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This is a brief comment on the recent social media episode in which a young woman attracted a lot of attention by graduating with a thesis on olfactory suppression in English prose. In this video, I try to put these events into context. I find it difficult to wrap my head around the sudden outrage. Let me know what you think about this.

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Continue reading “The Thesis that Killed Academia?” | >

Microsoft has now partially lifted a compatibility hold blocking the Windows 24H2 update on systems with some Ubisoft games after the French video game publisher has fixed bugs causing crashes, freezes, and audio issues.

The company blocked Windows 24H2 upgrades on PCs with Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora games more than two weeks ago, following a stream of user reports on Reddit [1, 2] and the Microsoft Answers forums [1, 2, 3] that these games were no longer working correctly.

Windows users affected by this known issue were particularly frustrated as they reported these issues in the Windows Insider Feedback Hub, on Reddit, and other online platforms since Windows 11 24H2 was still in preview.

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In 2018, Google DeepMind’s AlphaZero program taught itself the games of chess, shogi, and Go using machine learning and a special algorithm to determine the best moves to win a game within a defined grid. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has developed an analogous algorithm for autonomous robots—a planning and decision-making control system that helps freely moving robots determine the best movements to make as they navigate the real world.

“Our algorithm actually strategizes and then explores all the possible and important motions and chooses the best one through dynamic simulation, like playing many simulated games involving moving robots,” says Soon-Jo Chung, Caltech’s Bren Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. “The breakthrough innovation here is that we have derived a very efficient way of finding that optimal safe motion that typical optimization-based methods would never find.”

The team describes the technique, which they call Spectral Expansion Tree Search (SETS), in the December cover article of the journal Science Robotics.

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Games play a key role in AI research.

Generating unlimited diverse training environments for future general agents.

Today we introduce Genie 2, a foundation world model capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments for training and evaluating embodied agents. Based on a single prompt image, it can be played by a human or AI agent using keyboard and mouse inputs.

Games play a key role in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Their engaging nature, unique blend of challenges, and measurable progress make them ideal environments to safely test and advance AI capabilities.

Continue reading “Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model” | >

Japanese electronics giant Sony is set to celebrate 30 years since it launched the PlayStation console, the little gray box that catapulted the firm into the gaming big league.

PlayStation was Sony’s first foray into the world of video games and when it hit the shelves in Japan on December 3, 1994, the company needed to sell one million units to cover its costs.

In the end, the gadget became a legend, selling more than 102 million units, helping to launch many of the industry’s best-loved franchises and positioning Sony as a heavyweight in a hugely lucrative sector.

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Normally found only in heavy metal bands or certain post-apocalyptic films, a “flame-throwing guitar” has now been spotted moving through space. Astronomers have captured movies of this extreme cosmic object using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope.

The new movie of Chandra (red) and Palomar (blue) data helps break down what is playing out in the Guitar Nebula. X-rays from Chandra show a of energetic matter and , about two light-years or 12 trillion miles long, blasting away from the pulsar (seen as the bright white dot connected to the filament).

Astronomers have nicknamed the structure connected to the pulsar PSR B2224+65 as the “Guitar Nebula” because of its distinct resemblance to the instrument in glowing hydrogen light. The shape comes from bubbles blown by particles ejected from the pulsar through a steady wind. Because the pulsar is moving from the lower right to the upper left, most of the bubbles were created in the past as the pulsar moved through a medium with variations in density.

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The most observant of our readers might have already noticed a small little detail about Oasis, a caveat that only the most eagle-eyed OSINT enthusiasts would catch – it’s basically a 1-to-1 copy of Mojang’s Minecraft.

And those readers would be right. Essentially, the “first AI-generated game” is nothing more than blatant plagiarism of everyone’s favorite sandbox, trained on thousands of hours of Minecraft gameplay and recordings of corresponding user actions, which resulted in a nearly identical, but worse in every aspect, “game” with a similar visual style, UI, gameplay mechanics, fonts, visual effects, animations, and so on.

One thing that doesn’t exist in the original Minecraft but is front and center in Oasis is, of course, AI hallucinations. Those who have tried it confirm that the experience is incredibly unstable, with environments often morphing into something else when not in the player’s direct line of sight, making the “first AI-generated game” a proof of concept at best, something that its creators, to their credit, openly admit, describing the current iteration of Oasis as a “technical demo.”

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