An expert human solver, Mr. Shortz said, would "slap your head and say, 'Oh, now I get it.'" Not so for Dr. Fill, a bundle of computer code on a notebook computer.
Paul Maritz, chief executive of VMware, compared its move in the cloud to Microsoft's introduction of a bundle of personal computer productivity programs for white-collar workers in the 1990s: Microsoft Office.
Increasingly, modern cellphones are sophisticated bundles of radios and computers, equipped with tiny cameras, video screens and music players.
The project is a bundle of advanced computers and machine-learning algorithms called the Never-Ending Language Learner, or NELL for short.
It stands in a cluttered robotics laboratory here at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where a team of students, engineers and software hackers are training the 330-pound bundle of sensors, computers, metal struts, joints and cables.
Christian Owens In 2008, aged 14, Owens, from Corby, began Mac Bundle Box, selling discounted bundles of software for Apple computers; he said it took £700,000 in revenue.
By bundling the processing power of thousands of computer servers, a company, for example, could allow two employees from different countries who speak different languages to communicate directly by phone, using voice recognition software to process what is being said and translation programs to interpret it into another language.
They bundle the power of hundreds of thousands of computer systems in botnets in order to carry out large-scale attacks.
The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don't transfer across devices.
