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Update (April 5, 2021): So it turns out that Adam Chalcraft and Michael Greene already proved the essential result of this post back in 1994 (hat tip to commenter Dylan). Not terribly surprising in retrospect!
My son Daniel had his fourth birthday a couple weeks ago. For a present, he got an electric train set. (For completeness and since the details of the train set will be rather important to the post it’s called “WESPREX Create a Dinosaur Track”, but this is not an ad and I’m not getting a kickback for it.)
As you can see, the main feature of this set is a Y-shaped junction, which has a flap that can control which direction the train goes. The logic is as follows:
Scientists read 300-year-old letters without opening them
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Unopened letters more than 300 years old that were folded using mysterious techniques have now been read for the first time without opening them, a new study finds.
For centuries, before mass-produced envelopes started proliferating in the 1830s, most letters across the globe were sent using letterlocking, a method of folding letters to become their own envelopes. These intricate techniques also often served to help recipients detect if mail had been tampered with.
For example, during research in the Vatican Secret Archives, conservator Jana Dambrogio at the MIT Libraries unearthed Renaissance letters with odd slits and sliced-off corners. She discovered these were signs these documents were originally locked with a slice of paper slid through a slit and closed with a wax seal. Such letters could not be opened without ripping the paper,
Deep Science: AI adventures in arts and letters
There’s more AI news out there than anyone can possibly keep up with. But you can stay tolerably up to date on the most interesting developments with this column, which collects AI and machine learning advancements from around the world and explains why they might be important to tech, startups or civilization.
To begin on a lighthearted note: The ways researchers find to apply machine learning to the arts are always interesting though not always practical. A team from the University of Washington wanted to see if a computer vision system could learn to tell what is being played on a piano just from an overhead view of the keys and the player’s hands.
Updated:
The team used a technique called X-ray microtomography
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Computer-generated unfolding sequence of sealed letter DB-1538. Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive. The letters are from the Brienne Collection, Sound and Vision The Hague, The Netherlands.
The team used a technique called X-ray microtomography
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In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk containing over 2000 unclaimed letters was bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum. The letters were closed using an ancient technique called letterlocking, in which the writing paper is intricately folded and secured to become its own envelopes. Now an international team of researchers has virtually unfolded and unlocked the contents of one of the letters and the findings were published on Tuesday in