Games

We've been waiting on Stardew Valley multiplayer for awhile now, and now we finally have a release date. According to the developer's Twitter account, it will arrive on PC, Mac and Linux on August 1st. There's also a new trailer to enjoy. Eric Barone, the solo game developer of Stardew Valley, answered some questions in the replies to this original tweet, so feel free to take a look if you have additional concerns. There is currently no date for the Nintendo Switch or other console multiplayer versions, though they are in the works.

For as long as I can remember, I've had the dream of becoming a mother... to a pet dragon. And there is perhaps no game designer more equipped to turn my dreams of fantastical motherhood into a reality than the creator of the beloved Harvest Moon, Yasuhiro Wada. After playing the first thirty minutes of Wada's new upcoming game, Little Dragons Cafe, we spoke to the man largely credited for fathering the now popularized genre of farm and life simulation games. When asked to describe what set his games apart from all the others, Wada replied with a simple but powerful answer: "Heart. That sense of warmth, home, and human relationships defined Harvest Moon.

Here's where to search between an Oasis, Rock Arch and Dinosaurs in Fortnite: Battle Royale.Credit: Epic / Erik Kain Fortnite's Season 5, Week 2 challenges are live. Once again, players are tasked with searching between three points---this time in the new desert zone that replaced Moisty Mires. This week's challenge asks players to search between an oasis, a rock archway and dinosaurs. All of these can be found just to the south and west of Paradise Palms, one of the Fortnite: Battle Royale's newest locales. Uncovering the hidden Battle Star will net you an entire Season 5 Battle Pass tier, getting you that much closer to Tier 100 and the Ragnarok outfit.

The debate whether computers can be truly creative started two years ago after a special game of Go, an abstract strategy board game. The world champion, Lee Sedol, had just lost to AlphaGo, a computer program developed by the Google company DeepMind. What surprised the engineers and Go experts was that AlphaGo had secured the victory with a remarkable move that no human had ever done. The question is how artificial intelligence will be used in the workplace and if it will complement or substitute human skills. Michael Björn, co-author of the report and Head of Research at the Ericsson Consumer and Industry Lab, says: "The introduction of artificial intelligence systems will affect most professions in the future.

A computer can trounce a human chess master and solve complex mathematical calculations in seconds. Can it do a better job investing your money than a flesh-and-blood portfolio manager? Investors willing to test that question can do so with a couple of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that leave the investment decisions to a computer's so-called artificial intelligence, or AI. ETF Managers Group and Ocean Capital Advisors launched an AI-powered fund last month dubbed the Rogers AI Global Macro ETF that invests primarily in single-country ETFs. The fund's AI sifts through millions of data points from countries around the globe and uses what it learns to determine how best to allocate the fund's holdings.

In the early 2000s, game publisher Bethesda was best known for its Elder Scrolls series of technologically ambitious fantasy games. In the last 15 years, however, it has expanded greatly, snapping up several legendary video game franchises as well as starting an original series of its own. The company now produces the Fallout post-apocalyptic role-playing games; the iconic, hellish shooter Doom; tongue-in-cheek Nazi-killing romp Wolfenstein; supernatural steampunk assassin sim Dishonoured; and Rage, a Mad Max-style romp around a devastated world. At its E3 press conference last month, after showing new Doom, Rage, Fallout and Wolfenstein titles, Bethesda teased the next entry in its Elder Scrolls series as well as a new sci-fi role-playing game called Starfield. For both, 100 hours is a conservative playtime estimate.

The Robotart (that's "Robot art") competition aims to combine art and engineering to advance both fields. Vincent van Bot: Of the 100 images submitted to the 2018 Robotart competition, a automaton called CloudPainter rose to the top, with evocative portraits featuring varying degrees of abstraction. One of its winning images (pictured above) was created by a team of neural networks, AI algorithms, and robots. Artistic progress: Robotart's founder, Andrew Conru, told MIT Technology Review that this year's entries have shown refined brushstrokes and composition. "CloudPainter, the winner this year, has been involved all three years and has made the most improvement in his system," he says.

Entries for the 2018 RobotArt competitions are in. The top 10 teams have been announced, and you can see the robot-painters' impressive works in an online gallery. This year's first-place artist, CloudPainter used machine learning to generate portraits and landscapes (including a re-imagination of Cezanne). The second place team chose impressionistic paintings with "a high level of skill with brushstrokes," and the third place team programmed a robot "brushstroke by stroke," using haptic recording and playback to generate gorgeous reproductions of Van Gogh landscapes. For the first time this year, patrons can also buy AI produced paintings at the Seattle Art Fair on August 2-5th.

When IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy – the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research – didn't see it that way. As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the "Drosophila of artificial intelligence" – a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover the secrets of genetics – and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research had taken the analogy too far. "Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila," McCarthy wrote following Deep Blue's win. "We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies."

Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. Leif has been dumping plenty of hours into the new expasion for The Elder Scrolls Online called Summerset. In this live stream we'll be venturing in the new delves, checking out some world bosses, and just do some general expolration! Follow PCWorld's Twitch channel (or YouTube) so you don't miss out on this or future live streams.