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Category: entertainment – Page 79

How do you get rid of a giant pest like Godzilla, King Kong, or any of the other assorted kaiju (Japanese for “strange beast”)? Evidence from films suggests that these monsters are highly destructive and tremendously difficult to kill.

To a mathematician, however, this situation is nothing more than a predator-prey interaction problem. By accurately simulating the properties of the species we want to eradicate, we can predict the required properties of the predators we would need to create. If we look to the movies that made them famous, we find two alternative strategies for dealing with an invasion of multiple monsters. We could build our own mechanical monsters, or create a kaiju of our own.

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Some people simply dream of having superhero powers – but one man made it a reality by inventing a real life Spider-Man web shooter.

I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who have been envious of Spider-Man’s nifty web-shooting trick; people who eventually had to come to terms with the fact that the closest they were going to get to having those powers was through Spider-Man video games.

But one guy has given the world the opportunity to control webs without a PS4, and instead with a device that really shoots webs. The best part is, they’re willing to share it with the world and have made the invention available for purchase.

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NASA’s administrator warned that the threat of a meteor crashing into Earth is bigger than we might think.

Jim Bridenstine told the International Academy of Astronautics’ Planetary Defense Conference on Monday that “the reason it’s important for NASA to take this seriously is something you call the ‘giggle factor,’” or scientific theories that seem too ridiculous to be likely.

“We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood. It’s not about movies. This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know right now to host life, and that is the planet Earth,” he added.

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In our day and age when the science and philosophy of information start to eclipse traditional disciplines on all fronts, the importance of asking the right kinds of questions in light of a new rhetoric cannot be overestimated. Hereafter you can find three videos with their transcripts related to D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, that I cover extensively in my new book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution, as well as in my just-released ebook The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics.

Will We Transcend The Temporal Dimension?: If you’re like me who loves thought-provoking sci-fi literature and movies, Interstellar and Arrival are both about transcending temporality, one through physics and the other through language. Arguably, these two outlooks on TIME reflect our current understanding as the most plausible ways to overcome the grips of impermanence.

If we look back at evolutionary emergence on our planet, the simplest organisms like primordial mitochondria, the front-runners at the onset of biological life, were able to perceive and move towards nutrients and away from environmental threats in an essentially one-dimensional existence.

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As impressive as such technology has been among gamers, many artificial-intelligence experts question whether it will ultimately translate to solving real-world problems. DeepMind’s agents are not really collaborating, said Mark Riedl, a professor at Georgia Tech College of Computing who specializes in artificial intelligence. They are merely responding to what is happening in the game, rather than trading messages with one another, as human players do. (Even mere ants can collaborate by trading chemical signals.)

Chess and Go were child’s play. Now A.I. is winning at capture the flag. Will such skills translate to the real world?

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Annihilation is an upcoming science fantasy action horror film written for the screen and directed by Alex Garland based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer. The film stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac.

Having previously written screenplays for cult classics like 28 Days Later and Dredd, Garland’s Ex Machina is arguably the definitive film about artificial intelligence (and killer robots) of the 21st century. And that was only his directorial debut.

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By pieter spronck and jaap van den herik

While the audiovisual qualities of games have improved significantly over the last twenty years, game artificial intelligence (AI) has been largely neglected. Since the turn of the century game development companies have discovered that nowadays it is the quality of the game AI that sets apart good games from mediocre ones. The Institute of Knowledge and Agent Technology (IKAT) of the Universiteit Maastricht examines methods to enhance game AI with machine learning techniques. Several typical characteristics of games, such as their inherent randomness, require novel machine learning approaches to allow them to deal with game AI.

Most commercial computer games contain computer-controlled agents that oppose the human player. ‘Game AI’ encompasses the decision-making capabilities of these agents. For implementing game AI, especially for complex games, developers usually resort to rule-based techniques in the form of scripts. Scripts have the advantage that they are easy to understand and can be used to implement fairly complex behaviour.

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