CADIE was a good one!
Google played it out well, but note that what us to suspicion was the fact that there had been NOTHING about this technology before it was turned “on” suspiciously ON APRIL 1st!
We were also giggling at the “brain scan”…made to make people look funny as they drive down the street or on their lunch break with their cell phone placed to their forehead! HA…that part gave it away!
Here’s what Wikipedia says about CADIE:2009
CADIE
When using Google Books or GMail, a user would come across an announcement dated March 31, 2009 at 11:59:59, declaring a new “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity”. CADIE is also mentioned on the gBall FAQ page: “Google’s new CADIE technology will interpret the data obtained from each ball to provide useful tips to owners”. There is also a link on Google’s Homepage for CADIE, and a blog entry in Google’s official blog.
CADIE technology is also used to generate “senryu” (a type of Japanese poem similar to haiku) based on search terms for certain Japanese queries.
The Google Search homepage has a link to the CADIE announcement which states that “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.” The page links to the blog below.
On mobile devices, a link shows up to Brain Search, which uses CADIE technology to “index your brain”. This is how it all looks like from a mobile device.
Tags: April Fool's, CADIE hoax