Lifeboat Foundation

Australian and UK researchers grow brain cells in a lab that have learned to play a 1970s video game.

Summary: Brain cells grown in a petri dish can perform goal-directed tasks, such as learning to play a game of Pong.

Source: Cortical Labs.

A Melbourne-led team has for the first time shown that 800,000 brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case the simple tennis-like computer game, Pong.

We will see there are a lot of reasons, and that the methods are not very high tech at all.

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The event will take place in a man-made city with a year-round winter sports complex.

Can you make snow in the desert? It seems you can, as Saudi Arabia will be hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games, according to a report.

The games will take place at an under-construction US$500 billion megacity called Neom that is set to boast a year-round winter sports complex along with other futuristic amenities and features.

Increased inter-brain synchrony has been linked with social closeness (Kinreich et al., 2017), rapport (Nozawa et al., 2019), agreement (Richard et al., 2021), sense of joint agency (Shiraishi and Shimada, 2021), prosociality (Hu et al., 2017), similarity of flow states (Nozawa et al., 2021), shared meaning-making (Stolk et al., 2014), and cooperation (Cui et al., 2012; Toppi et al., 2016; Szymanski et al., 2017; Cheng et al., 2019). Phase-coupled brain stimulation has led to increased interpersonal synchrony (Novembre et al., 2017), as well as improved interpersonal learning (Pan et al., 2020b). Furthermore, preceding a learning task with synchronized physical activity led to both better rapport and increased inter-brain synchrony, although task performance was unaffected (Nozawa et al., 2019). Nonetheless, learning outcomes (Pan et al., 2020a) and team performance in a variety of tasks (Szymanski et al., 2017; Reinero et al., 2020) can be predicted with the amount of inter-brain synchrony occurring between interacting individuals. Even though collaboration is a dynamic phenomenon, previous studies reporting connections between positive social outcomes and inter-brain synchronization have not explored the temporal aspects of this phenomenon, as recently pointed out by Li et al. (2021). Their fNIRS study revealed differences in the time courses of inter-brain synchronization during two different cooperative tasks. The connection between temporal changes in inter-brain synchronization and the success of collaboration is, however, still not clear.

EEG and fNIRS allow freer movement and more natural interaction compared to magnetic imaging such as fMRI and MEG, arguably lending themselves most easily to actual interactive situations. However, interpersonal synchronization and mirroring between people engaged in social interaction involve quite fast timing precision. For example, participants’ movements were synchronized to less than 40 ms in the mirror game, in which participants improvise motion together (Noy et al., 2011). As EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain, it represents a faster changing signal than hemodynamic measurement, i.e. measures of blood flow, such as fNIRS. This makes EEG a suitable method for investigating fast changes in phase synchronization of oscillatory activity during dynamic social interaction, when taking into account the limitations of the method in regards to signal-to-noise ratio.

In this study, we wanted to investigate whether cooperative action of physically isolated participants would lead to inter-brain phase synchronization. We were especially interested in the temporal dynamics of inter-brain synchrony and its connection to performance in a collaborative task. We attempted to create an experimental setup which would facilitate the occurrence of inter-brain synchrony, while removing any bodily cues and controlling, as much as possible, for spurious synchronization. We also wanted to create a granular performance measure that could be calculated for any segment of the data, to make it possible to investigate dynamic changes in synchrony during the measurement and their connection to dynamic changes in collaborative success during the task.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has thrown out an idea about building a video game that uses Tesla’s Simulation to reconstruct a playable version of your neighborhood.

Block coding converts text-based software code into a visual block format. It helps reduce probable errors. It is used to construct games, apps, and other programs. Users just need to drag and drop visual block coding representations of text-based code into the code editor. Blocks are chunks of instructions a user leverages to create their invention. Sprites can move and turn themselves and other sprites. The sprite can be taken a few steps forward or turned by a few degrees. They can be moved to the right or left with just one block. Blocks are used to change the form of a sprite. They can make the sprite think or talk or do anything. It can dress them up differently or the scale or graphic effects of a sprite. Kids can also use sound blocks are add audio effects to a tale or game. They can also adjust sound effects by varying the pitch and changing the depth of different sounds.

Syntax-free programming

Block-based coding doesn’t involve complex syntax. You can focus on areas that seem more complex and need more attention. The best thing about syntax-free programming is that it helps avoid minor syntax errors.

Google is shutting down its cloud gaming storefront just a few years after it launched.

A well-known game studio is allegedly using AI voices for a video game. A clarification includes a commitment to human creativity. It’s another footnote in the debate over the value of human labor that will become more common in the future.

It’s the very debate that has erupted so vehemently around AI-generated images in recent months. Are AI images art? If so, can they be equated with human art? Are they detrimental to art? Are they even plagiarism, because the AI examines human works during training – in the inspiration phase, so to speak – and then imitates them in trace elements?

Continue reading “AI audio is on the rise and will spark new debates about the value of human effort” »