from ALS（渐冻症）, also known as motor neurone disease, eye movement can be the only way they are able to communicate.

    “Current eye-tracking input systems for people with ALS or other motor impairments are expensive, not robust under sunlight, and require frequent re-calibration and substantial, relatively immobile setups,” said Xiaoyi Zhang, a researcher at Microsoft who developed the technology.

    “To mitigate the drawbacks…we created GazeSpeak, an eye-gesture communication system that runs on a smartphone, and is designed to be low-cost, robust, portable and easy to learn.”

    The app is used by the listener by pointing their smartphone at the speaker. A chart that can be stuck to the back of the smartphone is then used by the speaker to determine which eye movements to make in order to communicate.

    The sticker shows four grids(方格) of letters, which each correspond to a different eye movement. By looking up, down, left or right, the speaker selects which grids the letters they want belong to. The artificial intelligence algorithm（程序） is then able to predict the word or sentence they are trying to say.

    Self-driving cars have been backed by the hope that they will save lives by getting involved in fewer crashes with fewer injuries and deaths than human-driven cars. But so far, most comparisons between human drivers and automated vehicles have been unfair. Crash statistics for human-driven cars arc gathered from all sorts of driving situations and all types of roads. However, most of the data on self-driving cars' safety have been recorded often in good weather and on highways, where the most important tasks are staying in the car's own lane and not getting too close to the vehicle-ahead. Automated cars are good at those tasks, but so are humans.

    It is true that self-driving cars don't get tired, angry, frustrated or drunk .But neither can they yet react to uncertain situations with the same skill or anticipation of an attentive Unban driver. Nor do they possess the foresight to avoid potential dangers. They largely drive from moment to moment, rather than think ahead to possible events literally down the road.

    To a self-driving car, a bus full of people might appear quite similar to an uninhabited field. Indeed, deciding what action to take in an emergency is difficult for humans, but drivers have sacrificed themselves for the greater good of others. An automated system's limited understanding of the world means it will almost never evaluate (评估)a Situation the same way a human would. And machines can't be programmed in advance to handle every imaginable set of events.

    Some people may argue that the promise of simply reducing the number of injuries and deaths is enough to support driverless cars. But experience from aviation(航空)shows that as new automated systems are introduced, there is often an increase in the rate of disasters.

    Therefore, comparisons between humans and automated vehicles have to be performed carefully. To fairly evaluate driverless cars on how well they fulfill their promise of improved safety, it's important to ensure the data being presented actually provide a true comparison. After all, choosing to replace humans with automation has more effects than simply a one-for-one exchange.

It is the stock response to a parent struggling with a crying baby or a bad-tempered teenager: "Treasure every moment because they grow up so fast." Now researchers have found there may be something in the old saying. Watching children grow up really does seem to make time fly. Scientists have found that parents feel time passing more quickly than non-parents.

The findings could be due to the fact that children change fast. "Over ten years, children go through dramatic changes not only in their physical appearance, but also in their understanding abilities and their status," the researchers said. The results could also be a consequence of parents spending a large amount of their time on their children, they said, even though they found no difference in the time pressures recorded by parents compared with non-parents in the study.

For the study, published in the journal Timing & Time Perception (感知), the researchers asked 431 people aged from 20 to 59 to fill in a subjective time questionnaire, a tool used by psychologists to measure time perception. They were asked: "How fast did the last ten years pass for you?" An answer of very slowly gave a score of-2; slowly was-I; neither fast nor slow was 0; fast was I and very fast scored 2. So the higher the score, the faster they felt time had passed. The parents had an average score of I. 22, compared with 0. 76 for the non-parents.

Participants were also asked how quickly the last year, month and week had passed, but there were no differences between the groups for these shorter intervals (间隔). Previous studies have suggested that time also seems to speed up when we get older. Research published in 2019 by Duke University in North Carolina suggests this could be due to physical changes in our bodies, with a slowdown in image processing speeding up our perception of time passing.

Days that seemed to last forever in our youth were "not due to experiences being much deeper or meaningful", the researcher Adrian Bejan said, "but due to the fact that they were being processed rapidly."