At E3 2018, Rare released a new teaser trailer for the upcoming "Sea of Thieves" expansions, Cursed Sails and Forsaken Shores. By the looks of things, the two new DLC packs will bring in more exciting elements to the multiplayer sandbox game. The promotional clip gives a cinematic look at what's in store for the upcoming updates. Cursed Sails will introduce skeleton crews that will rise from the depths to curse the seas.

Can we effectively learn a nonlinear representation in time comparable to linear learning? We describe a new algorithm that explicitly and adaptively expands higher-order interaction features over base linear representations. The algorithm is designed for extreme computational efficiency, and an extensive experimental study shows that its computation/prediction tradeoff ability compares very favorably against strong baselines.

Swedish startup Readly has built a digital magazine newsstand, that gives paying users unlimited access to thousands of print publications through an app. Readly, founded in 2012, has adopted a Spotify-like business model based on monthly subscription fees in a bid to digitize the $35 billion global consumer magazine market. This week, the company closed a SEK 130 million ($13m) Series B round to boost its international expansion and support growth in its existing markets. London-based Zouk Capital, an existing investor, led the round together with Hermes GPE, a new owner. In addition, Channel 4's Commercial Growth Fund and Aggregate Media Fund also participated in the round, along with a number of Swedish investors.

Sorry to tell you this, but you repeat yourself quite a bit. You may not be telling the same Christmas party story on repeat, but you are probably writing the same text message to your friends or family over and over, caught in a loop forever giving the same answer to questions like "Have you left the office yet?" It's worse when the messages you're endlessly duplicating are part of your job, and typing that standardized greeting becomes yet another daily task on your list. Ditch the tedium and take advantage of text shortcuts, a quick-typing magic trick. They'll let you type a short pre-set short keyword and, the second you hit the spacebar, expand into a more complete phrase.

This paper explores links between basis construction methods in Markov decision processes and power series expansions of value functions. This perspective provides a useful framework to analyze properties of existing bases, as well as provides insight into constructing more effective bases. Krylov and Bellman error bases are based on the Neumann series expansion. These bases incur very large initial Bellman errors, and can converge rather slowly as the discount factor approaches unity. The Laurent series expansion, which relates discounted and average-reward formulations, provides both an explanation for this slow convergence as well as suggests a way to construct more efficient basis representations. The first two terms in the Laurent series represent the scaled average-reward and the average-adjusted sum of rewards, and subsequent terms expand the discounted value function using powers of a generalized inverse called the Drazin (or group inverse) of a singular matrix derived from the transition matrix. Experiments show that Drazin bases converge considerably more quickly than several other bases, particularly for large values of the discount factor. An incremental variant of Drazin bases called Bellman average-reward bases (BARBs) is described, which provides some of the same benefits at lower computational cost.