Lifeboat Foundation

History tells us that games are an inseparable facet of humanity, and mainly for good reasons. Advocates of video games laud their pros: they help develop problem-solving skills, socialize, relieve stress, and exercise the mind and body—all at the same time! However, games also have a dark side: the potential for addiction. The explosive growth of the video game industry has spawned all sorts of games targeting different groups of people. This includes digital adaptations of popular board games like chess, but also extends to gambling-type games like online casinos and betting on horse races. While virtually all engaging forms of entertainment lend themselves to addictive behavior under specific circumstances, some video games are more commonly associated with addiction than others. But what exactly makes these games so potentially addictive?

This is a difficult question to answer because it deals directly with aspects of the human mind, and the inner workings of the mind are mostly a mystery. However, there may be a way to answer it by leveraging what we do know about the physical world and its laws. At the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan, Professor Hiroyuki Iida and colleagues have been pioneering a methodology called “motion in mind” that could help us understand what draws us towards games and makes us want to keep reaching for the console.

Their approach is centered around modeling the underlying mechanisms that operate in the mind when playing games through an analogy with actual physical models of motion. For example, the concepts of potential energy, forces, and momentum from classical mechanics are considered to be analogous to objective and/or subjective game-related aspects, including pacing of the game, randomness, and fairness. In their latest study published in IEEE Access, Professor Iida and Assistant Professor Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid, also from JAIST, linked their “motion in mind” model with the concepts of engagement and addiction in various types of games from the perceived experience of the player and their behaviors.

Future movie making. Planning your movies years before filming.

Editor’s Note: Previs is a collaboration between previs artists, directors, producers, and other department heads. Directors have a role in guiding and producing the previs, and some furnish the storyboarding materials on which previs is based.

Continue reading “How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming | Movies Insider” »

Gotta catch them all because this one may cause legionnaires diesease.

“Institute of Zoology have named one of the newly discovered bacteria ‘Pokemonas’ because they live in spherical amoebae, comparable to Pokémon in the video game, which are caught in balls.”

A research team at the University of Cologne has discovered previously undescribed bacteria in amoebae that are related to Legionella and may even cause disease. The researchers from Professor Dr. Michael Bonkowski’s working group at the Institute of Zoology have named one of the newly discovered bacteria ‘Pokemonas’ because they live in spherical amoebae, comparable to Pokémon in the video game, which are caught in balls. The results of their research have been published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.

Continue reading “‘Pokemonas’: Bacteria related to lung parasites discovered, named after Pokémon” »

Let the farming games begin.

Chinese motherboard manufacturer Onda (via ZOL) has launched the brand’s new Chia-D32H-D4 motherboard. The model name alone is enough to tell you that this motherboard is aimed at farming Chia cryptocurrency, which has already caused hard drive price spikes in Asia.

Designed for mining, rather than to compete with the best motherboards for gaming, the Chia-D32H-D4 is most likely a rebranded version of Onda’s existing B365 D32-D4 motherboard. It measures 530 × 310mm, so the Chia-D32H-D4 isn’t your typical motherboard. In fact, Onda has produced a special case with an included power supply for this specific model. The unspecified 800W power supply arrives with the 80Plus Gold certification, while the case features five cooling fans.

AI squad mates. Called this a few years ago. It’s too annoying getting strangers to join up on some online task for a game.

Who wouldn’t want an A.I.to sit there and play backseat gamer? That’s exactly what looks to be happening thanks to a recently revealed Sony patent. The patent is for an automated Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) control mode specifically designed to perform certain tasks, including playing a game while the player is away.

In the patent, as spotted by SegmentNext, it’s detailed that this A.I. will involve assigning a default gameplay profile to the user. This profile will include a compendium of information detailing the player’s gaming habits, play styles, and decision-making processes while sitting down for a new adventure. This knowledge can then be harnessed to simulate the player’s gaming habits, even when said gamer is away from their platform of choice.

Continue reading “Sony Files A Patent For An A.I. That Will Play Your Games And Judge You” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eNOGqNCbcV8

Around a century ago when film stocks and photographs were first coming to light, they faced a number of challenges in capturing the essence of an image. In addition to the black and white limitation, photography and film methods also struggled to capture other various elements of the color spectrum, rendering many images of famous figures appearing differently than they may have actually looked.

Now, a new AI imaging technique uses color to restyle old photographs in a way that could almost pass for modern day photographs. This colorization method mitigates the main obstacles of cameras and lenses from the olden days—namely, the orthochromatic nature of those tools, meaning that the photo capture device in question incorporated all detected light into the image without discrimination. The inclusion of all of this light resulted in photos that appeared grainy and noisy, leading to renowned figures such as U.S. president Abraham Lincoln looking far older and wrinklier than he actually was.

Continue reading “New photo colorizing technique uses skin reaction to light for life-like results” »

Words categorize the semantic fields they refer to in ways that maximize communication accuracy while minimizing complexity. Recent studies have shown that human languages are optimally balanced between accuracy and complexity. For example, many languages have a word that denotes the color red, but no language has individual words to distinguish ten different shades of the color. These additional words would complicate the vocabulary and rarely would they be useful to achieve precise communication.

A study published on 23 March in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed how artificial neural networks develop spontaneous systems to name colors. A study by Marco Baroni, ICREA research professor at the UPF Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL), conducted with members of Facebook AI Research (France).

For this study, the researchers formed two artificial neural networks trained with two generic deep learning methods. As Baroni explains: “we made the networks play a color-naming game in which they had to communicate about color chips from a continuous color space. We did not limit the “language” they could use, however, when they learned to play the game successfully, we observed the color-naming terms these artificial neural networks had developed spontaneously.”

Take my micro-transaction.

We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”

Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Continue reading “Epic Games Raised $1 Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse” »

Writer-director Neil Burger is well known for his provocative cinematic projects, most notably 2006’s period-set magician movie “The Illusionist,” 2011’s psychological thriller “Limitless,” and a trio of “Divergent” films adapted from author Veronica Roth’s young adult sci-fi novels.

Now Burger has his eyes fixed on the stars with his new science fiction adventure flick, “Voyagers,” which revolves around the perils inside a generation spaceship carrying 30 home-grown candidates on a one-way mission to settle an exoplanet 86 years from Earth.