Games

Detroit: Become Human, the latest game from David Cage and Quantic Dream, releases this week on PlayStation 4. A story about humanity's future relationship with artificial intelligence, it aims to confront our feelings on empathy and how we treat those who are different to us. But Cage is not the only developer with thoughts on AI. Tameem Antoniades, chief creative director at Ninja Theory, finds the subject fascinating, and has a very different idea for how games could explore and make use of it. "I am interested in AI a lot, because finally we're breaking through," Antoniades tells us. "AI technology has basically been in the doldrums for 30 or 40 years with very little in the way of advancement, and finally we're getting really good results - eye-opening results.

"Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future." We all probably remember the movie ("Jurassic Park"), even if we don't remember this exact scene: Dr. Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum is explaining Chaos Theory to Dr. Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern. Dr. Malcolm is explaining how random, seemingly negligible events can disrupt even the most carefully laid out plans. Dr. Ian Malcolm: [after the T-Rex failed to appear for the tour group]. "You see a Tyrannosaur doesn't follow a set pattern or park schedules, the essence of chaos."

It's a Saturday morning in February, and Chloe, a curious 3-year-old in a striped shirt and leggings, is exploring the possibilities of a new toy. Her father, Gary Marcus, a developmental cognitive scientist at New York University (NYU) in New York City, has brought home some strips of tape designed to adhere Lego bricks to surfaces. Chloe, well-versed in Lego, is intrigued. But she has always built upward. Could she use the tape to build sideways or upside down? Marcus suggests building out from the side of a table. Ten minutes later, Chloe starts sticking the tape to the wall.

In the Welcome to Westworld-esque opening menu screen of Detroit: Become Human, a pretty blonde robot lady flirtatiously calibrates the game to satisfy your needs. Then, she gives you warning -- and it sounds a lot like the game designers using her as a mouthpiece. "Remember this is not just a story. This is our future," she says ominously. The aggrandizement of this statement sets the tone for the rest of the game, with its ham-fisted dialogue, questionable optics, and juvenile desperation to be taken as Serious Art About Social Commentary.

What do bitcoin mining chips and artificial intelligence (AI) chips have in common? Cryptocurrency mining chips are mostly designed to be extraordinarily efficient at performing one specific type of computation as quickly as possible. Machine learning is similarly focused on performing certain calculations as quickly as possible. This is how Google Deep Mind's Alpha Go Zero became the best Go (an exceptionally complex chess-like board game) player in history, in three days flat. It was just programmed with the basic rules of the game, then set loose to play games against itself.

Billions of dollars and years of study have been poured into research trying to discover if someone is lying or not. Researchers from the University of Rochester are now using data science and an online crowdsourcing framework called ADDR (Automated Dyadic Data Recorder) to further understanding of deception based on facial and verbal cues. By playing an online game, the researchers have already collected 1.3 million frames of facial expressions from 151 pairs of individuals in just a few weeks. 'Basically, our system is like Skype on steroids,' said Tay Sen, a PhD student in the lab. The researchers have two people sign up on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

In 1848, the 25-year-old Phineas Gage was working on a railroad in Vermont, packing explosive powder into a hole with an iron tamper. Unexpectedly, the powder exploded, sending the tamper backwards through Gage's skull and brain. That he survived is a miracle, but astonishingly he even seemed capable of functioning effectively, maintaining normal memory, speech, and motor skills. Those that knew him, however, thought he was anything but the same, with friends remarking he was "no longer Gage." "…his equilibrium, or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seems to have been destroyed.

For good reason, deep learning is increasingly capturing mainstream attention. Just recently, on March 15th, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo AI -- technology based on deep neural networks -- beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players, in a professional Go match. Behind the scenes, deep learning is an active, fast-paced research area that's proliferating quickly among some of the world's most innovative companies. We are asked frequently about our favorite resources to get up to speed on deep learning and follow its rapid developments. As such, we've outlined below some of our favorite resources.

Chatbot technology is at an inflection point. The promises made about the potential for the technology have yet to come true. The market is predicted to grow 25% year-on-year to reach $1.25 Billion by 2025. Yet current attempts to build chatbots are failing. It is not clear how this apparent contradiction will resolve.

This is a genuine question! If you look into the code, you'll find they are calling properties on the observation space variables that are passed into the learners that don't exist. I am trying to do policysearch with a dict based observationspace. Nothing suggests that wouldn't be possible. None, None) # None for shape and dtype, since it'll require special handling so ... rewriting the code to be a tuple now.