Watson climbed down to Wreck Beach, where there were two abandoned gun towers, built during the Second World War to protect Canada from a Pacific invasion.

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This is the city's Wreck Beach, one of many beaches at the heart of Vancouver (though the only dedicated nudist one), and home to the annual summertime Bare Buns Run.

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Pacing around a room, they will talk for hours about future technologies such as voice recognition (they call their team working on it the "wreck a nice beach" group, because that's what invariably appears on the screen when someone speaks the phrase "recognize speech" into the system), then wander onto topics ranging from quantum physics to genetic engineering.

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Up the beach, at Little Creek Cove condominium village, the wreck has been good for business, too.

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