Google's April Fools roundup!
Like ever year, Google took part in another round of entertaining April Fools hoaxes. No real products were launched this year like what happened several years ago when Gmail was launched. At that time, people thought it was a hoax since it was invite-only, and it sounded way too good to be true with a massive amount of free storage.
This year's theme across a whole bunch of their products is CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) -- the first "global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster". You can see CADIE pictured here.
For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.
You can find Cadie on all sorts of Google applications including Google Images, Google Docs, Picasa, Google Analytics, Google Code, Knol, Google Books, and even on her very own blog that she created after analyzing the web and figuring out optimal web interface design.
This year there were several other pranks that are worth mentioning:
1) YouTube was turned upside down According to Google, monitors perform much better when they are upside down -- so in order to show the best possible video quality, they decided doing this was in their best interest.
2) Google Chrome makes the web 3D A special version of Google Chrome turns the web 3D. You can find this version of the browser here. I have no way to test how well it works -- let us know in the TalkBack!
3) Gmail gets Auto-Pilot Forget about responding to email yourself -- let CADIE do it for you. She will analyze your email, and auto-formulate a response based on your past responses to other email. For example, she can manage your personal relationships automatically by breaking up with significant others.
4) Picasa adds auto-redeye feature Sure, it's easy to remove red-eye from pictures -- but have you ever needed to add it? Well, finally there is a solution with this special version of Picasa.
Did you find any other April fools jokes today? Let's hear about them in the TalkBack!