Sapere Aude
Tag: games
Tilt5’s approach to AR is quite different from the others you’ve seen. The glasses require you place an inexpensive sheet of retroreflector on a surface (table, wall or stand) and it can display anything in 3D where that surface is. Real world objects can then be placed on the table and mix with the virtual ones. This may seem quite limiting, it doesn’t try to paint things on top of the arbitrary world like Magic Leap, but it has some big advantages because of this method:
The best human has a GO rating of 3695 while Alpha GO Zero has an ELO rating of 5185. Human players were beaten 100 to 0 and AI GO systems can only crush the prior best AI to show improvement.
We used a tournament-style evaluation to demonstrate that an agent can achieve human-level performance in a 3D multiplayer first-person video game, Quake III Arena in Capture the Flag mode, using only pixels and game points scored as input. We used a 2-tier optimization process in which a population of independent RL agents are trained concurrently from 1000s of parallel matches on randomly generated environments. Each agent learns its own internal reward signal and rich representation of the world. These results indicate the great potential of multiagent reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence research.
Astonishingly Photorealistic Real-Time Rendered Scene
To prepare for the project, Quixel spent 1 month in cold and wet locations in Iceland, scanning all kinds of objects found in the natural environment using. The team returned with over 1000 scans that captured the details of the landscape. Using the scans — a part of Quixel’s Megascans library — a team of 3 artists at Quixel created the 1:45 cinematic film in real-time using the power of the Unreal Engine 4 game engine.
Amazing progress.
we are delighted to introduce the full evaluation of AlphaZero, published in the journal Science, that confirms and updates those preliminary results. It describes how AlphaZero quickly learns each game to become the strongest player in history for each, despite starting its training from random play, with no in-built domain knowledge but the basic rules of the game.
A number of things apparently gave it away, including small patches of brown trees being rendered around garbage incinerators to represent pollution. While that’s actually quite funny, some residents and internet users criticized the developer for failing to note that the image was a screenshot from the game. Residents in particular seemed to indicate that the image’s use demonstrated the cavalier attitude the developer was taking the project as a whole.
But how does that make any sense? Developers typically include renderings of future projects in pitch material. Those renderings are usually created by graphical artists that specialize in that sort of thing. But if Cities:Skylines is simply good enough at depicting residential neighborhoods that one can create a rendering within the game and use that instead, how is that anything other than pretty neat? Now, in this case, it seems that Lanpro used a neighborhood created in the game by another player. But, again, so what? As Lanpro’s Chris Leeming notes, it’s not like this is the first time a developer has used images from the game to pitch a project.
Fortnite, for anyone not a teen-ager or a parent or educator of teens, is the third-person shooter game that has taken over the hearts and minds—and the time, both discretionary and otherwise—of adolescent and collegiate America. Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than 3M people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated 60M times. (The game, available on PC, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and mobile devices, is—crucially—free, but many players pay for additional, cosmetic features, including costumes known as “skins.”) In terms of fervor, compulsive behavior, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and the ingestion of Tide Pods. Parents speak of it as an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: under the desk at school, at a memorial service, in the bathroom at 4:00. They beg one another for solutions. A friend sent me a video he’d taken one afternoon while trying to stop his son from playing; there was a time when repeatedly calling one’s father a fucking asshole would have led to big trouble in Tomato Town. In our household, the big threat is gamer rehab in South Korea.
table tennis is now best learned from robots.
Gowanus is now home to a 700 m2 bar that specializes in axe throwing. Located on 622 DeGraw St., Kick Axe opened to the public on December 15, offering beer, wine and malt beverages inside a rustic, cabin-like setting. Whether you choose to yield a weapon or down a drink, it’s the ideal location to vent out your frustrations.
Robert Penney created a pixel-perfect animation of Stranger Things as a turn-of-the-1990s adventure game a la Secret of Monkey Island. Turns out that he’s got a knack for these displaced artifacts, each pulled from a parallel universe where 20th century game systems still received rushed, sloppy games based on inappropriate movies and shows.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 