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Category: entertainment

A group of psychologists and economists at Jaume I University, in Spain, has found evidence that women are more generous than men. In their study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, Ainhoa Jaramillo-Gutiérrez, Marina Pavan, and Gerardo Sabater-Grande conducted experiments with volunteers playing “the Dictator Game.”

Prior research has suggested that men and women are nearly equal regarding financial generosity. But the team noted that virtually all such studies have involved small numbers of volunteer participants. In this new work, the group attempted to learn more about gender-based generosity by recruiting 1,161 volunteers to play the Dictator Game, and used the results to measure generosity.

The Dictator Game is a type of ultimatum game developed by psychologists to determine if people act solely out of . Players are given a certain amount of money and are asked if they would like to share some or all of it with a second, anonymous player. The second player is at the mercy of the first; they will receive only the amount offered by the first player.

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Flock of Meese’s engine is a fully custom-built, Minecraft-inspired engine created to run on older consoles like the Dreamcast, GameCube, and Wii. While it might look just like a Minecraft clone for now, the goal is to replicate the mechanics of Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 and then evolve into an original block-based game that surpasses it in both gameplay and visual fidelity, showcasing the technical capabilities of this engine.

Meese specifically chose the Dreamcast because it’s barely capable enough to run an open-world voxel game. This challenge sparked a lot of creativity in performance optimization, and the result was a major success: despite having only 16 MB of main RAM, Dreamcast already runs Meese’s engine at 30 FPS, while the GameCube port achieves a smooth 60 FPS.

Why would someone build an engine for these old consoles? It seems like a project of passion, similar to how people continue to port DOOM to different devices, testing their programming skills to the limit and exploring just how far classic games can be pushed. Once released, you’ll have the chance to put your 20-year-old consoles to work with this game, or you can choose to play it via a PC port. According to Meese, there will likely be a distinction between the modern PC version and the retro console versions, as he wants the PC to fully take advantage of newer hardware.

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A game of chess requires its players to think several moves ahead, a skill that computer programs have mastered over the years. Back in 1996, an IBM supercomputer famously beat the then world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Later, in 2017, an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Google DeepMind, called AlphaZero, triumphed over the best computerized chess engines of the time after training itself to play the game in a matter of hours.

More recently, some mathematicians have begun to actively pursue the question of whether AI programs can also help in cracking some of the world’s toughest problems. But, whereas an average game of chess lasts about 30 to 40 moves, these research-level math problems require solutions that take a million or more steps, or moves.

In a paper appearing on the arXiv preprint server, a team led by Caltech’s Sergei Gukov, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, describes developing a new type of machine-learning algorithm that can solve math problems requiring extremely long sequences of steps. The team used their to solve families of problems related to an overarching decades-old math problem called the Andrews–Curtis conjecture. In essence, the algorithm can think farther ahead than even advanced programs like AlphaZero.

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Movies often reflect the predominant societal and cultural values at the time they were shot. These values can be expressed in various elements of a film, including the interactions between characters, their communication styles and their characterizing traits.

Over the past few decades, some parents and scholars have expressed their concerns about the recent evolution of Hollywood Oscar-nominated and blockbuster movies, suggesting that they contain significantly more abusive and violent content than movies released during earlier historical periods. Yet, these debates are often grounded on a general perception of films as opposed to detailed analyses of films.

Two researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the differences between the content and dialogues of movies released over the past 70 years, using a class of well-known computational models known as large language models (LLMs). Their findings, on the arXiv preprint server, confirm the hypothesis that movies have become more violent over time while also highlighting movie genres that appear to feature the most abusive and violent content.

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Without the French interpreter so you can listen through the whole speech without interruption.

Twitter… @thebrynnium.

This is Philip K Dick’s famous Metz speech given in Metz, France in 1977. Philip gave the speech with a French interpreter beside him for the audience, but for English speakers it can be distracting. I took care of that for you in addition to very subtly improving the video quality and doing modest touch-ups to the audio, making it clearer and reducing the humming without too heavy a hand. In the speech he explores some of his ideas of parallel realities (lateral realities/lateral dimensions), his experience in 1974 (2−3−74), and how they both relate to his novels. A very exciting way to get introduced to the enigmatic, fascinating Philip K. Dick!

Gaming stuff I do:

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Now, thanks to a brain implant, he’s experienced the thrill in a simulation. By picturing finger movements in his mind, the 69-year-old flew a virtual drone in a video game, with the quadcopter dodging obstacles and whizzing through randomly appearing rings in real time.

T5 is part of the BrainGate2 Neural Interface System clinical trial, which launched in 2009 to help paralyzed people control computer cursors, robotic arms, and other devices by decoding electrical activity in their brains. It’s not just for gaming. Having the ability to move and click a cursor gets them back online. Googling, emailing, streaming shows, scrolling though social media posts—what able-bodied people spend hours on every day—are now again part of their lives.

But cursors can only do so much. Popular gaming consoles—PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch—require you to precisely move your fingers, especially thumbs, fast and in multiple directions.

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“The floor is lava,” proclaimed Willaim W in the live chat as more than 400 people watched shortly after midnight Jan. 25 while lava once again fountained from the north vent in the southwest portion of Halema’uma’u Crater within Kaluapele, the summit caldera, of Kīlauea.

Episode 6 of the Big Island volcano’s latest eruption, which began the week of Christmas 2024, is underway as lava flows onto the crater floor from a geiser that started at about 11:28 p.m. Jan. 24.

Lava was fountaining to between 10 and 20 feet high within about 2 hours after Hawaiian Volcano Observatory reported spattering that kicked off at about 6 p.m. Jan. 24 increased to spatter fountaining and spiked in frequency and intensity.

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