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Wargraphs, a gaming startup with only one employee and no outside funding, sells for $54M

While the U.K. and U.S. try to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision over concerns it will kill competition in games distribution, competition appears to be alive and well in another (smaller) area of gaming: modding and analytics.

Wargraphs, a one-man-band startup behind a popular companion app for League of Legends called Porofessor, which helps players track and improve their playing stats, is getting acquired for up to €50 million ($54 million), half up front and half based on meeting certain earnings and growth targets.

MOBA Networks, a company founded out of Sweden that buys, grows and runs online gaming communities (MOBA is short for “multiplayer online battle arena”), is buying the startup and its existing products. The plan is to expand them to more markets, in particular across Asia, and to build analytics for more titles.

DeepMind AI creates algorithms that sort data faster than those built by people

Computer scientists have, for decades, been optimizing how computers sort data to shave off crucial milliseconds in returning search results or alphabetizing contact lists. Now DeepMind, based in London, has vastly improved sorting speeds by applying the technology behind AlphaZero — its artificial-intelligence system for playing the board games chess, Go and shogi — to a game of building sorting algorithms. “This is an exciting result,” said Emma Brunskill, a computer scientist at Stanford University, California.

The system, AlphaDev, is described in a paper in Nature1, and has invented faster algorithms that are already part of two standard C++ coding libraries, so are being used trillions of times per day by programmers around the world.

From Science Fiction To Reality: How Digital Humans Are Forging New Realities

Siren is a digital human that showcases the potential of 3D/4D scanning technology for digitizing human appearance and motion with unprecedented realism.

Epic Games Inc. is a leading developer of the popular video game engine Unreal Engine. Recently, the company launched the highly anticipated MetaHuman Creator, a tool for creating high-fidelity digital humans for various applications including video games, film and more. The MetaHuman Creator is powered by advanced motion capture and rendering technology, enabling creators to create lifelike characters that can be customized and animated for various uses.

The advancement of digital humans is disrupting our world in profound and unpredictable ways. As they become increasingly intelligent, empathetic and capable, they will reshape businesses, society and human relationships at every level.

Singapore Airlines announces free Wi-Fi for all passengers

Passengers of Singapore Airlines can now stay connected to free internet at an altitude of 12,000 meters.

In simpler times, during a flight journey, one could switch off the cellular, read a good or a bad book, enjoy a glass of questionable wine, watch a movie in a different language using the in-flight entertainment system, or simply nod off. Or one could even dare to converse with a fellow passenger (gasp).

And now, more and more airlines have… More.

FreshSplash/iStock.

But we live in a digitally demanding age, and while it would be convenient for many to stay connected to the world outside of the airplane, up until about five years ago, flying meant going off the grid (sort of), even if for a couple of hours.

Quantum computers are better at guessing, new study demonstrates

Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and Dr. Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, have achieved a quantum speedup advantage in the context of a “bitstring guessing game.” They managed strings up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible, by effectively suppressing errors typically seen at this scale. (A bit is a binary number that is either zero or one). Their paper is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the problems increase in complexity. However, they are also highly prone to errors, or noise. The challenge, says Lidar, is “to obtain an advantage in the real world where today’s quantum computers are still ‘noisy.’” This noise-prone condition of current is termed the “NISQ” (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, a term adapted from the RISC architecture used to describe classical computing devices. Thus, any present demonstration of quantum speed advantage necessitates noise reduction.

The more unknown variables a problem has, the harder it usually is for a to solve. Scholars can evaluate a computer’s performance by playing a type of game with it to see how quickly an algorithm can guess hidden information. For instance, imagine a version of the TV game Jeopardy, where contestants take turns guessing a secret word of known length, one whole word at a time. The host reveals only one correct letter for each guessed word before changing the secret word randomly.

Doug Casey’s Take [ep.#114] Shocking 2025 Deagel Forecast… War, Population Reduction and Collapse

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Doug Casey on the Shocking 2025 Deagel Forecast… War, Population Reduction and the Collapse of the West

Generative AI Sparks Life into Virtual Characters with NVIDIA ACE for Games

When gaming and AI wholly collide… it’ll hopefully look this good but sound much better.

At Computex 2023 in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just gave the world a glimpse of what it might be like when gaming and AI collide — with a graphically breathtaking rendering of a cyberpunk ramen shop where you can actually talk to the proprietor.

Seriously, instead of clicking on dialogue options, it imagines you could hold down a button, just say something with your own voice, and get an answer from a video game character. Nvidia’s calling it a “peek at the future of games.”

Generative AI technologies are revolutionizing how games are conceived, produced, and played. Game developers are exploring how these technologies impact 2D and 3D content-creation pipelines during production. Part of the excitement comes from the ability to create gaming experiences at runtime that would have been impossible using earlier solutions.

The creation of non-playable characters (NPCs) has evolved as games have become more sophisticated. The number of pre-recorded lines has grown, the number of options a player has to interact with NPCs has increased, and facial animations have become more realistic.

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