Real Mars video
1.8 billion pixels! Amazing new Mars panorama from Curiosity.
For 10 years NASA has been capturing images of mars and they now reveal the planet’s amazing beauty.
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Microsoft, Sony, and Nvidia are just days or weeks away from delivering next-generation hardware. The PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and RTX 2080 are all promising big performance leaps for gaming.
“Of chess, it has been said that life is not long enough for it,” chess master William Napier once said, “but that is the fault of life, not chess.”
The game of chess itself has had a gloriously long life, with earliest recovered relics of the ancient game dating to the ancient Persian Sasanian Empire in 600 AD.
The game has gone through hundreds of modifications, tweaks and enhancements over the centuries. Of an estimated 2,000 variations of the game, most have been developed only in recent years. One single version itself, known as Chess960 (created by world chess champion Bobby Fischer), has 960 variations of the game, with each version rearranging the standard positioning of all game pieces.
The cruise line was already eschewing cruise staples like buffets, setting Virgin Voyages ahead of the pack.
Douglas Murray joins us for the first episode at the new TRIGGERnometry studio.
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A hand-held video game console allowing indefinite gameplay might be a parent’s worst nightmare.
But this Game Boy is not just a toy. It’s a powerful proof-of-concept, developed by researchers at Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, that pushes the boundaries of battery-free intermittent computing into the realm of fun and interaction.
DeepMind today announced a new milestone for its artificial intelligence agents trained to play the Blizzard Entertainment game StarCraft II. The Google-owned AI lab’s more sophisticated software, still called AlphaStar, is now grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game, capable of besting 99.8 percent of all human players in competition. The findings are to be published in a research paper in the scientific journal Nature.
Not only that, but DeepMind says it also evened the playing field when testing the new and improved AlphaStar against human opponents who opted into online competitions this past summer. For one, it trained AlphaStar to use all three of the game’s playable races, adding to the complexity of the game at the upper echelons of pro play. It also limited AlphaStar to only viewing the portion of the map a human would see and restricted the number of mouse clicks it could register to 22 non-duplicated actions every five seconds of play, to align it with standard human movement.
SpaceX gave an update on early tests of its Starlink satellite internet network, which showed speeds capable of playing online video games and streaming movies.
Starlink is the ambitious plan by Elon Musk’s company to build an interconnected network of about 12,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. To date, SpaceX has launched about 650 of its version 1.0 satellites and is currently building a system of ground stations and user terminals to connect consumers directly to its network.
The company confirmed during the webcast of its latest launch on Monday that employees have been testing Starlink’s latency and download speeds, key measures for an internet service provider. SpaceX senior certification engineer Kate Tice said that the initial results of those tests “have been good.”
Denis Shiryaev uses algorithms to colorize and sharpen old movies, bumping them up to a smooth 60 frames per second. The result is a stunning glimpse at the past.
Move.ai can use artificial intelligence to capture a 3D representation of an actor in a process known as motion capture. But it doesn’t need actors in Lycra suits with lots of white balls attached to them. And it enables game companies to do motion capture in a remote way during the pandemic.
That’s an important technological advancement, because the hassles of motion-capture systems have led to a stall in production for both movie makers and video game companies. Move.ai hopes to fix that with “markerless” motion capture that can lower the costs and hassles of doing the work.
The technology comes from a London company that started out capturing the images of sports athletes and turning them into digital animated objects. But the pandemic hobbled that business with the closing of physical sports events. Luckily, games need better realism to give players total immersion and engagement in an alternate reality, and that means that they need motion capture.
