Can Microsoft compete with Linux?

The history of the Microsoft cooperation is well researched by journalists. What the company is doing all the time is waiting until a new technology is available and then Microsoft will become the leader in the business. An example from the past was the Netscape browser. In contrast to many internet startup companies, Microsoft has …

Short history of optimal control

The amount of books and papers about the subject of optimal control is endless. It make sense to categorize them in a chronological order to provide an overview. In the beginning, the control theory was analyzed only by mathematicans. The idea is strongly connected with differential equations and was described in the books of the …

Stable release versions

The classical way for describing open source software is to focus on the source code. The Linux kernel was written in C and it is possible to analyze the codelines if they are running fast enough. A more recent approach to evaluate the usefulness of software is to ignore the sourcecode and set a top …

Production ready Linux systems

A short look into the Linux repository will show, that the kernel gets updated very often. Many code lines are added each week, while other are deleted. The reason is, that many expert programmers are creating patches and the result is code repository which is never the same. The Linux sourcecode can't be used for …

Short overview for optimal control theory

The main problem with Artificial Intelligence is that the subject is a large field with many hundreds of subdomains. It is not possible to read all the information and even the attempt to get an overview over Artificial Intelligence will result into a book with more than 1000 pages. Apart from the technical aspect of …

Reducing Artificial Intelligence to optimal control theory

Every user who is familiar with the textbook of Russel / Norvig will agree, that the topic of Artificial Intelligence is a large subject which is hard to grasp. The first thing to do is to reduce AI to it's core principle. This is not the Lisp programming language and it is not neural network. …

Unix history has ended in year 2000

The advent of the unix operating system is an interesting part of computer history. Many programmers and companies were involved over decades and it is amazing how well the system has improved. A surprising situation is, that around the year 2000 the overall development has stopped. From 1970 to 2000 lots of improvement are visible …

Motion capture and the future of computing

According to a widely accepted definition, Artificial Intelligence is everything what wasn't realized yet with computer science. What is available today are normal computer software and hardware and what is missing is robotics and intelligent software. To bridge the current situation with potential future application of the computer, science fiction authors and researchers are trying …

Hierarchical planning for a race car

Classical artificial intelligence is never focussed on a concrete problem, but the idea is to invent general techniques to solve a large amount of problems. A typical example is a neural network which can act as a general pattern oscillator. The problem with this generalized understanding of Artificial Intelligence is, that a concrete problem can't …

Reducing the state space for a robot arm

Controlling a robot hand with a human operator is not very hard. The operator moves a joystick back and forth, and this will change the position of the robot. Reproducing the same task with a software is more complicated because the possible actions with the joystick are endless. The bottleneck for all robot control systems …