An upgraded version of the game-playing AI teaches itself every trick in the Go book, using a new form of machine learning.
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Category: entertainment – Page 97
This week, Neill Blomkamp, the Academy Award-nominated director of District 9, unveiled a short film that he made with the Unity Technologies game engine. At Unity’s event in Austin, Texas, Blomkamp’s Oats Studios showed off Adam: The Mirror, a 6-minute film that was a sequel to Adam, a short film that Unity built as an internally produced showcase demo last year.
Evoking the theme of transhumanism, or the notion that we can live beyond our physical bodies, the film shows an android coming to life and realizing that it was a human trapped in a robot’s body. The film was meant to show off the power of the Unity engine when it comes to making high-quality 3D graphics. But to Blomkamp, it’s also an example of how a game engine can help democratize film, making life easier for independent film makers just as Unity has done for indie game developers.
Oats Studios in Vancouver will release a second film, Adam: The Prophet, also built with Unity. And if all goes well, then Blomkamp might be able to get financing for a larger Adam movie, since he has already created a backstory and script for the project. Blomkamp said the game engine helps because it allows him to shoot one scene and then put it into a digital form, like a “3D sandbox.” He shot some scenes in the desert for Adam: The Mirror. And if he needs to re-use that desert scenery, he can do so very easily because it exists in a digital format. So he only has to go out to the desert once to shoot actors.
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Billions In Change 2 Official Film
Posted in entertainment, food
New film, New Ideas New Inventions. Billions in Change 2 shows how simple life-changing inventions provide clean water, electricity, and improve the lives of farmers. See how these inventions will enable the unlucky half of the world to improve their lives.
For more information go to BillionsInChange.com
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Decades on, his work remains an irresistible trove of ideas for film-makers to plunder. Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, which begins on Sunday (Channel 4, 9pm), is an ambitious series of 10 one-hour films based on his stories, with different casts and creative teams.
An ambitious series of 10 one-hour films based on the stories of the sci-fi writer.
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When one thinks of Mark Twain, one thinks of folksy wit, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and the Mississippi River. Twain’s work immortalized the rapidly changing United States of the 1800s. But in his personal life, Twain often preferred the future to nostalgia, supporting women’s suffrage and civil rights, and frequently being contemptuous of what he considered to be the absurd and corrupt values of the past. He harbored a long running fascination with technology and new gadgets, and frequently invested in the latter — albeit with spotty success, at best. But Twain cemented his becoming an honorary futurist via his long friendship with inventor and Mad-scientist archetype Nikola Tesla.
This is not about creating zombies-those so-called living (or walking) dead that are very popular and make a really great theme for TV shows and movies.
Even the Game of Thrones has its version of the living dead with them nasty creatures called White Walkers and Wights.
But then again, that’s only science fiction, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. In fact, this science-fiction plot could soon play out in real life. Read on.
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How will our relationship to technology evolve in the future? Will we regard it as something apart from ourselves, part of ourselves, or as a new area of evolution? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott explains that we are a part of a technological cosmos. Do you agree with Scott that technology is built into the universe, waiting to be discovered?
In Unexpected Futurist, we profile the lesser known futurist side of influential individuals. This episode’s unexpected time-traveler: Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin was an inventor, observer, electricity pioneer, and serial experimenter, so it’s not entirely surprising he looked to the future. But it turns out he was looking to the far, far future. In 1780 he wrote a letter to a friend in which he lamented that he was born during the dawn of science.