Tag: games

Clever slot machine cheat

wow:

operatives use their phones to record 25 spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, it transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

Human capability

A couple of people talked about how the quest for “optimal Go” wasn’t just about one game, but about grading human communities. Here we have this group of brilliant people who have been competing against each other for centuries, gradually refining their techniques. Did they come pretty close to doing as well as merely human minds could manage? Or did non-intellectual factors – politics, conformity, getting trapped at local maxima – cause them to ignore big parts of possibility-space? Right now it’s very preliminarily looking like the latter, which would be a really interesting result – especially if it gets replicated once AIs take over other human fields.

South Korea War Games

This seems to be something of a regular occurrence now. In the recent past, several foreign countries have celebrated how stunningly real video game graphics have become by using them to pretend they are really great at war. The Egyptians did it to pretend that Russia was fighting ISIS, the Iranians did it to pretend that their forces could shoot people from a really long way away, and the North Koreans did it to pretend that they could deliver a nuclear ICBM to our soil. Well, perhaps there is some synergy to be found over Korea’s DMZ, because the South Koreans recently released footage detailing how super-awesome their new fighter jet program is, and that footage included several clips from both Battlefield 3 and Ace Combat.

this should be more widely adopted, so we can replace super-expensive pretend programs like F35 with the much cheaper just pretending.

Engineering Luck

If play is the way in which human beings rehearse life, it follows that we require our games to be filled with uncertainties, moments of caprice to which we must adapt our position and strategy. But we’ve grown more demanding about the luck that games serve to us—not too much, not too little. What remains constant is our interest in the nature of the luck that we experience. “When we experience luck in a game we feel a deep sense of attunement and alignment, almost like we’ve found the pattern, and predicted it”.

Undercover AlphaGo

The account is simply called “Master”, and since the start of the new year it has made a habit out of trashing some of the world’s best Go professionals. It’s already beaten Ke Jie twice, who is currently the highest ranked Go player in the world. AlphaGo, incidentally, is #2. Ke Jie was “a bit shocked … just repeating ‘it’s too strong'”. By January 3, the number of probably-but-we-can’t-officially-say AI sanctioned beatings had risen to 41-zip

2017-01-04: It’s alphago

Victorian Games

For the steadfast Victorian, nothing announced it was Christmas morning better than blistered hands, burned lips and a scorched palate. Alas this practice has since come to an end, drowned beneath cloying animations and schmaltzy family entertainments. The Christmas we celebrate today is Victorian in nature, but it is a far cry from the flaming, bruising, drunken, puking, terrifying festival of yore.