2005-09-22
by earl, 7029 days ago
Two brilliant things that cheered up my day (not that it was dark and gloomy before, but ... you get the idea). First off: Pandora [via pwtm@]. Pandora is a music recommender service built on what they call the "Music Genome Project." Some crazy fanatics seem to have been analysing a huge body of music thru the last 5 years, trying to extract the "essence" of a song by qualifying it among several dimensions. Now they built a music player that leverages this database by playing a customized stream of music based on one song you provide as "seed". And no sense denying it, the thang works well! Even though the musical corpus in their database is certainly lacking Your Favorite Song and associated branches of music, their stuff works so fine that I have been listening to it all day. Granted, my successful searches may not be the most demanding or subtle ones, but their analysis seems to achieve a good precision in matching the mood of a song. Comparing Pandora's streams with something similar built on audioscrobbler/last.fm's dataset would be very interesting - kind of aristocracy vs democracy :)
Second: The Complexity Zoo (via chris). Ever since I first encountered computational complexity theory I felt a weird enjoyment while reading through various, rather pop-scientific pieces. Heck, I rejoiced when hearing about Σ2P in a class discussing DLV. Now the Complexity Zoo provides enough small tidbits for future hours of peculiar entertainment. Even better, they have a link to a Lance Fortnow's Computational Complexity Weblog which today featured the following Stephen Wolfram quote: "First there was Euclid, then there was Gödel and then there was Mathematica." Lovely.
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