Tag: games

Turing Gamebot

“The idea of the competition is to evaluate how we can make game bots, non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as possible. It is generally recognized that NPCs are relatively weak in most video games: their behavior is predictable and mechanical, and they often make mistakes that human players would be unlikely to make. Players often enjoy playing against other humans, because it provides a more interesting game experience. The goal of the competition is to promote more research in human-like bots, as well as evaluate how well we are currently doing in this area.”

Stagnation at the olympics

without breaking records, the olympics are utterly boring. we can now only hope for more oscar pistorius types to lead us into the future.

Many scientists have concluded from recent events that athletic performance is hitting a wall. Geoffroy Berthelot of INSEP, a sports research institute in Paris, looked at competitions from 1896 to 2007 and found that peak scores stopped improving in 64% of track and field events after 1993. Giuseppe Lippi of the University of Verona examined 9 Olympic sports from 1900 to 2007 and found similar results. “Improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities,” he wrote. Berthelot has predicted that the “human species’ physiological frontiers will be reached” in most sports around 2027.

Mass Effect

i have been looking for a great video game to play for some time. there were several problems:

i won’t buy a dedicated gaming rig, be it a PC or a console
i don’t have the patience to learn the controls enough to stop running into walls
i don’t have the time to set aside for a really serious effort like WoW
i am very quickly bored by running around and shoot at things games

i am interested in games because i understand that they are one of the greatest cultural artifacts of our time, and have profound impacts.

turns out there is a solution for me: playthroughs! enjoy all the cinematic suspense and the story arc of a game without any of the work. i found myself skipping some slow moving parts. still, the whole thing is an epic 30h long.