Clarke's Third Law states
that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That's exactly
how I felt the first time I saw various bits of advanced software: for example, watching a
word processor automatically wrap words at the end of a line without having to press Return,
seeing the Mac's graphical user interface and learning that I could program it into my apps
using ordinary-looking function calls, and watching a search engine take a couple of words and
almost instantly find exactly the right web page from among millions.
The Prediction API
described in yesterday's post on this blog is a modern piece of software that feels like
magic. Using machine
learning, the Prediction API examines existing data, determines patterns, and makes
educated guesses at answers to questions. For example, if you train a program with phrases in
various languages, you can then feed it new phrases and have it determine the language of
the new phrases. That's certainly something humans can learn to do; having computers
do it sounds remarkable to me, but it's real.
You can use the
Prediction API to tell whether user comments are positive or negative, decide which emails are
most and least relevant, and identify suspicious activity. If you'd like to add features like
these to your apps, please check out yesterday's
post.
Turning to a completely different topic, if you're
interested at all in making your HTML5 and CSS3 faster, spend half an hour or so watching this
talk by Paul
Irish from the Google Developer Relations Team. There's a lot in there, including a
nifty section about hardware accelerated CSS.
