April 11, 1954 declared most boring day in history
55 replies, posted
[quote](PRWeb UK) November 18, 2010
Every day something of significance occurs: a person is born who is destined for fame; an event happens in the arts or sports, history is created. So after 300 million of these facts had been added to the ‘brain’ of True Knowledge, an intelligent computer system created by Cambridge technologists, it was asked a most difficult question: ‘What was the most boring day in the 20th century?’
Unlike a search engine, which finds relevant web pages statistically using key words, True Knowledge is able to reason. ‘Boring’ is a subjective term. A 14-year old has a very different idea of boring to a 45-year old. In this case it used ‘uneventful’ and found the day when nothing much happened.
Founder of True Knowledge William Tunstall-Pedoe explains that the company is building a learning engine that will be a powerful source of knowledge, being able to store and process ‘factoids’ bits of information about people, places, events, businesses and answer questions in an intelligent way.
“Being knowledgeable is not just about regurgitating lots of facts. It is about applying that information in response to new situations.” William explains. “What we are aiming for with True Knowledge is a means of storing information so that it is naturally updated as new facts are included. Along with the ability to access relevant answers to unique questions.”
Nearly 5 million people are using True Knowledge every month, asking their own questions and contributing factoids and context to improve the quality of search. Many of these facts include dates. The system has a unique understanding of the importance of the entities in the world which can be calculated as a number, such as events beginning and ending, births, deaths, wars, founding of businesses and the release of publications. So you can use True Knowledge to find out what happened on a particular day. For example, questions like these produce good results:
Who was born on the 3rd of May 1983?
Who died on January the 16th 2001?
What happened on April 3 2006?
William continues, “It occurred to us that we are able to objectively measure the importance of every day in history. Some days are highly eventful and on some days far less happens and we can also objectively estimate the importance of these events.”
“For fun we wrote the program and set it going. When the results came back the winner was April 11 1954 - a Sunday in the 1950's. Nobody significant died that day, no major events apparently occurred and although a typical day in the 20th century has many notable people being born, for some reason that day had only one who might make that claim: Abdullah Atalar - a Turkish academic.”
“The irony is though, that having done the calculation, the day is interesting for being exceptionally boring, unless that is you are Abdullah Atalar!”
About True Knowledge
True Knowledge is building the first internet-scale platform for answering the world’s questions.
Its goal is to power a new kind of search experience where users can access the world’s knowledge simply by asking for the information they need in a way that is completely natural to them; just as if they were talking to another human being.
Instead of a list of links that may or may not be relevant to the query, the user experience is an immediate, perfect response, giving them exactly the information they are after.
True Knowledge has a unique semantic technology that has been many years in development. It understands user questions, represents knowledge in a way that the system can understand and process and can combine existing knowledge to infer new facts and answer questions it has never seen before.
Powering the platform is also a database of facts: a unified representation of the world’s knowledge containing factual, common sense and lexical knowledge. We can already answer trillions of questions and as this knowledge base grows, we understand and answer more and more.
To learn more about True Knowledge [url]http://www.trueknowledge.com/[/url]
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[url]http://www.prweb.com/releases/trueknowledge/boring-day/prweb4802964.htm[/url]
Waste of time, and it's only an opinion anyway.
Boring news.
[QUOTE=Werem00se;26318133]Waste of time, and it's only an opinion anyway.[/QUOTE]
Not an opinion, here "boring" is being used in place of "uneventful"
Hey my best friend was born on that day, and I was born a day before that.
What the hell PRWeb.
Waiting for someone to post saying they were born on that day.
April 11, 1954 – Abdullah Atalar, Turkish scientist and academic was born.
:colbert:
[QUOTE=Comcastic;26318202]Waiting for someone to post saying they were born on that day.[/QUOTE]
I doubt there's very many 56 year olds on FP.
This Thread: Declared most boring thread in history.
Not really though, who decides what day is the most boring? You'd think opinions matter.
[QUOTE=Dacheet;26318215]April 11, 1954 – Abdullah Atalar, Turkish scientist and academic was born.
:colbert:[/QUOTE]
Nice work reading the article.
Through this website I found out that Ted Bundy, famous serial killer died on the same day as I was born.
Am I the reincarnation of Ted Bundy?
:tinfoil:
I was born on that day.
This pun, declared most boring in history.
[editline]26th November 2010[/editline]
[QUOTE=Micr0;26318270]I was born on that day.[/QUOTE]
Wait what.
[QUOTE=scottsmith46;26318250]I doubt there's very many 56 year olds on FP.[/QUOTE]
I wouldn't be surprised...
Read the damn article. A computer calculated that not many exciting things happened on April 11, compared to the other 36525 days in the century.
That would be quite cool to be the only person born on a specific day.
April 11,1954-Oregon Woman notices paint drying unusually slow that day
[QUOTE=B-hazard;26318413]That would be quite cool to be the only person born on a specific day.[/QUOTE]
It happened at SOME point, but probably thousands of years ago.
He wasn't the only person born that day he was the only one that anyone might ever give a damn about.
I typed in "What is your favourite colour?" and it replied 'Blue'.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpx6XnankZ8[/media]
how do i read the article???
At facepunch every day is the most boring in history.
[editline]27th November 2010[/editline]
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;26318805]how do i read the article???[/QUOTE]
With your eyes.
It's understandable why it was so boring since it was a Sunday. I've always hated Sundays.
[QUOTE=BANNED USER;26318257]This Thread: Declared most boring thread in history.
Not really though, who decides what day is the most boring? You'd think opinions matter.[/QUOTE]
It's talking about uneventful, this day had the least events of notable (notable as in that this search engine thing knew about them)...events
[QUOTE=Zeb Brown;26319520][url]http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/what_is_the_meaning_of_life[/url][/QUOTE]
Well whoever posted that was being pretty literal
Yer....
[url]http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/what_is_the_meaning_of_life[/url]
oh
my
[B]GOD[/B]
I remember this day. It was pretty boring.
It looks like someone edited this into wikipedia already.
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